SchoolFinder.com can help you choose a school

By Rob Taylor

Picking a career first – 3-Step Career Quiz™
Without knowing what you want to do in terms of a career, it's kind of hard to pick a school. I suppose that some of you might know that, like me, you really like and are good at history or English and will therefore be studying English or history somewhere. And you might already know what you want to do.

But in case you don't know what you want to do, we have the very simple and free 3-Step Career Quiz™ designed by Rodger Harp, a former guidance counsellor.

The cool thing is that the Quiz gives you lots of choices. First it gives you the top three career categories that you might like. Within those categories, it gives you careers that you might like. Then it gives you links to schools that offer programs that lead to those careers (plus links to scholarships, interviews and associations related to those careers). From there, you can start to make your choices.

Using the Career Profiles
If you already know what you want to do as a career, you can look up that career in the Career section of SchoolFinder.com. In the career profile is information about what your duties would be in the career, what your employment outlook would be, earnings information and much more. Plus, there are links to schools that offer programs that lead to those careers.

Using an Advanced Search
Say you know that you want to study accounting but you really don't know how to narrow down the choices. There are 150 schools in the SchoolFinder.com database that offer accounting programs. You can use the advanced search on SchoolFinder.com to narrow down your choices.

Do you want a degree or a diploma in accounting? If you choose diploma as your degree type, you can narrow your choices down to 96 schools. If you choose bachelor, you can narrow down your choices to 34 schools.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, you decide that you want to go with a diploma. Ninety-six schools is still a hefty number of schools to choose from. Next you can choose where you want to go to school. You choose Ontario, and the number is lowered down to 44 schools.

You want to go to a school that has semesters, just in case you want to take a semester off, and that brings the number down to 22.

You want to go to a school that has co-ed residences, and that brings your choice of schools down to six.

Finally, you want to go to school in Toronto, Oshawa or Barrie and that brings your choices down to three.

Pretty useful, huh?

There are lots of other search fields, like degree modifier (co-op, honours, etc.), entrance date, language of instruction, school size, housing (residence) type, and what kinds of sports are available.

Have a look around – e-Tours™
A good way to make a choice about a school is to actually visit the campus. But if you may not have the time or resources to visit all the schools that you are interested in. That's where e-Tours™ come in.

An e-Tour™ is a presentation that includes music, video, text, photos, animation and Web links to give you a chance to see what that school is like.

See what money is available to you – scholarships and awards
One of the more popular features on our sites is information on scholarships. When choosing a school, some students use the amount of money available to them in awards as a deciding factor.

In the Finance section of SchoolFinder.com there quite a few searches you can do for scholarships, including a keyword search, a search by field of study, and most importantly in terms of this article, a search by school of study. You can also access a listing of scholarships through the school's school profile on SchoolFinder.com.

While many of the schools listed on SchoolFinder.com have scholarships in their school profile, not all do. Now don't panic if the school you want to attend does not have any scholarships listed on their school profile. They very likely do have scholarships (they just don't list with us) and you should contact that school to see if they have a list to refer you to.

It's up to you
We've given you some tools, but it's still up to you to do some soul-searching and research to figure out what you want to do and how to make it a reality - so get cracking!