Deciding on which College to Play Girls Golf

For any young lady and her parents the process of deciding on a college to play girls golf at is a very important decision to be made as it will not only likely shape the next four or five years of the young woman's life but in many respects will dictate what direction the entire future course of her life will be like.In the long run it could very well impact the person you end up marrying, the cities you live in as an adult, and what career you up with.

The decision is an extremely personal one as every individual is different in their preferences. A suggested strategy is to sit down with someone who knows you well and whose opinions you trust to lay out a list of priorities and then weigh those priorities against one another. For many young golfers the person that they sit down with will likely be a parent or coach. It's important to keep in mind that the listed priorities need to be those of the girl who is soon going off to play golf in college and not the adviser.

While preferences and priorities obviously vary some classically universal ones include:

• proximity to home
• size of the college
• level of academic emphasis
• small town versus urban metropolitan
• intensity of the golf program
• academic programs offered

After listing all of the relevant priorities break up their importance by distributing the percentages of importance to each item. Evenly divide 100% between all the priorities to determine the weights. Given the highest percentage to the most important issues. For instance an example list might look like this:

• Close to home (within a 5 hour drive home) (10%)
• Not a small school (more than 5,000 students) (15%)
• high academic reputation (25%)
• In or close to large city (15%)
• Very successful golf program (5%)
• Offers undergraduate architecture program (30%)

Now for each school you're considering see how it stacks up with this criteria by giving a particular school scores in each category from 1-10.

For instance if a school is very close to home/parent's house then give it a 10 if it's only 30 minutes away. If it's an 8 hour drive from home give it a 1. If the school has 2,000 students and you want a larger school give that category a score of 2. If the school is reasonably close to a big city give it a 6 or 7 in that category, and so on.

Eventually you'll have scores for every category and then you'll multiple each score by the percentage you assigned for the category. The aggregate score will be your weighted score for one particular school. You can then repeat this process for the other colleges you're considering.

The beauty of this method is that it allows you to mathematically compare competing choices that have differing pros and cons.

Read more...