The Los Ange­les Times ran an arti­cle, where fash­ion colum­nist Adam Tschorn inter­viewed Neil Patrick Har­ris from “How I Met your Mother” who dis­cussed how much he loves his Paul Smith and Dolce & Gab­bana suits, because they fit and flat­ter his tall and nar­row frame like no other. The arti­cle reminded me of the time when I pur­chased a suit the sum­mer before my first year of col­lege. Though it was one size above my true suit size, the store man­ager said that I would grow into it. After four years, and some occa­sional rib­bing by for­mer co-workers who made a habit of not­ing that my suit was too big each time I wore it to work, I never, “grew into my suit.”

At Bet­ter­Grads, we think the idea of a great fit extends beyond the fash­ion world. Around this time of year, when prospec­tive stu­dents begin to receive their admis­sion let­ters and weigh their var­i­ous offers, the phrase “I’m look­ing for the col­lege that’s the best fit for me” becomes ubiquitous.

At first glance, gaug­ing how a par­tic­u­lar col­lege could be the “best fit” sounds neb­u­lous. To the best of my knowl­edge, there is no mag­i­cal num­ber crunch­ing for­mula where one can plug in a val­ues for vari­ables such as qual­ity of social life, num­ber of majors, professor-to-student ratio, etc, and yield a “best fit” rat­ing. How­ever, just as there are sim­ple ways to deter­mine that a suit does not fit one’s body (ex: if the shoul­der pads extend beyond your shoul­ders, you’ve got a prob­lem), there are sim­i­lar ways to eval­u­ate whether a col­lege will be a great fit too.

Do your home­work ahead of time

As a for­mer room­mate once told me, “When you know your­self, deci­sion mak­ing becomes easy.” With­out hav­ing to spend an exor­bi­tant amount of money revis­it­ing each school that sends you an accep­tance let­ter, take the time to cre­ate a check­list filled with pre­qual­i­fi­ca­tion ques­tions high­light­ing the nec­es­sary attrib­utes required for a col­lege to be con­sid­ered a great fit. This exer­cise will pro­vide you with the nec­es­sary frame­work to com­pare schools across the board. In my case, I knew that I was not ready to attend a col­lege located 3,000 miles away from home. Addi­tion­ally, the strug­gles I expe­ri­enced in some of my larger Advanced Place­ment classes made me real­ize the value of the smaller learn­ing envi­ron­ment from my days at a pri­vate Jew­ish day school.

Con­sid­er­ing these fac­tors, I decided to pass on the admis­sion offers from two medium-sized schools on the east coast. Thus, putting in the time to gen­er­ate these pre­qual­i­fi­ca­tion ques­tions was an excel­lent exer­cise in help­ing me nar­row down the list of schools that met my require­ments and saved me unnec­es­sary travel expenses.

Use your Eye-Q

Yes­ter­day, a co-worker lent me his copy of Stu­pid, Ugly, Unlucky, and Rich, an easy to read book filled with inter­views from a range of folks shar­ing their thoughts on what really leads to suc­cess. In one sec­tion of the book, Author Richard St. John shares a quo­ta­tion from Mar­i­lyn vos Savant , “‘To acquire knowl­edge, one must study; but to acquire wis­dom, one must observe.’”

So, when vis­it­ing schools on admit­ted stu­dents day, use your Eye-Q to help deter­mine whether a par­tic­u­lar school will be the “best fit.” For the intro­verted folks out there, an easy way to learn about cam­pus is to pick up a school news­pa­per. This one pub­lished doc­u­ment pro­vides a snap­shot of cam­pus polit­i­cal views, past social events, and in some cases, cur­rent stu­dent gripes. For those who would describe them­selves as extro­verts (myself included), I found that talk­ing to the stu­dents who were not tour guides or had any affil­i­a­tion with the admis­sions depart­ment pro­vided me with invalu­able insight to hard­ball top­ics rang­ing from access to pro­fes­sors, diver­sity, strength of the career cen­ter, and over­all sat­is­fac­tion with school. Overnight vis­its are also useful.