Schooling

In general the experience you have in college is much more a function of you than of the college. People with a good attitude and some discipline and an idea of who and what they want to be get very good educations and make lifelong friends at the cheapest commuter-campus state universities. Conversely, people who don't have any idea what they want out of life and never developed good study habits waste their parents' money and flunk out of UCLA and Princeton.

So what you need to put your thoughts into is what exactly you want out of life and what you're prepared to put into it. I think next year will be early enough to look for the right school.

You want to pick your major first, and then find a college that has a good program in that field. Talk to the adults who are in the profession you are interested in and ask them about good schools. They're the ones who will know. And if you haven't gone out looking for those people and found them yet, it's a sign that you maybe aren't quite as interested in psychology as you think you are. These days it's really easy to make professional acquaintances on the internet. There are probably some psychologists here on SciForums if you go into the right forum instead of Free Thoughts.

I yell at every high school kid who will listen, "MAJOR IN SOME MIDEASTERN LANGUAGE." America is desperate for people who know Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, etc. And regardless of what happens in the Iraq War, this trend will continue. If you can speak Arabic or Farsi you can get a fabulous job without searching any further than the U.S. government. Far Eastern languages are also good. Business is booming there and there are just practically no Americans who speak Chinese, Korean or Japanese. The website I search for jobs in information technology every single day has companies begging for project managers who can speak Japanese or Korean.

If you haven't tried learning a foreign language yet, it's time to start even if you don't decide to major in it. It's not hard for anyone with high intelligence and some curiosity. Besides, it's really fun! And it is a valuable asset throughout life. Being able to think in two different languages gives you an advantage over everyone else in America because it means you can think more clearly about more different stuff. In Europe and Asia it's common for people to know three languages. We've got a president who can't even speak English fluently, it's so damn embarrassing.

You've asked for advice on your writing skills before. I STRONGLY recommend that you follow through with that. Your choice of colleges will be extremely limited if you continue to write the way you do now. You're smart but you haven't learned how to show it on paper and that's what the admissions officials at the colleges will be reading. One year is not a long time to learn how to write at the college level. Get going! And maybe learn to spell "psychology" if that's what you want to study?

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Good luck!