What makes decision-making such a difficult process is that you’re rarely able to know whether or not you’ve made the right decision. When attempting to make a difficult decision, we try to consider as many factors as possible to assure ourselves that whatever decision we ultimately make is the right one.

When deciding which universities to apply to, I tried to consider as many factors as possible to assure myself that I was making the right decisions. For months, leading up until applications were due in mid-January, I made hand-written notes, multiple pages at a time, outlining the various pros and cons of all of the programs and schools that I was considering. I carried these notes in my bag, and would take them out, whenever I thought I might be reaching a decision, sometimes removing a program or school from the list, or re-adding one I thought I had ruled out. Along the way, I also received the standard advice that someone gives to you when you’re making such a difficult decision: go with your gut, just choose whatever interests you, apply to wherever you think will be a good fit.

At the time, I remember wondering how I was ever going to make such a seemingly impossible decision. I had researched every major aspect of every school that I could apply to, had created various rankings of different schools based off those factors, studied admissions requirements, and changed my mind on an almost daily basis.

Eventually, I realized that if I continued to focus on making the ‘right’ decision, I may never make any decision at all. It’s impossible to consider every single factor when deciding where to apply to school, and as the deadline quickly approaches, this becomes more and more evident. So instead of assuring myself that I had considered everything, I took a moment to consider the advice that other people had been giving me and considered where would be a ‘good fit’ for me.

I realized that a lot of the reason I was having difficulty deciding before is because there was hardly any distinction between what I had assumed were the ‘big’ factors to consider between different schools I was considering. I realized that since so many of these were the same, I’d have to look at the 'small' factors I wasn’t considering to determine where would be a ‘good fit’ for me.

For myself, as a University of Waterloo student, one of those ‘small’ factors was St. Jerome’s University.

At St. Jerome’s University, they take the ‘small’ factors just as seriously as the ‘big’ ones, and ultimately, they’re what made me able to picture myself going to school here. It was evident that SJU understood what made a school a ‘good fit’ for students, and had the attention to detail to consider the small factors that have the ability to make a student’s experience truly exceptional.

As a student who isn’t co-registered, I was able to see this in their student life, and through my experiences as a Student Leader and a member of the SJU community, this notion has only been reaffirmed. Through the friends that I have made who are co-registered with St. Jerome’s University, I have seen that this is also true with regards to their Academics. From small class sizes, to approachable professors who want to get to know their students, to academic advisors who always make time for you, it’s clear that SJU recognizes the importance of the small aspects of a university that determine whether it is a ‘good fit’ for students.

Although deciding where to apply to university can seem like an impossible task, and you've probably received enough advice on the subject from countless people, my advice, if you're still deciding what schools you should apply to, is to look for which schools value the ‘small’ aspects that will make it a ‘good fit’ for you.

With St. Jerome’s, you’ve made the right decision.