If you're a high school student who's attending college fairs and talking with your guidance counselor about colleges, you can be said to be in the stage of the consumer buying process.

The correct answer is information search stage.
As the name itself says, this is the stage where you are looking for new information about something that interests you. In this case, you want to enroll in a college and thus you want to learn as many details as you can which will help you reach a decision.