A Different Kind of College Trip
“Just can’t wait to get on the road again.”
The last patches of snow are struggling to remain in my backyard as the sun searches them out and the thermometer heads towards the 60’s. The inexorable arrival of spring is at hand, when countless juniors and their families turn their attention to the college search. In a “normal” year, Spring Break would be packed with marathon road trips (“If it’s Tuesday, this must be Bowdoin!”), while April and May would bring in-person events like college nights and college fairs.
While this is still not a normal year, the college guidance community has had considerably more time to plan than we did last spring, so the research options available to students this spring are plentiful and varied. Last fall, I wrote about rep visits, which went virtual this year with considerable success. In February, I gambled that college reps, with spring fair travel cancelled, might be interested in holding some virtual high school visits. I set up appointment slots and sent out invitations, specifically targeting schools that were not able to come in the fall and others that are too far away to travel to New York. Then I crossed my fingers. To date I have had 22 schools book visits with nearly that many openings still available after break. I am encouraging all Sophomores and Juniors to sign up for at least one visit every week, not just to find out about schools they are already interested in, but, more importantly, to find out about schools they have never heard of.
This is my College Trip philosophy. Students need to learn about college, not just about specific colleges. They do that by researching a variety of institutions. Our boys have an enviable opportunity this spring to meet in a small group with the person who would likely be the first reader of their application should they choose to apply, and learn about colleges big and small, close by and far away, all from the comfort of home. The meetings are all in Week B, when the boys are online, and scheduled either during lunch or breakfast, so there is never a conflict with an academic class.
Every year, at the end of April, the Manhattan Independent School Consortium (eleven schools including Browning) sponsors a College Fair. Last year, the in-person fair was abruptly cancelled. This year it has been replaced by “MISC Mondays,” a series of six virtual fairs featuring sixty college participants. Every Monday, starting April 19, juniors will have the opportunity to hear from and connect with admission officers from a variety of selective institutions.
Interschool College Night is an annual event aimed at Junior parents and sponsored by the eight schools of the Interschool Consortium. In a panel discussion, admissions deans discuss “constituent admissions” and the process they go through building a freshman class. This year, as last, the event will be online.
As of today, the CDC is still recommending against travel, but as vaccinations surge, even those guidelines may relax, and families may find safe opportunities to venture forth for a few in-person campus visits. Colleges are already slowly beginning to open their doors to visitors, and the pace is likely to accelerate over the course of the next few months. For Spring Break, small in-person group tours and information sessions may be available, but options vary dramatically from school to school, so it is essential to do some investigation in advance and to double-check a day or two ahead in case conditions at the school have changed. Virtual campus tours, on the other hand, are widely available and here to stay. There is no substitute for actually setting foot on a quad, but the virtual tours can be viewed anytime and allow students to visit campuses that they would otherwise be unable to travel to. For anyone who is interested, I have prepared an 18-minute video on college visits, which is available here. Note that it is intended for parents of Browning eleventh graders, so it references tools such as Naviance and Scoir, to which other families may not have access.
I encourage sophomore and junior parents to urge their sons to sign up for a number of spring rep visits. Juniors should also block out time for all six MISC Mondays. I hope junior parents will join us at Interschool College Night and will take advantage of my series of video tutorials on “Assisting your son in the college admissions process,” which are available in their son’s Canvas portal. And channel Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again: “goin’ places where I’ve never been…”