Getting to Know Colleges

Getting To Know Colleges
by Ann Montgomery

As the pandemic continues, how can you get to know colleges well enough to decide whether to apply?

Spring break of junior year has been a popular time to visit colleges in person. While some colleges are open for small groups of students to visit in person this spring, this is not an option in 2021 for many students and many colleges. What can you do instead?

Websites: The good news is that colleges have stepped up their online offerings. They understand that students need to get to know them, and they themselves are in need of students! If you go to each college’s website, then admissions section, click on “visit” or look around for virtual admission options. In addition to a virtual tour, you will often find options to sign up for a live information session, student panel, department info sessions, or even faculty panel. You may learn more from these sessions than from the typical in-person tour and info session.

Demonstrated Interest: Many colleges keep track of any interest you’ve shown in the college, and that includes the interest you demonstrate by attending virtual admission sessions. For any college that interests you, you should also sign up on the admissions page to receive information about the college. The college will then begin a virtual file on you and add to it every time you interact with the college.

College Fairs: This year, some of the national and regional college admission organizations are offering virtual college fairs, where you can mix it up easily with representatives from many colleges. Check out “NACAC Virtual College Fairs” elsewhere in the newsletter. Like the virtual opportunities on individual college websites, these virtual fairs are better than before the pandemic: the in-person college fairs are usually chaotic, with many students trying to talk to college reps at the same time, and now you can sign up for Zoom info sessions and one-on-one chats with the colleges that interest you.

Other Online Resources: There are additional ways to get to know the colleges. Many have Facebook pages where students interact. You can often read the student newspaper online and learn what’s on students’ minds at the colleges right now. (Wikipedia has a list of college newspapers, including links to the newspaper websites.) Campus Reel offers virtual tours of over 300 colleges at www.campusreel.org. Induck College Impressions, www.induck.co, conducts and hosts interviews with current students at many colleges; they’re very helpful, and there’s a summary for each college of reasons to apply and reasons not to apply.

Guidebooks: Guidebooks and online information sources can tell you much about the colleges. There are objective guidebooks and websites with plenty of statistics. There are also subjective guidebooks and websites with student opinions. Of course, these vary in reliability.

Best guidebooks:
Fiske Guide to Colleges: a new version is published every year, but you don’t need the most up-to-date version to get excellent information, since colleges don’t change very quickly. The Fiske Guide has two- to three-page write-ups on many selective colleges. The writing is reader-friendly and informative, and we find the opinions trustworthy. If you are using College Planner Pro, the write-ups are available on the colleges’ information page.

Princeton Review’s The Best 386 Colleges provides a two-page spread on many colleges. Once you learn where a particular piece of information is located on the page, you can quickly go to that same spot for any college to find the information quickly.