My daughter is shopping for colleges the same way she shops for shoes.
Really.
She sits down next to me on the couch with her laptop and shows me the websites she’s checking out. She goes over each one the same way she scours Zappos.com for flat black boots or shoes.com for fire engine red stilettos.
It makes sense. She’s a junior. She’s seen three siblings ahead of her go through the process of looking, applying, and making the decision, so she’s been ready to look for a school of her very own for a while now.
It’s not always easy to engage a junior in high school and get them interested in starting to think about where they’d like to apply. But because of the growing number of incredible web resources available, sitting down and beginning the conversation is getting a lot easier.
Her top pick among all of the web sites she’s checking these days is Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. She’s already decided she wants a city experience for college, and her cousin goes there, so VCU was a natural place to look.
What she likes about the site are the big photos of the campus and the students, how easy it was to actually explore different majors, and what classes were offered. The site makes all of that easy to find -it’s clean, clear and unstuffy. She’s interested in digital arts, and she learned a lot about what major might fit with that interest. She also learned that she might want to start organizing her photos to create a possible portfolio some day.
A variety of views of this school in the slideshow
You can even click on a live chat button to ask questions on the VCU site. That’s not a feature available on every college site, including another favorite of hers, Seattle University, but on the SU site they’ve taken the time to spell out many of the basics that a prospective student needs to know, such as what is a major, and a detailed list of bullet points on how to choose one.
A virtual campus tour is another way to start the discussion about where to start looking. Some college web sites do virtual tours themselves, with slide shows and video- often they are slickly produced but show gorgeous scenery, like the University of Colorado at Boulder. You get an idea of the area, but not a whole lot of insight into the school.
YOUniversityTV has a good start on the college tour video franchise. They are well on their way to showing off most major schools in the nation. You can get a good first look here, and save your favorites. The hosting by college aged talent and rapid fire edits are formulaic, but they add map graphics and details about the community. Useful stuff.
Then there’s YouTube. It’s the second biggest search engine next to Google, of course, and you can find plenty there. When my son was looking last year, he found a simple video tour, with no narration or graphics that was made a by a student just carrying a camera around on a fall day, right at eye level. Nothing fancy.
It was actually one of the best ways to take a good look at the school, which he ended up choosing. He passed that one on to grandparents who haven’t had a chance to visit yet so they could get a feel for where he is. It’s lost in the YouTube pile now, but I hope more students will upload simple footage like this in the future.
If you have a student who isn’t showing much interest in a particular school, and the clock is ticking, settle in on the sofa with a laptop, or grab a couple of chairs and sit at the computer. It’s no substitute for a visit or that one-to-one conversation you find at a college fair, or a visit to campus, but it’s a way to get the conversation going.
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