Project 1: College Visit Coordination

Narrative

This year, I was in charge of scheduling university admissions representative visits to our campus. I communicate with all admission representatives interested in visiting and reach out to admissions officers who we are interested in having visit our campus. I have to coordinate the dates they visit in order to avoid conflict with any other previously scheduled school activities. Once the visits are scheduled, I am in charge of communicating the visits to students and teachers to encourage them to attend.

The admissions representatives are often the same people who host our school groups on their campuses as well as the people that read college applications for our students. It is important to have professional working relationships with the representatives as they can help with networking opportunities, inform me of policy changes, and help provide social and educational capital all around for our students and our school.

Reflections on Leadership

I really enjoy this part of my job because it provides me with an opportunity to reach out, communicate, and establish relationships directly with university personnel. I feel that this is an important part of my job because I work with my students by helping introduce them to college options and connecting them with people who can help them to be successful in applying. In scheduling these visits, I learned how important it is to be organized and diligent with planning things that involve the schedules of various people. I also learned how important it is to balance the needs of the people that I work with. As a counselor, I want to provide as many opportunities as possible to introduce my students to different universities. Often times, university admissions representatives are focused on meeting with the most competitive potential college applicants to reach out to them. This year specifically, I found it challenging to schedule more visits because several admissions officers would prefer to meet with specific AP students or classes, rather than a general group of potentially interested students. Because I am not allowed to schedule visits during class time which would take up instructional minutes, several universities chose to not to visit at lunch.

This year I also learned how university budgets affect their ability to visit. Several universities that have visited in the past did not do so this year because they were not travelling as much. Lastly, I learned that it is important to keep track of all university representatives that I establish contact with in order to continue communication with them in the future.

CPSEL Standards

Standards 1.2, 1.3 - As part of the school mission of preparing students for college, one of the most important things we do as a school is try to expose students to as many colleges as possible. One of the best ways to expose out students to colleges is to bring the colleges to us. I realize that it is hard for students and parents to visit colleges, especially if they are the first ones to attend college, so I make it a point to try to bring colleges to them.

Standards 3.2, 3.3 - I have created a system in which our school community expects there to be college visitors on campus, especially in the fall.

Standard 4.2, 4.3 - Establishing relationships with outside agencies and community members is an important part of my job. When it comes to providing my students with opportunities to attend college there are few outside agencies more important than the universities that visit our campus. I have met this standard by creating and maintaining relationships with various universities.

Supporting Documents

Here is the list of all visits I had scheduled for the 2012-2013 school year. I updated it as I scheduled more and I will use this list to begin scheduling visits for next year.

I used this College Representative Contacts chart to help me keep track of all of the representatives I had direct contact with in the fall, regardless of whether they actually visited our campus or not.