Collegewise

Class of 2008 celebrates in Irvine!

Our senior class spent their fall months poring over applications and re-editing essays. They spent their spring months checking the mailbox (and email inbox!) for admissions decisions three times a day and building their collection of college t-shirts from university bookstores across the country.

May 1st is officially the end of all of that waiting--the seniors know where they're going to college! The counselors in the Collegewise Irvine office decided that all of that hard work was worth celebrating and we invited our seniors (and their new college t-shirts!) to come catch up with us and meet up with future college classmates. We promised to bring food other than the traditional Clif-Bar-only menu, and swore not to hand out a single To Do list!

We managed to take a couple of pictures between eating goldfish crackers, animal cookies and many, many peanut butter cups. Hopefully you'll enjoy the pictures as much as we enjoyed all of those snacks!

Shifting Activity Gears- A Tip for Freshmen and Sophomores

Have you asked your child lately if they truly enjoy their extracurricular activities? If not, you should.

Colleges aren’t looking for a magic list of activities; what they really want to know is that the student is passionate about what they’re involved in.

So, if your student comes to you and says how much they hate marching band or the badminton team, tell them it’s okay to look for a new activity to replace it with. It’s definitely alright to switch gears during the freshman and sophomore years.

They've Got Your Back

I love when I find something about a school that could have easily been uninteresting, but instead is creative and fun. I also love that I work with someone who gets it when I make him get up from his chair to come see what I’m suddenly very excited about (Actually anyone in our company would have found this cool, which is why I belong here at Collegewise.) As a former tour guide at Ithaca College, and a former advisor to the tour guide program at Whittier College, I fully appreciate the art of walking backwards during a campus tour, and the reason behind it. The University of Rhode Island took this quirky and very useful skill and put their own distinctive spin on it. Check out their truly fantastic way of introducing the tour guides here: Meet The Guides It not only makes me want to go meet all of them in person (and the person on their admission staff who came up with this brilliant idea), but it makes me think this place must be pretty fun. Good job Rams.