This year, we’ve had a large influx of college representatives visiting our school. Believe it or not, this doesn’t just happen. Our counselors have been putting in the hours trying to get us as many opportunities to meet with college reps as possible. 

“This is our first year getting a lot of people from out of state,” said junior class counselor Mr. Mickey Little. “We’ve been getting colleges from places like New York, Chicago, and Washington. We’ve never really had out-of-state schools in the past, but the key to getting them has been SchoolLinks. SchoolLinks is a national program and colleges see and ask us to come, and we also have the ability to ask them as well.”

The counselors are hoping to hit some goals this year with how many colleges they can get to come to our school. They also plan on getting some other types of schools, exposing students to more opportunities.

“I hope to have a minimum of 30 colleges visit our school this year and more than that would be great,” said Mr. Little. “We also have more than colleges like trade schools, things like MedQuest and cosmetology. I feel like in the past, a lot of things have been focused on formal college only instead of other important things as well like jobs, trades, the military and other things like that.” 

They are also trying to offer more exposure to more kids beyond just juniors and seniors looking to go to college. They are trying to reach out to our Freshman in an attempt to get them thinking about their future early.

“As a counseling office, we are being really intentional in spreading college awareness and readiness to not just seniors and juniors, but sophomores and freshmen as well,” said Mr. Little. “A lot of times, freshmen don’t understand what they should be looking at in high school, because your classes you take really should correlate to what you want to do in the future.”

Our counselors have been doing everything in their power to open our eyes to all potential opportunities, be it financially or otherwise to give us the best leg up in life they can. They also want to make sure they understand the “why” in the plans for our future so we don’t go making decisions without knowing all the details first.

“We’ve been thinking about doing things like a career fair alongside our college fair,” said Mr. Little. We’re trying to get more people in here to give more options to students.When students are discovering colleges, they usually just bring up state colleges. Our real goal in all of this is to make students think, ‘Why that school?’ so they can make the right choice for them.”