When should students begin visiting colleges?

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My name is Jerome Cole. I am the Director of College Counseling at the Edmund Burke School in Washington D.

C. I am also the founder of the Cole Educational Consultant Services. I have a Masters degree in Education and Human Development with a specialty in Secondary School Counseling from the George Washington University. For the past seven years I have worked in both public and private school settings helping students and families strategise for college. Today, I am going to talk about some of the strategies, some of the steps that you and your students should take to determine how you go about selecting a college and then ultimately, how you go about being admitted to a college.

Host: When should students begin visiting colleges?

Jerome Cole: I believe that students along with their families should start visiting colleges as early as possible. I think you should start local, in your local area, visiting the colleges and universities that are within a short driving distance. I think the visits should be informal. I think you can start as early as the ninth and tenth grade, but they should be informal. My definition of informal is, you go on campus, maybe you take in some activity on campus, check out the student union building. This is a place where students are congregated; where there is a lot of social activity just to give your student kind of, familiar with, again, this whole this idea of college.

So, I think the earlier the better. I think the informal visits where you are not putting pressure on your students; I think that s probably the way to go. Once you become a junior especially, in the spring of your junior year that is when you want to start taking your real serious official more formal visits. At that point, you want to make sure that you do a student guided tour with the admissions office. You sit in on an information session, maybe ask to sit in on a class, speak with some students who are interested in this, who are studying the same things that you are interested in, maybe ask to speak to a faculty member. Those things are probably, best left until the spring of your junior year or the fall of your senior year.

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