I have now filled four of these poster covers, and with the connections I've made through my departmental twitter account ( I hope that admissions offices will start sending me window decals instead of the usual felt banners. Louis, U of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Coastal Carolina. My students are now picking them up for me when they go on their own tours: Vanderbilt, Austin Peay, Wash U of St. I took a day during spring break a few years ago to see six campuses in DC:Ĭatholic, American, Georgetown, Howard, GWU.Īnd, of course, as with any investment, the interest generates further interest. My school district sent me to Atlanta for AVID training: Emory, Georgia State, Spelman, Clark Atlanta, Georgia Tech. Professional development and trainings: Bowie State, Morgan State, UMBC. More road trips: Maine, Brown, Ohio State, West Chester, St. I also decorated my office (we were not as fortunate as some schools to have a spacious career and college research center) with posters and maps of colleges beyond the ones everyone knew, and I had amassed enough window decals to fill a whole 24" x 36" poster cover. Then, when visiting my future in-laws' family in Michigan, I hit the jackpot: U of Michigan, Michigan State, Western Michigan, Wayne State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan.Ĭonsistent with my professional goal, I began incorporating non-mainstream colleges as reasonable options alternative to the popular ones during my college planning guidance lessons. I traveled to Boston (what a college town!) while my future fiancee checked out BU for its masters program, and collected decals along the way: Northeastern, Harvard, Berklee. While in grad school, I managed to collect a few more window decals along the way. It would become my mission as a new school counselor to introduce my students to the notion that you don't have to go to brand-name colleges simply because they're all that you can think of, or because that's what the popular kids a year older than you did. I observed during my secondary school internships that students' college vocabularies are usually limited to about ten colleges (the one or two closest schools, plus the ones that we see every year in the BCS football and NCAA final four basketball championship games), and they were falling prey to the same ignorance that I had. Well, by the time the dust settled, I had a handful of window decals that would not end up residing on my car's rear window. After all, if I was going to go to grad school as many as three states away from home, I wanted to show off my two colleges the whole summer before moving away to study. When the time came to interview for graduate school, I picked up window decals from each of the universities I visited. Granted, I still have pride in my alma mater, but I always wonder how things would have turned out if I had really known my options. My friends were from colleges I had never even considered, let alone heard of, in some cases. Six majors and four semesters later, upon meeting fellow college students and children from all over the country at my summer job at a sports camp, I realized that I wanted to be a school counselor, partly to offer students better services than I had in school. I was so excited to go to my first-choice college that when I went for my overnight visit in the spring of my senior year, I bought a window decal, and - with permission - proudly displayed it in the rear window of my mother's car. By Jeremy Goldman, M.Ed., High School Counselor, MDįor me, it all started with my own experience with college.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |