By: Genelle Gogue
The college process is a long and confusing one. Students in most high schools have the luxury of getting help from their counselors and teachers, and getting that help their junior year,but for MHS that isn’t the case.
Don’t get me wrong, some counselors do a good job helping students through the process of college and college apps, but is it enough? Not all the time. Some students can go their whole four years of high school without even talking to their counselor. I recall my freshman year during the counselors’ presentation when they said they would call us up to help us with a four-year plan, but that didn’t happen for most of my peers. Instead, they chose classes that weren’t the best for them to take, and now they need to cram fine arts in their senior year.
Ever since Naviance has come out, that’s all my counselor and teachers will refer me to. I admit, it’s a fascinating website and they have a lot of information that you can get with the touch of a button, but sometimes I would actually like to talk to my counselor about college. Naviance may give a lot of information, but the website doesn’t know everything.
On another note, I attended the UC application presentation that was for seniors only. It isn’t much help to know what you should have and what you should do for your application two months before that actual application process. It isn’t the best option to advertise these college presentations during our senior year when we would have already started to decide the colleges we want to attend. We should have been given the option to attend these college presentations our freshman to junior year so we could have made our minds up by the time senior year rolls around.
It would’ve benefited students significantly if we were given a chance to start thinking about college in at least our sophomore year. Hearing about college now in my senior year just makes me feel pressured and rushed since it’s all getting crammed in.
Kudos to the College and Career Technician, Marissa Canez. I think she does a good job helping students with the college information that they need and students should definitely take advantage of that. Her website also has multiple scholarship links to make finding them easier for students. I would recommend taking a stop by the College and Career Center and soaking it all up.
Hopefully MHS will at least start to guide students in their college path during freshman year.