Mt. Pleasant Session 2

After two weeks of being on pause for the explore program at Mt. Pleasant, we were finally able to get back there for an hour session with the students. I am happy to be back and I also felt that this week was much more structured than the first week we were there. Having lost out on two weeks with the students I was glad that we had a slightly smaller group of students to work with, and we spent that time working individually with a student to help familiarize them with the college board website. It was nice to see that the students were exciting about making these accounts, but it also raised a few questions and concerns for me as well. I realized that most of the students we were working with did not have any knowledge or understanding of what college board is. They had never heard of it before, and had never accessed it before. This makes me wonder, why isn't the high school promoting this website, why haven't they exposed the students to this tool. It is such an incredibly useful website in so many ways that I find it very upsetting that the students did not know about it prior to our session. I feel that if a high school is going to aim at getting as many students into college as possible, they need to start with the basics, they need to present these useful tools to the students right away. It was exciting to be able to search around the website with my partner and look at different schools and read different descriptions, but as we did this many more realizations occurred to me. As helpful and useful as these tools are, many of these students are in need of some basic college common knowledge. What I mean by that is that most did not know any thing about college. They did not know the difference between a four year and a two year college, a BA or BS, or even what those stand for, a state college versus a university or private college. They did not know the basic understanding of what college is. I think that many of these students see different colleges on sports channels, or on TV shows and create an idea of what they are, but they do not actually know the facts or the details about college. I think that as explore leaders we really need to take a step back and present these students with some basic knowledge and understanding of college before we can go into specifics about college choice, majors, minors, careers, and all that goes along with picking the right college for yourself.