Shea Week 6

We had another successful session at Shea today. Our topic was college conversations, and we started by having the students write a journal entry about why they want to go to college. I think this was a good way to get the students thinking about college, and their responses will be interesting for my final paper. Then, we talked with the students in small groups about what a typical day for a college student is like, and what kind of clubs and activities we are involved in at PC. We also shared pictures and showed the students our student ID's so they could get a better feel of student life. Most of the students seemed very interested in these aspects of college life. After our discussions, we moved to the computer lab. The students all signed up for college board accounts, which we explained that they will need in the future for SATs, etc. The students used the college match maker tool to find schools that might be good fits for them. Unfortunately, not all of the students were able to complete all the sections of the tool in time, and it tended to narrow down schools so much that some students were not able to find ones that fit what they were looking for. In the future, students should be directed to pick more broad preferences, so schools that might be a good fit do not get eliminated based on trivial criteria. Despite these mishaps, the students were very interested in using the tool overall. However, I noticed that some of the students had trouble with some of the basic information on the tool (such as the word "initial), which was troubling to see for students their age. I hope that today's session helped the students to start thinking about what colleges they might be interested in the future, and made them more excited about the idea of going to college in general.