Through the eyes of a student - account of a student who attended a college fair

Editorial note: An institution's purpose for attending a college fair is to attract high school students to their campuses. Black Issues thought it would be interesting to hear from a student who attended. The following is his report.

WASHINGTON - I am a high school junior now, so I guess its time to get serious about my immediate future - namely college. Where do I want to spend the first four years of my young adult life? Of course I want to go to a college that fulfills my academic and social needs, but there are so many of them out there.

The Washington, D.C., National College Fair, which was sponsored by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, offered what I thought would be the perfect place to begin my search for my perfect school. According to the association approximately 5,000 other students visited with representatives from 165 schools during the two-day fair earlier this month.

My present thoughts about a future career involve engineering. Before I went to the fair. I did some research and discovered that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the California Institute of Technology, and Stanford are considered three of the top engineering schools in the country. While I was hoping to get some additional information from these schools - which did not attend the fair, much to my disappointment - I was still eager to question some of the other engineering schools.

I arrived at the fair with my dad and we were greeted with a bag full of helpful information, including a book of college facts and a pamphlet of college shopping tips. An announcement that a financial aid workshop was about to begin caught our ear. My dad, being the thrifty man that he is, suggested that we attend.

For us, this turned out to be a waste of time. After watching my parents deal with the financial-aid process with my older sister for four years, I already knew what the seminar leader was telling us about keeping grades up, filing applications on time, who is responsible for paying for my education, the types of financial aid available, and things like that.

After the workshop, I made my way. to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute table. There, a friendly person with concise answers gave me a lot of information on RPI's research programs, equipment, and facilities - and even told me about students who were published in academic journals before they graduated college.

I left the table with a good feeling about RPI that had not previously been there. I took a handful of brochures and added the college to my list of possible schools.

My next table stop was Michigan Technological University, a school I had not heard of before attending the fair. The admissions officer gave me tuition, student body, campus, curriculum, and research information. Then he inquired about my present high school math and science courses and my grade-point average. After hearing that I was taking Algebra 3 and Physics with an "A" average in both classes, he told me that I was ahead of the bunch.

I left the table feeling good about myself and Michigan Tech, even though I do not necessarily want to attend college there. The admissions officer gave me a good impression of his school by simply acting as if he was sincerely interested in me. But this "happy time" came to an abrupt end when I visited the table of the only Ivy League college represented.

The representative was busy talking with others when I arrived at the table, so I picked up a pamphlet and began reading. When he was finished, I asked him about his engineering research program. Besides telling me that it existed and was good, he provided me with basically the same information I had read in the pamphlet. I tried to probe for a deeper, more satisfying answer, but all I received in return was cold, basic statistics. I left the table disappointed and uninformed.

The National College Fair was not what I expected. Although I did have a couple good experiences, overall I was disappointed. Not only did I not get any information on my top college choices, the uninterested and stolid treatment I received from the only Ivy League school in attendance was frustrating.

I was so frustrated, in fact, that I found my dad - who was checking out the New York Institute of Technology and the Rochester Institute of Technology for me - and asked him to drop me off at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. I needed to do some more research for a report on Native American mound builders due at school.

Terry J. Lee-St. John is a sixteen-year-old high school junior of African American and Asian American ancestry who attends the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. He is the son of Black Issues Copy Editor Eric St. John.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group