This year’s out of state college visits have quickly come to a close, with the last visit occurring November 6 and college application week already over. 

In total, thirty-three colleges reached out to Karen Manning, the Skyline Career Center Secretary, to visit this year. Manning said, “It’s a really cool opportunity for the students to actually get to talk to a representative, because very few schools have out of state colleges and those that come may have three or four.” Skyline, however, will have anywhere from thirty to fifty different universities visit each year.

The colleges that come aren’t always the same. While schools like the University of Puget Sound, University of Portland, and Gonzaga University visit almost every year, others only come around every so often, like Yale. Some new universities that visited this year are Fort Lewis College and Oklahoma State University. Bowdoin is a new visitor as well, while schools like Caltech and University of Rochester haven’t visited in so long that they are grouped with the fresh colleges. 

Another school that is relatively new to the visiting group is the Naval Academy. Sophomore Freya Schultz was among the students who attended this particular college’s visit. She decided to go due to an already established interest in the school. “The meeting was beneficial in the sense that I got a better idea of what it offered and how the setup of the school worked,” Schultz said. The key to this, she revealed, was the questions she had the opportunity of asking the representative. She was able to learn about club opportunities in the school and  steps she could take for a higher chance of eligibility, both of which would be difficult to find clear information about from online research.

Apart from going to ask questions about colleges they were already considering, some students will attend visits of completely unfamiliar schools. This was the case for Senior Eszter Vizhanyo, who had never heard of Chapman University before its visit was announced. “I always try to get more ideas for what I could possibly put on my college list, and when I saw Chapman I realized that I had never heard of it before and I wanted to find out more about it,” she said. The meeting was quaint, with Vizhanyo only accompanied by two other students. She explained, “The representative from the university was very nice, very welcoming, and gave a really nice presentation. I liked the fact that it was more led by us and what questions we had, so we were able to focus on more of what I was interested in.”

However, these visits aren’t the only way to learn about different colleges. Trace Rowbotham spent part of his summer prior to Senior year on a campus visit to the University of Utah. While on-campus visits aren’t always ideal for out of state schools, this is not so much the case with in-state universities. To those who are debating visiting a campus, Rowbotham said, “I would tell them it is worth their time and helpful when deciding between colleges. It makes it easier to see what the atmosphere on a given campus will be like.” 

Rowbotham has made plans to visit other colleges in Washington this November, but never attended any of the representative college visits at Skyline. He said, “I […] have kind of planned on going to the U, so I didn’t feel the need to go see other schools.” 

While the visits aren’t necessary for all students, they still provide a “neat opportunity”, in the words of Manning. Schultz explains, “I feel the college visits are greatly advantageous to high school students, as they help us to understand and narrow down which colleges we were interested in.”