COLLEGE VISITS
College VisitsBY MADISON ALLIGOOD ON SEPTEMBER 20, 2013
As seniors begin taking the next step toward their future after high school, their past summer was filled with more than vacations, visiting family and hanging out with friends.
For senior Mo Blackwell, his summer was no different. Blackwell set off on his first college trip this summer with his friend seniors Garrett Hill. They packed their bags and headed to South Carolina to explore the College of Charleston. “The location of the college made me really interested and seeing some of the pictures online of the campus are really pretty,” Blackwell said. There were also many qualities that he realized he loved once he arrived in Charleston. “It’s really old and historical,” Blackwell said, “It is nice, pretty weather, a lot to do, beaches surrounding, and shops and restaurants that are really good.” Senior Ashish Khanchandani spent the majority of his summer dealing with school related trips and camps. “I went to a camp called Governor's School this summer,” Khanchandani said. He spent many hours at various colleges, including the one hosting Governor's School, while away from Rose. “I visited Wake Forest while I was at Governor's School and then after that I visited Duke, State, and Carolina,” Khanchandani said. Khanchandani said that he probably would have still visited Wake Forest if he had not attended Governor's School, but he is still has options open for several different colleges within the state. “I am generally interested in engineering so Duke and State would be good, but I wouldn't mind Carolina or Wake Forest either,” Khanchandani said. Khanchandani found positive and negative things from each university he visited. He was able to specify things that he enjoyed about the University of North Carolina. “One is how close by everything is,” Khanchandani said. “At State you have to take a bus everywhere and at Duke you have to do quite a bit of walking to get everywhere, but at Carolina everything is kind of close by and it also has Franklin Street, which I really like.” Khanchandani said that he enjoyed being able to find similarities with our school and the universities that he visited. Some of the traditions that Rose groups, such as Rowdie Rampants, have started are able to have some influence over where the students are deciding to attend in the future. “The other part about Carolina that I liked was the school spirit seemed really high, which is similar to Rose in that sense and was really interesting to me,” Khanchandani said. Senior Baylea Williams had a little bit of a different college trip this summer. “I traveled to Colorado Springs for the Air Force College Seminar; it is basically a college recruit type camp,” Williams said. This seminar served as a summer camp and a college visit that was probably unsimilar to all other summer trips. “It was the actual Air Force Academy,” Williams said. “You went there for about three or four days, and they kinda led you through freshman, sophomore, junior and senior year,” Williams said. This was an experience that was very informational for any ROTC or military-interested student. “It really helped because each day they spread out the things that we learned about,” Williams said. “One day I was learning about field biology, another I was learning zoology, one day I dealt with some special mathtype course and history.” Williams worries about the differences in attending an academy or an actual university. “I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to do a service academy or a ROTC program at a normal college, so I applied to go try it out since I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” Williams said. Williams was not sure what to expect from the seminar before she landed in Colorado. “They did a really good job of telling you what was gonna happen,” Williams said. “It was based on military, so a lot of workouts, but it is in Colorado so we are going from sea-level to really high up there so that was pretty hard to do.” Even after her trip to the Air Force Academy, Williams said that she is still struggling with a final decision on her top choice for college. She also said that she is interested in schools like Harvard and Cornell. “It is still an option, but after doing the service academy I think that I may want to do a ROTC program at a normal college so that I could get more of a college experience instead of more military-based,” Williams said. Senior Diane Padilla also traveled far from home on her college visits this summer. She traveled to Harvard University, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “My brother goes there so I wanted to see him and also get to know the school better,” Padilla said. Padilla was already aware of some of the things that the school had to offer. “They give you a lot of money to go travel abroad and help with organizations and I really want to travel the world and help people,” Padilla said. Similar to what other students said about the universities that they visited, Padilla said that she found the campus to be very inviting. “The buildings are really pretty,” Padilla said. “It is set in a town and it’s still historical so you have like little brick pavements and stuff.” Through all of these different college visits seniors all have many decisions to make this year that will affect where they will be residing and what they will be studying for the next four years. HTML Comment Box is loading comments...
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