The JC College Fair, held on March 28, had good intentions that were quickly dashed against the rocks of annoyance. While there was some good that came out of it, there are some definite ways to improve it for next year.
For students like me, who want to get as far away as possible from Harford County when they go to college, the fair wasn’t very helpful. There were 58 colleges represented, but the majority of them are in Maryland or in the surrounding states. I was hoping that the fair would shed some light on colleges that I couldn’t visit very easily, but most would have only been a couple of hours away, at the most.
The relevance of some of the schools to JC students is also questionable. Over half of the colleges at the fair were schools that nobody from the class of 2011 attended. Without interest, they should not be invited back and their places should be filled by schools that JC students could potentially be interested in.
A major issue was the spacing. The room was set up in a way where there was a large ring of tables around the perimeter of the gym and a smaller ring of tables in the middle of the gym. Popular colleges like University of Maryland and UMBC were quickly mobbed, which made it impossible to get near their tables or the tables surrounding them.
This is obviously not JC’s fault, but some of the representatives were completely unhelpful. When a college’s representative is an alumnus or a current student, there is almost no way that you will actually find out useful information. Unless you want to major in the same thing as them, they probably can’t offer any insight on what you need to know.
Of course, there were also the representatives who were too busy playing Temple Run on their iPads to answer my questions. A helpful hint to colleges: if your representative can’t answer a question like, “Do you have a journalism program?” you are not putting your best foot forward.
What seemed like the biggest waste to me was having the sophomores attend. While it looks like tons of sophomores are interested in finding colleges early, let me clue you in. If you tell a sophomore that they can choose between going to class and milling around the gym with their friends, they will pick the gym.
Martha Schick is a Managing Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.