“[...] the real trick is looking beyond the name of the school and taking a close look at what it offers to its students.”
College Counselor Lauren Cunniffe (in yellow at center) with fellow college counselors in July 2009.
College Bound
by Lauren Cunniffe
8
Read the full New York Times article. Find the link at twitter.com/sbschoolorg.
As any Stoneleigh-Burnham athlete learns in her years here, the common bonds forged through riding, dancing and team practices are strong and enduring. These athletes find that the experience of working together in a group engages both the mind and body and produces lasting and, sometimes, surprising results. For two weeks this past July I had the opportunity to join a group of college counselors from seven different states as we pedaled our way through three Mid-Atlantic states visiting about a dozen colleges and universities. This adventure, complete with remarkably perfect summer weather, afforded us a unique chance to view these schools from, as Jacques Steinberg of the New York Times put it in his article about us, “the open-air perch of a bike saddle.” We all rode bikes and carried our own gear; in my case I pulled a small trailer equipped with an eye-catching yellow flag that billowed happily over nearly 500 miles of sun-baked roads, from quiet, shaded bike paths to the din of downtown Baltimore’s traffic and construction zones. Approaching a college campus by bike allows a fresh vantage point that isn’t visible from a car. The group took in buildings and landscapes from a slow-moving perspective that let us spend time, far removed from glossy brochures and internet connections, reflecting on which of our students we could imagine walking around that campus. Later, on each formal tour, we did what any college tour group does: we watched the tour guide walk backwards and listened to the speech, sometimes rehearsed, sometimes refreshingly candid, about the college. We saw the dorms, the classrooms, the library and the
athletic facilities. We then checked out the downtown area for student cafes, shopping and music spots. We ate meals in the dining halls and we slept in the dorm rooms and came away with the certain knowledge that every single college offers something valuable and unique to its population; the real trick is looking beyond the name of the school and taking a close look at what it offers to its students. That, for me, was the most valuable part of this experience: spending time with counselors, from both small, independent and large, public high schools, who all share the goal of finding the best fit for the students with whom they work. I’ve been asked if there were any real standouts or any disappointments among the schools I saw. There were no disappointments because every college I saw aims to provide a unique educational opportunity and no single college closely resembled the one I saw the previous day. As a new cycle of college applications begins this fall, I plan to counsel each student to immerse herself in the process much as I did in the bike tour: setting off on a new adventure, armed with plenty of knowledge and support, but prepared to pedal her own bicycle on that journey towards the college that suits her best.