Some students dream of standing in an operating room, others in a courtroom, and others on a stage. But when it comes to planning those futures, does CSArts’ college fair offer something for everyone? Another school year, another college fair. But this year, the fair saw many exciting changes.
Unlike previous years, this year’s college fair took place outside regular academic classes, with events scheduled around conservatory and after-school hours. Students had the opportunity to attend sessions and booth fairs based on their interests.
The new format also aimed to make the fair more manageable. In previous years, the booth fair brought approximately 1,000 students together at once, while the event’s schedule affected regular classes and the students were affected by the humidity in a cramped booth fair.
But to understand the present is to understand the past and respect the process. So, how does the college fair get planned in the first place? According to Sean Kerr, Assistant Principal of Student and Special Services and a coordinator for the college fair, the school’s counselors maintain a spreadsheet of more than 400 colleges and their admissions contacts. Beginning in May, coordinators sent invitations and waited for colleges to respond. In previous years, about 60 colleges attended the fair; this year, 67 were expected.
Kerr explained that highly selective universities may be less likely to attend because they already receive large numbers of applications, while smaller colleges may see the fair as an opportunity to recruit students.
Still, with so many colleges, there are only 14 colleges that represented their academic subjects, which has been a common concern expressed by many students: that too many colleges had an emphasis on art and not on academics.
Equal representation of academic and arts-based education and colleges is very important to the student body who will not pursue arts after high school. “I think that it’s important that there is equal representation with academic and art classes because our student body is really diverse,” said sophomore Kristina Ghazaryan. This conflict is largely due to the misleading assumption that since CSArts is primarily an art school, our students only want to pursue art, which is not always true. CSArts has a very diverse student body that pursues many different interests and is interested in many different futures for themselves.
“The name, our school name, really messes us up. They think we’re an art school and that’s what we focus on,” said Kerr. Even after sending statistics of CSArts’ academic success, like AP pass rates, there still seems to be a stigma that CSArts is purely dedicated to the arts.
But even through this conflict, academics were represented. Academic representation, like lawyers and doctors, was at the college fair, along with many booths and master classes.
Trick or...Retreat?!