By Ruth Steinhardt
Rayne Cedergreen, a counselor at Bend Senior High School in Bend, Ore., said “very, very few” students from her small, fairly rural community decide to make the long trek to the East Coast for college.
But Ms. Cedergreen was at the George Washington University on their behalf this weekend as she attended Counselor Connection, GW’s signature program for high school advisers.
“It absolutely makes a difference” to see the school in person, Ms. Cedergreen said. “And not only the school but the surrounding environment. Being able to describe to my students the feel, and what the culture is like at GW, is really important. And it helps me see what type of student would excel here.”
Over the course of the weekend, counselors took tours of GW and its environs, networked with their peers, attended mock classes and joined discussion panels with GW administrators and current students.
Courtney Skerritt, a college counselor at the Hockaday School in Dallas, agreed with Ms. Cedergreen about the importance of feet-on-the-ground visits.
“To be able to be sitting in my office 1,500 miles away with a family or a student and to say, ‘It’s a 10 minute Uber ride from National Airport,’ or ‘I physically walked the [few] blocks to the White House’—those things give a school relevancy, and I’m able to talk about it with so much more detail,” Ms. Skerritt said. “It brings the campus to life in my office.”
At a Friday panel on the student experience, five current Colonials talked about their own time at GW, from their favorite eateries to their biggest challenges. Then they took questions from the audience of counselors, ranging from the place of the arts in GW’s famously political culture to the advice college students would like to give their high school peers.
Ms. Cedergreen was struck by the advice that rising sophomore Ruby Cheresnowsky passed on—not to her fellow students but to the counselors in the audience. “Reach out,” Ms. Cherenowsky urged. An email from counselors to the students they helped on their way to college can make a huge difference, especially when those students may be struggling with the challenges of their new situation, she said.
“It’s important to relay the message that it’s OK to fail,” Ms. Cheresnowsky said.
“That was one of those ‘aha’ moments for me,” Ms. Cedergreen said after the panel. “It takes 30 seconds to send an email to a student and say, ‘How’s it going?’”
Counselor Connection is one of several counselor outreach initiatives at GW. Another is the university’s Counselor Advisory Board, several members of which—including Ms. Skerritt—were in attendance this weekend. Such boards are increasingly common at colleges and universities.
“We value the opportunity to improve our relationships with college counselors and to support them in their critical work of helping every student find their best-fit college,” said Dean of Admissions Costas Solomou. Through Counselor Connection and our Counselor Advisory Board, we learn as much from our counseling peers about their roles and how students feel about the college admission process as they learn about GW.
Sanjay Mitchell, a board member and director of college and alumni programs at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Southeast Washington, D.C., said the board enables necessary communication between GW and the students it hopes to attract. He cited GW’s admissions and financial aid information sessions for high schoolers and their families, held this year in libraries around the city, as examples of positive outreach enabled by the board’s conversations.
“As a person from the Washington, D.C., area, it’s good to see the university reaching into all parts of the city and really trying to be a part of the college-going culture here,” he said. “Being on the advisory board gives the ability to shine a light as to what’s happening within our school communities, what’s happening within our counselor communities, what students and families are saying. And then we in turn get in tune with what’s happening on the admissions side.”
But the advisory board is more than a GW-specific informational entity, counselors said. Like Counselor Connection, it’s an opportunity to network with peers and also to gain behind-the-scenes insight into trends in enrollment management and admissions.
“It’s been instrumental to my growth as a professional,” Mr. Mitchell said.
“It’s incredible professional development,” Ms. Skerritt said. “And we’re colleagues—that’s what’s especially exciting. [At some schools] it can feel like the admissions office is on one side of a room, and the advisory board is on the other, but on this board we’re peers sitting together and having really interesting conversations about our profession.”
