As part of the college selection process, students are encouraged to visit colleges and universities they are interested in to get a feel of what that particular institute is like. However, many students choose to not partake in this step of choosing a college for several reasons, whether from not having the time to not having a ride to the college. Counselors saw this problem and have, as a result, decided to start field trips to different institutes.

“As counselors, we encourage students and parents to take a trip to campus,” guidance counselor Mr. Trevor Wolfe, who is charge of the trip, said.  “I think if we were to take a poll on students, we would find the numbers to be pretty high on our students who never did a college visit, but decided on a particular two-year or four-year school. We are trying to promote that idea of getting on to a campus and finding out that 1. ‘I love this campus’ or sometimes even better, getting on campus and thinking ‘No way, I can’t believe I was thinking about going here’. They wouldn’t have known this without actually going to the college and getting a feel of campus.”

Mr. Wolfe decided to plan the trip after attending a conference with other counselors from around the country. He learned of other schools who had been doing bus tours and corresponded with other counselors. Then, he contacted different universities that students might be interested in and settled on going to Mizzou and Westminster April 1st because of their relative close proximity to FHC and their short distance from each other.

“What I wanted to do was pick schools fairly close to Howell Central,” Mr. Wolfe said.  “I also wanted to pick schools close together so we could get two colleges in in one day. So we ended up with Mizzou, everyone knowing about it and interested in it, and Westminster, which is in Fulton 30 miles away.”

Besides location, students who choose to go on the trip will get to witness two very different campuses based on size. This, to Mr. Wolfe, will give students a look into a broad spectrum of what different colleges have to offer.

“The two colleges we are going to are going to have totally different feels,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Mizzou is going to have like 25 thousand students; Westminster is going to have about a thousand students. Our school is actually going to be bigger than Westminster. But they are going to have the exposure to the two different experiences.”

Mr. Wolfe hopes to see this first trip as a learning experience for more trips in the future.

“The vision is that it will grow, and each semester we will be able to offer one of these, and the other thought about keeping it simple early is we can do it, learn from it, if there is anything we want to adjust we can do that,” Mr. Wolfe said. “Some of the schools that I talked to do the overnight thing and I was like ‘whoa definitely not ready for that yet,’ so we are starting simple.”