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Day One!

Hello! And welcome to our 2019 J Term blog. This first blog entry was written collaboratively by the entire class to share with our parents, in order to give a broad picture of the structure and expectations of this course.

In this J-Term we will be doing several things to further our knowledge about the complicated thing we call "college". This course offers things such as college visits to different types of institutions. We will be visiting colleges such as Rice University, and Southwestern University. We will be doing case studies in order to learn more about certain institutions and see what type of college fits us best. Through our college research, we will learn how to look at colleges and not just look for “flashy colleges.”

As we mentioned, during the course we will all be working on a case study project. For this project are paired with another student in the course to research in-depth one of the colleges we are going to visit. In the end we will all be presenting our case studies to each other so we can have an in-depth understanding of these schools and everything that the school and other schools like it can offer.

Through this course we will experience college from a different perspective and not only find out things about colleges, but also figure things about ourselves and what we should be looking for. We will also be reading texts with information about colleges and discussing the texts in seminar. Throughout the course we will be keeping a daily blog which will update our adventures, as well as a final, public all-school presentation.

We also mentioned that we will be reading and participating in seminars on the books American Higher Education: A History by Christopher Lucas and The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College by Jacques Steinberg. These readings will help us to understand why colleges are the way they are and what colleges are looking for during the admissions process.

Making an effort in order to create our in-depth cases studies will most likely be the hardest part of the course; researching and retaining the information that’s not online or available elsewhere is one part of that.

Getting the opportunity to visit colleges and see for ourselves what they’re like is exciting for many of us. We get to see some of the potential environments we may be introduced to later in our lives. Some of us are especially excited to get to learn about different schools' cultures and academics. We are also excited to be learning about different schools' enrollment procedures to help us understand for the future when we begin applying for college.

Stick around on our blog to keep up with our adventures and what we've learned along the way!

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