BY ISABELLA KRZYKALA
Last weekend Sheridan College opened its doors to hundreds of prospective students and their families, giving them a sneak peek at life as a Bruin.
Each year Sheridan hosts its fall open house at all three campuses. From 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. visitors have the opportunity to visit the various programs and mingle with both the teaching staff and enthusiastic students.
The open house is dedicated to helping students make their post-secondary decision easier, by allowing them to explore the school.
“The most important thing you need to do before you decide where you want to attend is to visit, visit and visit,” said Karen Marlatt, Outreach student recruitment advisor at Sheridan College. “You need to have a feel for the place to make sure that you are going to feel happy there.”
As the visiting students begin touring the programs that they are interested in they can begin to envision themselves attending Sheridan College. This experience is key to making their decision.
“Being able to actually see students, and a lot of their work, made it a lot more exciting,” said Autumn Lapointe, who is looking to enrol in Sheridan’s Art and Art History program. “I am very excited to spend the time that I will be spending here. I was able to see students drawing and even some of the professors. It was really exciting.”
Many students applying to post-secondary schools find it difficult to decide the exact career path that they want to follow. Schools everywhere are filled with endless possibilities, which can make it hard to commit to just one program.
Sheridan uses the open house as a way to make the choice easier, by giving future students the chance to meet with faculty and students from each program.
“We find that a larger percentage of students nowadays are not knowing what they want to do for the rest of their life,” said Chris Treschak, manager of student recruitment at Sheridan College. “There are so many more choices now then there ever was before. We have programs for just about anything and that was not the case 10 or 15 years ago.”
Each information booth, at the open house, included current students who were able to give both advice and insight to what life at Sheridan is like.
“Take your time and talk to everyone,” was just some of the advice that Julia Bertola, a second-year Bachelor of Film and Television student gave to students during open house. “You might come here and you might have the idea of what you want to do and you end up talking to a lot of people and everything has changed. So keep an open mind and talk to everyone that is there for you and learn from that.”
The faculty at Sheridan recognizes the difficult task of picking a post-secondary program. That is why so much effort is put into making the experience as seamless as possible.
“We know with a great deal of research, one of the largest influencers on students, when they are making a decision about post-secondary education is the on campus visit,” said Treschak. “So this on campus visit is extremely important for us in recruitment and a key component of a students decision to choose post secondary.”