How to visit a university without leaving your house
If you are applying to university in the US but are unable to visit prospective colleges, a new website of student-created video tours could be a helpful resource
Nick Freud
,
Rob Carroll
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Imagine a conversation between Student A, a current high school senior, and Student B, a current college freshman:
“What’s college like?!” asks an eager Student A, to which Student B replies, “The student-to-faculty ratio is 9:1, we offer 34 different majors, and we have three million volumes in our library.”
Does that conversation seem unrealistic?
It does seem pretty unrealistic. And yet, every year, millions of students make the single biggest decision of their young adult lives based on this type of indecipherable data.
While rankings, statistics, and data points certainly have their place in the college search and selection process, they shouldn’t be the only factor in a student’s application or enrolment decision. Once on campus, you quickly realise that one of the biggest definers of the college experience is the community aspect.
It’s about the lifelong friendships, your connections with inspiring professors, that late-night consumption of borderline inedible cafeteria food, the all-nighters in the library before exams. It is the experiences and memories that make college so profoundly life-changing.
The cost of studying at a university in the United States
But how can you possibly get a feel for this if you are unable to visit the college campus? That’s where CampusReel comes in.
On CampusReel current college students – the ones who live in the dorms that you’re curious about and who trek through the dining halls every day – document their lives through video to provide a window into their campus and community.
Thousands of college students have captured their college experience and shared it on CampusReel which is available to view for free.
CampusReel currently hosts content from more than 11,000 videos from more than 250 US universities, and even a few abroad. College profiles are automatically published as soon as 10 videos are submitted to a school.
In-person campus visits can often be expensive and time consuming, effectively marginalising millions of applicants every year who lack the resources to visit colleges. Additionally, every prospective applicant is limited by geographic constraints. It’s our mission to ensure no student feels limited in their college search process – this decision is just too important to make with incomplete information.
Applicants can spend an afternoon taking a tour of a dorm room at University of California, Santa Cruz, and later experience the Ohio State University homecoming football game, and all without leaving their bedrooms.
Read more: Tips for attending university open days
