Confused about what exactly each grade is doing tomorrow during College and Career Awareness Day? Worry no more, The Paly Voice is here to help you figure it all out.
Palo Alto High School students will participate in their respective grades’ college preparatory-related activities for College and Career Awareness Day tomorrow, with changes from last year and juniors still taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
This year, the College and Career Awareness Day has been changed because of the discontinuation of the ACT Plan and ACT Explore tests.
In the past, freshmen would take the Explore test, sophomores would take the Plan test, juniors would take the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test® and seniors would have college preparation workshops. Because the SAT is planned to change for the Class of 2016, the practice tests are no longer being given.
Instead, freshmen and sophomores now have two seminars with their teacher advisers about career exploration and planning. Guidance counselor Charles Taylor says the goal this year was to try and find seminars that kept the theme of college and career awareness, in the place of taking practice tests.
Taylor says that the senior workshops have been very successful in the past and they wanted to continue with them. However, Ann Deggelman, coordinator of the TA program, says a financial literacy session has been added to the senior workshops based on surveys from seniors in the past. Financial Literacy will teach students about checkbooks and bank accounts and other life skills, Deggelman says.
For seniors, some workshops will be held during both sessions and you can chose which workshops would be most beneficial. College Application Help is a general question session for seniors who still are confused on certain parts of the application process. The UC and CSU session goes over the differences in these two applications and the best way to go about these applications. College Essay help has group review and teacher review of college essays for a variety of opinions in order to obtain the best college essay.
Some workshops are only offered during one session such as the new financial literacy workshop. Other one session workshops are helping with college interviews or figuring out if community college is the right option.
Many seniors have been debating the importance of College and Career Awareness Day, but some are certain of its significance.
“I would like to go to the College and Career [Awareness] Day because I think it will make me more aware of the college process,” senior Jack Brook said.
The full list of events for tomorrow can be found here.