This year, AVID students visited San Jose State University and Santa Clara University on Oct. 1 for their annual college field trip. These schools were voted by the students and each of them paid $8 to attend the trip.
On the field trip, students have a chance to speak with admission officers about the application process.
“[Admissions] give you a step by step process for [applying to the university] so that was really helpful,” said sophomore Rebecca Bedolla Jeremias. “They tell you all the different [application parts] … There are different deadlines for each [application]. There’s a personal statement that you have to do by a certain time and then [share] your and SAT scores.”
The interactive tour allows students to be engaged during the trip rather than just listening to tour guides talk.
“We had to go around and find different things on campus and take pictures of them just like a scavenger hunt,” said sophomore AVID student Laura Wood Carracedo. “That was a lot of fun because we got to see a lot of the campus and walk around in groups.”
The trip also provides students a sense of what their future could be like.
“I don’t know where I want to go to school for college,” Carracedo said. “It’s just really nice to get a different perspective [of a college] and explore [the campus], so that makes me feel a bit more secure about what schools are out there.”
Each year, the AVID departments make sure that students are able to choose which universities they will visit.
“We don’t like to repeat schools, so if an AVID student is in AVID for four years, they’re going to go to four different trips,” said AVID adviser Don Bush.
Many of the freshmen have also never even been to a college campus, making this trip their first experience.
“As a freshman, students may be thinking one thing [about a school]. [As] sophomores, they may change, their interests might change; and their transcripts are changing,” Bush said. “Most students, when they are seniors, have different interests than when they were freshman. So every year [students] get different ideas [about college].”
The AVID trip allows students to have a chance to think about their future college aspirations.
“I hope that the [AVID students] get excited about being on a college campus,” said AVID teacher Sara Kixmoeller. “There’s just something about being surrounded by other college students that are going through the experience and we hope that they envision themselves in that role.”
In order to accommodate the cost of the trip, the AVID department added a fee to the trip in order to balance their budget.
“Whenever we have expenses that go over our [budget], we ask our expense fund or the principal if there are any funds for students to go to field trips,” Bush said. “The [money] is partly from our AVID budget, the student fundraising [each student paying eight dollars] and partly from the PTSO expense fund.”
Teachers also go through a lot of preparation in advance to run the trip smoothly.
“We have to reach out to the schools, find out when tours are available, [and] find out if they can take our students,” Bush said.
Another important part of preparation is that the AVID students need to be familiarized with the colleges before they visit them.
“[The students] do some research before and after the trip,” Bush said. “They can get a preview of what they’re about to see and then they can follow up later and dig deeper.”
