The format of the college junior workshop, held on March 17-18, has changed to a different format after careful deliberation and contemplation to find the most effective way to deliver information to students.

In the past, juniors were pulled out of their history classes and attended one single session where they received important information about applying to colleges. However, with a plethora of information to cover and very limited time, they often were not able to delve into specifics that students want to know.

The counseling department has adopted a new session-style format in which the meeting will start out with a beginning general session, followed by three workshops; juniors can attended three of five of the workshops held. University of California, California State University,  private college, community college and career planning 101 workshops were held to inform the students about the information they needed.

After studying these sessions themselves, the counselors came to the conclusion that many of the attendees became uninterested in the given sessions. The sudden cause of boredom may have been because a lot of the information was irrelevant to these students. In newer sessions, counselors plan to cover what is truly helpful and applicable to each individual student.

“When we ask students why they go to their counselors, they often reply by saying, ‘I wanted to change my schedule.’ This should be one percent of what we do; the other 99 percent is really important, and students should know we’re here beyond just changing schedules,” counselor Elizabeth Taylor said.

In order to provide the information that juniors need to succeed in an effective manner, the counselors prepare to organize the event.

“Actually, the organization piece for this event was the most difficult part, not the content of the workshops because we had to organize the locations and we have so much happening on our campus,” counselor Heather Bethmann said.

These workshops received positive responses from students as they were provided a way to obtain more information about what they personally wanted to know.

“My favorite part about the workshop was that I could pick and choose which sessions I wanted to attend. Also, one really interesting thing that I learned was that the location of a college may affect how difficult it is to get accepted into,” junior Jordyn Boothroyd said.