On March 7th and March 20, the class of 2025 will travel to the Claremont colleges and UC Irvine, respectively. Preuss’ college advisor, Ms. Shaoni Bandy, plans to have the sophomores come to school a bit earlier than usual in order to bus up there for the college visits.

The Claremont colleges is a group of five small private schools that are located very close to each other. On the 7th of March, the college is essentially arranging staggered group tours for the sophomores since it’s five different schools. Ms. Bandy plans to, instead of keeping the students within their advisories, separate kids and some will even get to be on a self-guided tour with her.

“My ideal situation is to split some folks up amongst the advisories because it would be nice if everybody could go back to their advisories and then share about maybe some of the different campuses.” Ms. Bandy explains.

The sophomores will be eating at the college campus. Because there are five different schools at Claremont that means there’s multiple dining halls so Ms. Bandy hopes to make reservations at a couple places.

After the students have had the day to be there and experience college life, they will be coming back and getting a chance to debrief in advisory.

The schedule will be very similar for UC Irvine, whose trip will be taken on the 20th of March.

“The nice thing for both of them is that it will be an opportunity for you all to just see a couple college campuses, and we’ll visit some more next year,” commented Ms. Bandy.

The important thing in going on these college visits is starting to get the feel of what different college campuses have to offer and what things are important to you. By the time our current sophomores (or Preuss students in general) are in their senior year, they will have visited two CSU’s, two UC’s, and two sets of privates.

Ever since news about these college trips have been disclosed, sophomores are ecstatic and are looking forward to these field trips.

“I am really excited to go on these college trips because I actually still don’t know where I wanna go or what I wanna do after highschool.” said Amy Cruz-Zapata (25’).

Ms. Bandy’s advice when going on these trips is to not only have fun but to pay attention to the vibe and how they feel at this school. This is a wonderful opportunity for the Preuss students to be on a college campus and think about what they might want to do after they graduate.