Operation Research

Once you have played around on the more general searches and websites, you need to focus your research in order to help make an educated decision as to whether a campus visit or application is worth your time.

Home pages

The school’s official web site is a hot bed of detailed information. You can begin with some basics like demographics, majors, and programming.  As you dig deeper into the website, you may want to explore links to other areas such as student development where you can get a sense of what student life is like.

Ways to maximize your surfing:

Prospective Students Pages: Read the pages for prospective students fully for basic information about the college.

Faculty Pages:  Look at the pages in majors that interest you.  You may be able to learn about individual faculty members, view syllabi of their classes, and find email addresses. If you have a specific question, try sending a faculty member a short, polite email introducing yourself and asking your question (don't ask anything you can find out on the web or in the college catalog because instructors are busy people who don’t take kindly to random distractions).

Student Development / Student Life: See if you can find some links to student organizations—you can check out what organizations are active.

Alumni:  Check out the alumni pages to see how the college supports graduates as they transition into careers (after all, getting into a career is the reason you are going to college).  Some colleges do better than other in providing support and resources after graduation.

You can also check the web for more casual information.  Students may have homepages where they provide contact information.  You could ask for an email review from a student’s perspective.

Janelle Jalbert

November, 2007