A lot of things have changed this year due to COVID-19 starting with school, sports, and life in general. Along with these things college visits have changed too. All college visits have been moved to Virtual visits through Zoom.

“There is a complete listing of colleges who are hosting virtual visits for De Smet students on Naviance,” College Counselor Dave Boland said. “I pull out the ones that are a little more familiar to most of our students and put those ones on OnCampus.”

OnCampus and Naviance are the two best ways to find out when a college you are looking at is hosting a virtual visit.

“To do this virtually the student has to log into a visit,” Boland said. “There’s a link that the college rep sends to the students who register for the visits and that is how they get into the visits.”

On a normal college visit the school would send their representative down to De Smet to talk to any students who are interested in attending their college.

“Virtual visits are no different except that it’s not done in person,” Boland said. “It might be 2, 3, maybe 8 people in that zoom meeting where the college rep facilitates the discussion but then answers questions and gives everyone involved the information about that school.”

Most schools around the country do fall visits and fall visits end by thanksgiving. Some colleges offer spring visits but the majority will be in the fall.

“I don’t think any school anticipates actually making person to person visits before thanksgiving,” Boland said. “By spring I think we are hopeful that some of that can get back to normal and the college reps can travel around and go to campuses. But there is no way of telling right now whether the spring is going to be different or not.”

The future of college visits could very well be these online visits. It is not cheap to send a lot of these college reps from far away colleges all the way to De Smet. You have travel costs like hotel, food, and transportation.

“The fact that they can do them virtually is a lot less expensive and so that’s why virtual college visits are probably going to become a lot more popular,” Boland said. “ It’s not like sitting with a person like you and I are. For some schools again that might be across the country a virtual college visit is certainly a lot more accessible than it would be to sit with them face to face.”