As we’ve discussed before, a university visit to your school can be an invaluable tool for your students as they explore potential destinations. It’s a student’s chance to open a dialogue with a university they might be interested in and allows them to gain a more complete understanding of the admissions process.
But managing a university visit can be a complex process, from scheduling and raising awareness of the visit, to tracking students’ attendance and evaluating the success of the event.
That’s why our new University Visits feature within BridgeU is designed to simplify the process of a university visiting your school. With this new feature you and your guidance team can:
In this blog post, we’ll explain you can now use BridgeU to ensure that students can make the most of university visits to your school.
Counselors logging into BridgeU will now be able to see the new ‘University Visits’ feature in the main menu. Selecting this option in the menu will then take you to the ‘University Visits’ dashboard.
University Visits has a simple, chronological overview of when each university is scheduled to visit. The date, time, venue and summary of each visit is easily visualised in the dashboard. As you can see, the universities currently scheduled to visit in this instance are Columbia, Stanford and Berkeley.
Let’s take a quick look at how BridgeU lets you schedule a new University Visit.
When you create a University Visit, you can easily add:
When you’ve finished creating an event, you’ll be able to view a summary of the relevant information. Clicking on 'Create University Visit' creates the event for you and your students to see.
When you schedule a new visit, all students who have shortlisted this visiting university will be immediately notified.
This automatic notification simplifies communication between students and counselors and replaces the more manual, time-consuming process of counselors having to contact students individually via email. We’ll cover this in more detail in the next section.
To access University Visits, students need only log in to BridgeU in the usual way. They will see University Visits now appears in their main menu.
Likewise, the students’ University Visits dashboard has a similar overview of the universities coming to their school, meaning that they can easily keep track of events that are of interest to them.
Let’s imagine our student has shortlisted King’s College London, which was the university visit our counselor created. As we discussed in the previous section, when the guidance counselor created this University Visit, the student was sent an immediate notification.
If your student clicks on the ‘Notifications’ icon in the top right hand corner of their screen they will see the notification telling them that King’s College will be visiting their school and advising them to reserve a place at the event.
When a student clicks to ‘View’ the notification, they’ll be sent to a screen asking them if they plan to attend the university visit. Clicking on ‘Yes’ will confirm their attendance.
So now our student has confirmed their attendance. Let’s turn back to the Counselor’s dashboard to see what happens next.
Our student has been added to the list of students attending the King’s College London Personal Statement workshop.
This simple overview of students’ attendance gives counselors a valuable insight into the popularity of a visit, and allows them to see if they need to make any changes to the venue or time of the event.
If necessary, it’s easy to manage University Visits and make any relevant changes. As you can from the image below you can Edit any event details as you see fit, or even Delete the event should the need arise.
Students who are listed as attending a University Visit will also receive notifications if the event is amended or deleted for any reason
As well as tracking attendance and gauging students’ interest in when you create them, we’ve also added a ‘Past Events’ button to the University Visits dashboard.
Clicking on ‘Past Events’ means you can review historical visits to your school and get access to all the same information on the University Visits dashboard (e.g. event name, time, location)
You can use this information to make any necessary improvements to the University Visits process at your school, and how it fits into your wider guidance programme.
For example, if the visit from University of Amsterdam proved unpopular or had a low attendance, then you can gain valuable insights into how to organise future events. Perhaps the visit was scheduled at an inconvenient time, or maybe not enough students at your school have shortlisted the university, meaning it’s just not a popular university visit.
The instant visibility and easy communication offered by University Visits means that you can organise events that are relevant to your students’ interests and ensure visits to your school are having maximum impact on your guidance strategy.
If you’d like to know more about University Visits, or are interested in how BridgeU can simplify and enhance your guidance strategy, book a consultation with one of our Education Partnerships team.
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