The school year has begun, and with the arrival of September, the Office of Admission travel season has also arrived!

From this week through mid-November, all of us on the admission staff will be traveling throughout the country and around the world to "tell the Providence College story" to thousands of prospective students, families, and high school counselors.

As you know if you're a regular reader of my blog, each of us in the Admission Office has a specific territory that we travel to during the fall and review applications from during the winter. For me personally, I will be spending about a week this fall in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona; a few days in Northern California (San Jose and San Francisco, mainly); and about two weeks in Southern California, from L.A. to San Diego. But those are only my national trips... I will also be spending a great deal of time in Middlesex County, Massachusetts and also in Western Mass., visiting high schools in the Berkshires.

Our counseling staff travels on four different levels during the fall - local, regional, national, and international. Locally, two of our counselors share our home state of Rhode Island, while three spend time in Connecticut and eight divide up Massachusetts! (With so much interest and so many applications from here in our backyard, it's impossible for just one counselor to handle the volume!).

Regionally, we have one counselor who spends a great deal of time in Northern New England -she's originally from New Hampshire so she loves heading up to her home state along with visiting Maine and Vermont in the fall. Five counselors share the state of New York - including a native Long Islander who spends much of the fall in Nassau and Suffolk Counties - and five staff members divide up New Jersey as well. Branching out a bit further, counselors will be conducting high school visits in many cities and towns in the mid-Atlantic, from Pennsylvania and Delaware to Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Nationally and internationally, our counselors will visit 35 states and more than 10 countries over the next two-and-a-half months. U.S. destinations (beyond my territories listed above) include the following (in no particular order): Atlanta, Charlotte, Orlando, Miami, Tampa, Nashville, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Kansas City, Saint Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, and Seattle. For the complete list of college fairs we will be attending this fall, please click onto our College Fairs page.

I'll check in next week from Arizona with some travel updates, and also will introduce you to our new freshman student bloggers!

*Scott
Providence, RI