Greetings from Pittsfield, Massachusetts! Yes, back in the hometown for a couple of days of high school visits and college fairs. It's fun - I enjoyed asking the students at the Berkshire Community College NEACAC college fair what high school they went to... and then telling them that "St. Joe is a great school." They'd usually give me a strange look (I don't know why - it is a great high school!) until I told them I was from Pittsfield and graduated from St. Joe. So, yeah, there's nothing like visiting the hometown... we call it "Hometown Heroes Day" in our office, when our counselors are visiting their own high schools. That makes absolutely no sense, I know, but you come to this blog for the inside scoop, and there you have it...

Can you believe it's October already? That first semester of senior year flies by... Amazingly, we are less than a month away from our Early Action deadline of November 1. Yeah, that is coming up too quickly for me, too. It's funny because some days it seems like our admission travel season just started - and on other days, it feels like I've been on the road for 3 months, not 3 weeks. I still have a good deal of travel ahead of me, though - from Western Mass to Eastern Mass and from Northern California to Southern California - before I head back to the office to begin reviewing our Early Action applications.

If you are thinking about applying Early Action, I hope that you are moving along with the application at this point (or you are one of the dozens of students who already have submitted their applications to our office!). Completing the application is much easier when you have some time to think about your answers... and it's not as easy if you are just starting to fill out the application on October 31 and want to apply EA the next day...

More to come on the application process as we creep closer to November 1. Until then, I look forward to meeting more of you throughout the states of Massachusetts and California this month!

*Scott
Pittsfield, MA