By Grace Walsh

As the senior class of 2018 embarks on their college quests, the college counseling team at Manlius Pebble Hill has employed a new tool to help students become familiar with more colleges than ever before — RepVisits.

Thanks to RepVisits, MPH has 95 college representatives visiting this year. Mrs. Bernazzani, College Counseling Coordinator, and Mr. Cardamone, Director of College Counseling, conjointly made the decision to begin using RepVisits, a service provided by Hobsons Incorporated. Hobsons is the company that owns Naviance, which is why it is a trusty resource used in introducing MPH to nearly 20 new schools.

In the past, MPH college counselors have used the old-fashioned method of planning and scheduling college representative visits using pen and paper.

“I would never call a school to see if they could come visit us,” Bernazzani said. “If a school called us, I would get them on our calendar.”

Now, being on RepVisits allows many sizeable universities to view MPH on a map when they come to visit other local schools. In the past, many college representatives hadn’t ever heard of MPH. At a basic level, RepVisits schedules visits for representatives at nearby high schools that have openings for colleges to visit.

The next, and more costly level, works by directly connecting Google Maps to RepVisits. This level of RepVisits allows representatives to compare how far two schools in the area are from each other, and even route their drives to them.  However, the second level of RepVisits isn’t as popular as the first because colleges are required to pay for the map feature. This feature allows schools that have not visited MPH before to visit?, Bernazzani said.

“Providence College came and I learned from them, for example, that they’ve been coming to Syracuse for years, but they never knew about us until seeing our name on RepVisits,” Bernazzani said.

In addition to visiting MPH, RepVisits directly benefits the students of MPH by bringing a variety of new schools to visit. With these new representatives being welcomed into the MPH community, it gives students exposure to new schools.oo

“By me having a relationship with these people, if I have questions about a particular applicant to a particular school, I know who to contact, they know me — I get my phone calls returned,” Cardamone said. “You know, that’s an important part of this profession is the ability for me to shoot an email or send a phone call off to an admissions rep, sometimes on behalf of the student, can be a key factor in whether the student is admitted. Not the sole factor, but an important factor.”

Among the most direct results of RepVisits is the effect it has had on the students at MPH. Charles St. John, a senior at MPH, said that he stumbled upon the sign up for college visits while playing around in Naviance a couple of weeks before Mr. Cardamone showed it to the senior class. Despite his recognition of this new feature, Charles hasn’t used it very much because the schools he’ll be applying to aren’t visiting, as they are international universities.  

Jeffrey Bush, another senior at MPH says that he found out about all of the new schools that are visiting this year directly from Mr. Cardamone, and he’s used Naviance to sign up for “about six visits.” Jeffrey also said that he has noticed an increase in the number of representatives visiting from last year to this year.

Thanks to RepVisits, this year’s seniors will have the widest variety of schools to choose from, the most that have ever visited MPH. The end of RepVisits is nowhere in sight, as the team at Hobsons is working to improve the program and make the college process easier for everyone involved.