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Prospective UM students and their families participate in a recent tour of the Coral Gables campus.
CORAL GABLES, Fla. (August 19, 2015) –Natalia Elling is a veteran of college campus tours. As she strolled the University of Miami grounds recently, she was on her tenth college tour. The 17-year-old high school senior from Delaware came away very impressed.
“I really loved it and found it so thorough,” said Elling, who not only enjoyed the lush grounds, but the fact that the first stop was the Patricia and Harold Toppel Career Center, where she received information on career preparation.
Starting at Toppel is one of several changes to UM campus tours, which have been enriched to make them more relevant to what prospective students and their parents expect, said Carmen Perez, senior associate director of admissions.
“Basically the campus tour used to be a walk around the lake,” Perez said. “Now it is a much more realistic experience of what life at the University of Miami will be like.”
“The new tour emphasizes the core academic strengths of the University of Miami and highlights the tremendous outcomes associated with a UM degree,” said John Haller, vice president of enrollment management. It starts with a thorough 50-minute briefing by an admissions representative on the University, the admissions process, and the strengths of the school’s academic life.
Other new stops include Hecht Residential College and Glasgow Hall at the School of Architecture. Prospective students also visit the Donna E. Shalala Student Center and the Daystar Student Health Clinic.
“The campus visit experience is one of the top two factors in a prospective student’s consideration of a college or university,” said Haller. “It is, therefore, crucial that parents walk away convinced that their children will not only get a first-class education, but be in a safe environment that also will provide fun extracurricular activities.”
By beginning the tour at the Toppel Career Center, “both parents and students realize that career preparation and job placement is an integral part of the college experience at UM,” said Christian Garcia, the center’s executive director. “The message to prospective students is that the University of Miami is thinking strategically about their careers from the moment they apply to long after they graduate.”
Surveys show that students across the country are not taking full advantage of career services on their campuses. The picture is quite different at UM, where more than two-thirds of undergraduate students interact with the Toppel Career Center, which was just recognized among the Top 25 Career Centers on Social Media.
“We want students to know that they have so much to gain and will receive support in countless ways at Toppel, so getting them into our building as early as a campus tour makes getting that message across more straightforward,” Garcia said.
