It’s 8:45 AM on Wednesday, October 23, and around 500 students are gathered in the Sentinel gymnasium. Post-Secondary Institution Day, or PSI Day, as it’s commonly termed, is an annual event in which Grade 11 and 12 students are able to listen to presentations from and speak with representatives from various BC schools including SFU, Langara, BCIT, UBC, and UVic. It may be interesting to our readers to note that 1st and 2nd blocks of the day are cancelled.
For anyone attending, representatives, and especially their presentations, are genuine and thoughtful. We are lucky as Sentinel students to have this opportunity to meet them; in a sense, school research is brought to us, instead of having to seek it out and sift through copious amounts of information when we have the most direct and credible source brought before us, admissions advisors. Schools seem to want high students to succeed and they are providing resources to help us do so through information sessions like PSI Day.
Sentinel students say:
“PSI helps you envision your goals more and take into account what you really want to do with your future. When I went to the UVic presentation, I felt a greater sense of belonging.”
~Khalisa
These presentations go beyond simple statistics about a school--number of students, campus size, program choices--but give a sense of the unique community of each school by speaking about both the student body and extracurricular opportunities. We are able to gain an understanding of a school community’s atmosphere and character.
“It was useful as a reminder tool for many grade 12’s for our application and scholarship deadlines, since we already attended last year.”
~Emma
As a grade 12 student myself, I totally agree. While many grade 12s have already started researching and even reaching out to schools with questions, the reality is that applications themselves are often left to the last minute. The concreteness of PSI Day is indeed a great reminder of the benefits of applying earlier: scholarship opportunities, less stress, etc.
If there’s one thing that can be taken from PSI Day outside of basic information about institutions, it’s the reassurance that postsecondary institutions are ready to help us. Schools are open and ready for our questions, making the university application process much less overwhelming than it could be. That is the value of PSI Day.
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