On Thursday, Sept. 28, CCHS held the annual College and Career Fair from 6-8 PM on the CCHS football field. Due to the pandemic, the event has been virtual for the past two years, but it was finally in person this year. 

At the event, over 100 colleges had booths, each with brochures, financial aid pamphlets, and business cards. The booths lined the outer edges of the track. Some notable schools included Yale University, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Southern California (USC), and University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley), all of which had long lines of prospective students. 

“I liked how helpful the admissions representatives were,” said one student. “You could tell a lot of them were very passionate about their schools.”

There was truly a wide variety of schools that attended the event. Many local schools in the Los Angeles area participated, such as Los Angeles Trade Tech College, American Jewish University, and Santa Monica College. For students who were interested in colleges centered specifically on the arts, they could visit Laguna College of Art & Design, Los Angeles College of Music, and AMDA College of the Performing Arts. There were also many Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), such as Florida A&M University, Howard University, and Spelman College. A wide selection of UCs and Cal States also attended, such as UC Santa Barbara and CSU Northridge. Finally, some of the most well-known liberal arts colleges in the country, including Haverford College, Willamette College, and Carleton College, attended.

The fair saw a large and diverse turnout of students. Amongst the crowd of many seniors were juniors and underclassmen. Many juniors said they decided to take this opportunity to begin looking into colleges, as they knew it would facilitate their college search by the time they became seniors. 

“I think it was a good way to get a lot of information about local colleges to students,” said one junior. “Being able to see these out-of-state colleges [that] I might not have been able to see in my junior year because of classwork was a good thing.”