The idea of making your college preparations — be it in a traditional or virtual education fair can be daunting. Essentially, you’re responsible for making all the decisions concerning your future! 

While a virtual education fair provides an easy and convenient route for you to decide on your college career, you may get courses and scholarship awards mixed up and confused from the abundant of universities you’ve checked out.

Luckily, we’re here to make your planning process smoother! Before you head over to EduAdvisor Virtual Education Fair, check out these strategies you can implement to make your college preparations so much easier. 

#1. Decide your preferred courses 

Have you decided which course suits you best? Do you understand what it all entails? With the different types of pre-university and degree programmes, it can be difficult to decide on a course — especially ones that offer all your preferred subjects. 

While you can seek help from counsellors at the education fair, its best to pick the low hanging fruit first by deciding which course suits you best. You will save a lot of time and effort as opposed to pondering between options and eventually settling for a programme that you have no confidence in. 

If you're unsure which pre-university course to study, it’s not the end of the world. You can always keep your options open by going for broad-based courses like A-Levels or Australian Matriculation. Choosing the right combination of subjects will allow you to pursue a broad range of degrees once you complete the programme.

So, make a list of courses or similar ones that are related to your interests to process your preparations smoother and quicker. You can even list out courses or subjects that you're not keen on which can help the advisors filter out your options better.

#2. List out institutions you want to apply to 

Hastily exploring a virtual education fair without a proper plan and direction is the same as walking into a traditional exhibition — prepare to get bombarded by plenty of information from a variety of universities! 

Avoid jumping the gun by shortlisting a list of institutions you're interested in. Do your research beforehand and consider checking if your chosen universities offer the courses that you want and if the institution’s programmes are accredited by MQA. 

This will have you prioritise your chosen institutions’ booth and discover interesting rebates and scholarships held at the EduAdvisor Virtual Education Fair. Once you’ve acquired all that you need, you can continue to lay your options between your favourites and have an advisor to help you decide the best one. Tentatively, you can continue to explore other universities and check out their programmes for a sense of variety. 

#3. Be prepared with your documents 

Whether you’re urgently seeking a placement in a university or not, there’s no harm in preparing your documents early on. You wouldn’t want to ponder on it any longer when the variety of offers such as scholarship rebates and early bird discounts get too irresistible! 

Supporting documents that you will need to prepare beforehand are a copy of your latest certified SPM results, copy of your identity card (IC) and coloured passport-sized photograph. Because everything is available online, you will need to prepare these documents in digital format.

#4. Prepare your questions beforehand

Do you have a burning question about your desired courses or chosen institutions you’d like to ask the academic counsellor? Prepare them beforehand so you can clear up any doubts and confusions from the get-go!

Get your parents involved in providing questions too as they are more likely to bring a different perspective to the table, especially concerning things like fees and programme structure that you may not have otherwise thought of.

To boot, there will also be live webinar sessions with industry experts sharing key insights about a wide range of topics that you can join. Engage with them by leaving comments through a public forum and have them answered on the spot! The public forum will enable you to view questions asked by other students and vice versa so you can learn more that way. 

There’s no such thing as a stupid question when it comes to your education pathway. It’s always better to double-check with an expert to confirm your understanding than being in a fog. So, go ahead and note down your questions right away!

#5. Jot down notes

With the live chat feature at EduAdvisor Virtual Education Fair, you can easily chat with the representatives and counsellors online via text, audio and even video without interruption! 

While this digital feature allows you to save conversations you had as references, taking down necessary notes and details can further organise and compartmentalise your information based on institutions and courses. This includes jotting down information on financial aids and track records in terms of past year results. These notes will come in handy when you need to compare institutions with your parents later on. 

Tentatively, you will want to pay attention and take-down necessary notes from the webinar sessions as experts share important information on topics you find interesting. Who knows, you might just benefit extra knowledge about your desired courses and potential career pathway. 

We hope that you find navigating through college preparations less overwhelming and confusing with these steps! Once you’ve got the right bearing, you will find that making the first step isn’t so daunting after all.