On Wednesday, Jan. 15, The Benjamin School hosted its annual Junior Kickoff Event. This event marked the beginning of the college admissions journey for the members of the Class of 2026 and their parents.
This year, the event featured Melissa Falk, the Dean of Admissions at the University of Richmond. Prior to her position at the University of Richmond, Ms. Falk worked in admissions at Muhlenberg College, a private liberal arts university in Pennsylvania. One interesting tradition that Ms. Falk brings to her career is baking cookies for new students, usually baking around 20,000 cookies a year.
Mrs. Maggie Leshin, Associate Director of College Counseling, explains what the event looked like, “At eight o’clock, we had a Zoom meeting with Melissa Falk. We’re really lucky to have had her, she is a busy lady. She came to us virtually, so that was exciting. She spoke for half an hour to forty-five minutes along with Mrs. Wright. They had a fireside chat. They talked about some of the big picture things about what the college process looks like and what someone like Ms. Falk is looking for when she’s looking at applications.”
While this program has many purposes, such as education and insight, the college counseling department has one primary goal when organizing this event.
“It’s really meant to be something that makes the juniors excited about the process. It’s not meant to talk about all of the nitty-gritty pieces of the application, but more this is why we’re here, this is why we’re doing this, why we want to go to college in the first place,” expressed Mrs. Leshin.
Each year, Benjamin invites a different admissions officer to participate in the event, offering their own take on the college process and admissions decision. This year, the college counseling team was thrilled to choose Ms. Falk as the guest speaker.
Mrs. Leshin explains why Ms. Falk was the perfect speaker to have, “We have connections with a lot of different admissions professionals and we had a connection with her through her old school. She just recently moved to Richmond and we really wanted to focus on having a woman in leadership this year. For the past couple of years we’ve had male speakers, and so this year we wanted to have someone in leadership but also someone who was female.”
Although it may seem late in the year for the juniors to officially kick off their college process, there are various reasons why the college counseling team chooses to schedule this event in late winter.
“We do this every year. The focus is now shifting from the seniors to juniors, right around this time. The seniors are either settled or at least most of their applications have gone out at this point. Now it’s time to start the process and start our official meetings with the juniors. It’s kind of a kickoff to our journey together,” said Mrs. Leshin.
This event is one of the first real introductions juniors get to the college admissions process as well as the determining factors of applications. Junior kickoff is meant to begin the thinking process of applications for these upperclassmen.
Junior Anjali Patel explains how the event went for her, “It was very helpful to have insight into the college process at such an early stage. She talked about being yourself in the process, which I really liked.”
Parents who did not attend were provided with a summary of the talk and a copy of the presentation. The next event for juniors is a case studies afternoon on Jan. 30.
