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Obio Ntia has made the move from being an admissions recruiter for a US college to being admissions counsellor in China. He shares his experience of the switch.
My first year as a college admission officer entailed several weeks of fall recruitment travel through eight different African countries and parts of the U.S. mid-Atlantic. The travel was followed by months of customary application reading. Then came decision committee meetings, decision letters, yield events and planning for my next fall travel season. The newly-enrolled class matriculated right around the same time I was packing my bags to embark on another international recruitment journey. Upon completion of one full cycle, I felt like an admissions veteran. At this juncture, two months into my first post as a college counsellor in China, I will reflect on my rookie year thus far.
Being in admission for several years, I was accustomed to the operations of many college counselling offices in the U.S. So when I came to work in Ningbo-Zhenhai A-Level Centre this fall, I simply thought I would replicate the resources and programmes of the offices I was used to visiting. What I failed to bear in mind was the fact that although I was making a rather common move to the proverbial other side of the desk, the key difference in the job was that the desk was on the other side of the world.
A college counseling office in a Chinese public school has additional demands such as: working with a population that has only heard of a relatively small number of overseas universities; ensuring that students - most of whom have never left China - are prepared (academically, emotionally, linguistically, mentally) to spend their next four years studying abroad in a country with a vastly different culture, and helping students reflect and rewrite their way to compelling application essays in a language they are still struggling to master. As a rookie, I am still learning how to best handle these challenges but I find that the more interaction and face time I get with the students, the better. Mock interviews so far have been a great tool for me to assess and instruct students and I imagine I will continue to conduct them.
In Zhenhai, our Chinese counselling colleagues had the offices running long before I joined. They do great work with the students and I am pleased with the way our cross-cultural collaboration has been working. Overall, our A-Level Centre is quite multicultural with teachers mostly from the UK (and some from African countries and one each from Iraq and Canada), two counsellors from China, and a Dipont Fellow and me from the U.S.
If only we can get college admission officers to visit Zhenhai during their China recruitment trips, I would be thrilled to see our Centre’s A-Level kids interacting with outside constituents who may influence our students’ potential admission decisions. When most schools only visit the biggest Chinese cities, lobbying them to make Zhenhai stops may be a tall order, but I’m working on it.
Two months into my rookie year I’m feeling settled into my desk but I still have the majority of a college counseling cycle with Chinese characteristics to encounter and get accustomed.
Obio Ntia writes an education column for Ningbo Focus magazine. He is a college counselor at both Ningbo Zhenhai High School A-Level Center and at Ningbo Foreign Language School AP Center.
This story first appeared untitled in the Dipont People section of The Bridge, Dipont Education Newsletter, No.2 (Winter 2011).
