Website provides insightful information from college students

October 15, 2008 — by Aditi Jayaraman

Forget heavy guidebooks, biased pamphlets and costly travels around the nation. If you want a completely free database of documents, reviews and videos on any of the nation’s top 225 colleges, merely click a button and check out Unigo.com? Unigo.com is the brainchild of Jordan Goldman.

Forget heavy guidebooks, biased pamphlets and costly travels around the nation. If you want a completely free database of documents, reviews and videos on any of the nation’s top 225 colleges, merely click a button and check out Unigo.com? Unigo.com is the brainchild of Jordan Goldman.

Unigo.com is a student-driven site that targets high school students. It provides candid insight from college students about their experiences at their respective universities. High school students can create profiles that allow them to interact with high school students and college students. To add to its student-run credibility, the site has completely avoided procuring information directly from colleges through often biased pamphlets.

Through discerning articles on various aspects of a university such as college life, academics, ratings, writing samples and statistics, Unigo gives perspectives you might not get elsewhere. However, the site also benefits college students, in that they have the ability to learn more about their own college and explore its different facets.

Studies show that nearly a third of today’s college freshmen are unhappy with the schools they are attending and wish to transfer, perhaps because of misleading information they must have received about the college before enrolling. On the other hand, one may argue that the information posted on Unigo.com, because it is posted by students, may be partial to their own schools or include negative comments about rival colleges. The benefits of this system, though, far outweigh the risks. Since there are so many posts, a few biased pieces of information will not make a difference.

Students check out Unigo.com not to view a college’s academic rankings, but rather to get more subjective impressions from college students.

The forum also offers reviews from students who are categorized by their interests; in other words, students can search Unigo for more information about a college from the perspective of a student with similar interests as their own, thereby giving a more accurate representation of the kind of experience a student would have at that specific college. Another benefit of Unigo.com is that it provides students the ability to fully analyze a school, through resources and links like campus tour videos, without forcing them to leave their homes. In this respect, Unigo is convenient, simple and cheap to use.

As of now, colleges seem to be indifferent about new student-driven sites like Unigo.com. Authorities say that because parents recognize big names like “The Princeton Review” and turn to this class of resources before looking into the relatively new and small college guides, colleges feel no threat. Regardless, student-driven sites, like Unigo.com, are continuously gaining greater student followings.

Even now, Unigo.com is a useful resource for college-bound students.

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