By Grace Deng and Gabrielle Zhu

SASPD’s College Counseling and Alumni and Development departments hosted the annual alumni panel during the community meeting on Tuesday.

According to Director of College Counseling Mindy Rose, the panel is meant to “help SAS students begin to imagine what their post-high school lives could look like” and “put perspective around the college process.”

While last year’s alumni panel was larger, comprised of alumni from Australia and the UK, this year’s panel was just three alumni: Andrea Jeng, Katrina Cherk, and Mikas Hansen. All three SAS alumni are at American schools.

Several current SAS students expressed a wish for alumni who could provide a more international perspective.

Hannah Power, a senior applying to schools in Australia, noted having a non-American perspective could help “underclassmen who are debating on where they want to go.”

Power suggested next year’s panel could include college students in Europe, Korea, and Australia in addition to American college students for “more balance.”

Many students said they preferred last year’s alumni panel due to the wide variety of students from different types of American schools as well as schools around the world.

Katrina Cherk said she was asked to be on the panel “like two days before” in a WeChat group. Cherk, who was on the panel last year as well, said in the future these events should be “planned out like all important events that require people to come in” in order to ensure diverse perspectives.

Rose agreed the panel was “entirely American-centric.” She said there were two volunteers from Australia who were supposed to come, but both had scheduling conflicts.

“The timing of this particular year’s panel meant that the scope was narrower that I would have liked,” Rose said in an email. “Even so, there were some poignant and transcendent kernels of wisdom posited, and I hope the audience absorbed them!”

Advice SAS students said was particularly helpful includes keeping parents away from the college process, reassurance that the IB program prepares students for college, advice about deadlines, and warnings not to get too caught up in school-related statistics such as GPA.

Students from all grades said they felt the advice from the alumni panel was applicable but not necessarily new information.

“They were okay, but nothing I haven’t heard before,” said junior Michael Lin.

Several SAS students felt the advice was repetitive to them but perhaps helpful to students who weren’t as entrenched in the college process yet. However, some freshmen, like Michelle Huang, said they did not gain many new insights from the panel.

“They were more like reinforcements of what I already knew from past Q&A’s,” Huang said.