College Catalog – A Student's Bible

On his recent visit to Otterbein College, Mark shared his views about what helps students finding the desired information they’re looking for about a college.  A college’s catalog–or bulletin, as it is sometimes called–is the source of all knowledge about the policies, programs, and procedures of a college.  If you are interested in a particular place, make sure to pick up the catalog.
Watch this video and learn how a college catalog can help you find the right majors, graduation requirements or answers to any other questions you may have:

Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
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TRANSCRIPTION
Hi, I’m here today on the campus of Otterbein University which is in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio in a beautiful little town, a nice little center here right next to the campus but I want to take a minute just to talk about something about researching colleges and that is the catalog, the college catalog, also sometimes known as the bulletin.  This is the bible of any college student and it should be the college of any student who is looking at and trying to decide which college to attend.  When you’re serious about a particular college, make sure that you get a copy of this catalog.  Now you can find it on the internet sometimes, it’s kind of hard and sometimes it’s kind of funky to navigate but this is really important.  Why?  Because while choosing a college is partly about sports and activities, you can see the stadium and the track behind me, it’s sometimes about parties and about fraternities and sororities, the fraternity houses are just down the road here and sometimes it’s also about residence halls and living on your own and growing up and expanding in those personal ways but, you know, really college is primarily about school.  It’s primarily about learning.  It’s tests, it’s papers, it’s all the things, going to class.  This is the book that you need to have in order to understand the academic structure of a university and the requirements to your degree.  So, you want to make sure that you understand that when you’re looking at a particular college and trying to figure out whether or not this college has the things that you’re interested in.
So, you know, take an example, if you want to know about how to double major or what a dual degree option might be, you need to know all of those things are listed in here.  If you’re looking at, say, the politics department, you want to know about what kinds of courses are offered and what are the introductory courses, what are the second level courses, what’s the philosophy of education in that particular department?  What is the emphasis?  Looking at who the faculty are, that’s all going to be in this catalog.  Again, you know, we have all kinds of information at our fingertips.  When we go to the internet, we go to the websites of the various colleges, what do we see primarily?  We see pretty pictures, we see virtual tours, we see student blogs, we see, you know, talking heads telling us how wonderful this particular college is but if you want to understand what’s going to, what’s in it for you, get the book that every student has on campus, get the college catalog or bulletin and make sure that you read up and understand how this college is structured, what its priorities are and what it’s going to mean for you academically speaking because that’s really what college is all about.