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News

New website set to help students choose university

Kara Chow - News Editor

An employee of TRU’s Open Learning division is leaving her position at the end of the month to pursue a full-time project aimed at helping high school students find the best university for their needs.

Angela Ferguson, student recruitment co-ordinator for Open Learning, will be retiring from her position to launch www.YouKnowVersity.com, a university database she created to make finding the right post-secondary institution for a student’s needs easier.

“In working with students they’ve all kind of had the same concern, that … looking at post-secondary options was really overwhelming,” Ferguson said. “In Canada alone there are almost 1,200 accredited schools, so if you’re a mom or dad or a student looking at your options, that’s a lot of websites to go to.”

Parents and students told Ferguson that if they had a place to go to that had every post-secondary option across Canada where they could search it would make their lives a lot easier.

“I thought ‘Well, I could do that’, so two years ago I started thinking about it and YouKnowVersity.com was born.” The website enables easy and immediate comparisons between every listed school and students can email their search results to anyone they want, which makes it a great tool for career advising and planning.

“So far we have two [universities on the site], Thompson Rivers University and Sprott Shaw,” Ferguson said. “We’re finishing up a couple of user pages on the site and once we’re done it’s going to get pretty crazy as far as getting the schools set up and going.”

In the first week the High School Head Start program saw 2,893 B.C. high school students register and be come represented. YKV Marketing Inc. has committed to sharing 10 per cent of revenue from YouKnowVersity.com to fund the Head Start program, which raises money for participating Canadian high schools.

Ferguson said that getting YouKnowVersity.com up and running was a labour of love and that in the end, it was worth it.

“When I look at the potential for how much money can go back to high school students and how the site is really innovative and you can’t find it anywhere on the net for Canadian schools, it’s totally worth the sleepless nights.”

Ferguson chose to leave her position at Open Learning for two reasons, one was because the website is at a point where it needs her full-time attention, and the other was because of her job position at Open Learning.

“Because my position at TRU is student recruitment co-ordinator, my primary function is marketing and student recruitment for OL, and my website does just that, it’s a conflict of interest,” Ferguson explained.

Ferguson’s boss and co-workers, however, have been more than supportive of her venture, offering her suggestions and feedback for the website.

“They’ve been great,” she said. “I think that Open Learning sees my website as having the potential for benefit OL.” YouKnowVersity.com officially launches on April 13.