Students from the lower forms and forms five and six of the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School crowded the Rodney MacArthur Rey Auditorium on Monday, where the school’s Annual College Fair was held.
Coordinator of the Anguilla Careers and Guidance Unit, Mrs Anita Ruan, was particularly happy that this year’s College Fair was far larger than than that of 2012, thus affording students a wider opportunity to gather information about furthering their education both locally and abroad later on.
Commenting on the theme of the College Fair, “The Mind is a terrible thing to waste,” Mrs Ruan said she had a particular liking for it in that the young people were the future of the island. “We therefore need to encourage them to develop their minds as much as possible,” she stated. “That is one of the things I like about the theme – the encouragement it gives. Go out there, find a college, get qualified, come back and run your country.”
Mrs Ruan continued: “Over the years we only had about six colleges represented here, and it seems as though small islands are having some difficulty encouraging colleges and universities to come to our territories because our populations are so small. What we endeavoured to do this year is to call on our local alumni – Anguilla is full of graduates from various colleges and universities –to contact their institutions about our College Fair. They sent the information to them and so a lot of our local alumni are here to represent those institutions.”
The colleges and universities represented are located mainly in various parts of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and the Caribbean. Those in the region included the University of the Virgin Islands, the Open Campus of the University of the West Indies, St George’s University, the Anguilla Community College and the Ani Academy of Art. The Anguilla Comprehensive Learning Centre was also represented as an important contributor to education on the island.
All of the information desks at the auditorium were keenly manned by various persons who distributed an abundance of educational material to the students with whom they interacted.
