Face To Face with Univeristies

Our school does not treat university orientation as something that happens at the very end, a moment where you are suddenly asked to decide everything. We treat it as a continuous journey. This is why we keep creating opportunities for students to meet universities directly, to talk, to question, to compare, to discover what is possible for them beyond the IB.

In our recent university encounters, students spoke face-to-face with institutions that represent very different ways of learning: historic, research-driven environments like the University of St Andrews; large public universities known for industry and technology like the University of Hertfordshire; liberal arts models like Bard College Berlin and the American University of Rome; and contemporary, innovation-focused schools that work like creative labs such as Raffles Milano, H-FARM College, and Geneva Business School. They even explored highly specialised degrees that reshape what “university” can be today, for example the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche di Pollenzo, where food is studied not as culinary technique but as culture, sustainability, and system.

Through these conversations, students began to recognise what genuinely matters to them: the kind of learning that makes them feel alive, the environments in which they want to grow, and the educational approach that aligns with their values. And with this recognition, they also began to see that university is not a single narrow route to “somewhere”, but a wide landscape full of options in which they have real agency.

This is the real value of these experiences.
They take university out of the abstract future and bring it into the present through human conversation. In this dialogue, students begin to construct their priorities, their vision, their next steps gradually and intentionally.

And they discover that their future is not a choice made in one moment.
It is something they build with clarity, along the way.