Advice for National Portfolio Days

The National Portfolio Day schedule has been posted. For those attending, here's one piece of advice I give every student:

Talk to as many schools as you can, even if you may not apply.

One of the greatest values of National Portfolio Days is the opportunity to gather many perspectives in a single afternoon.Take notes after every conversation. Then, at the end of the event, look for the threads of consensus.

Those repeated comments are the gold nuggets.

If several reviewers from different institutions respond to your work in similar ways, you've learned something valuable about how your portfolio is being received. Those patterns are often more useful than any single opinion because they reveal what others consistently see in your work.

Aim to leave with a clear understanding of the feedback that came up repeatedly, and use that to strengthen your portfolio before you apply.