he ReelWisdom video guides are created for college-bound students and their parents. Our mission at ReelWisdom is to help you become informed consumers in the college admissions process. Loren Pope, author of Colleges That Change Lives, emphasizes that "Picking a college is a crucial decision because the experience profoundly affects the quality of one's future life." Add to this the current statistic showing that only half of college students complete their bachelor's degrees at the college where they first enrolled. Clearly, this latter group of students would have chosen colleges that were better matches for them if they and their parents had been better informed. While you can go to innumerable web sites and peruse hundreds of guides in your local bookstore, ReelWisdom provides a different kind of information: the know-how and advice that people have acquired from their recent experiences in the college admissions process. Throughout our video guides, we feature the resources and strategies that students and parents found to be most useful during their recent college search and application process. The ReelWisdom process: We meet with families to videotape interviews about their experiences in the college admissions process. We send the following questions ahead of time, so that students and their parents can reflect on what they have learned in advance of the interviews: 1. What surprised you most in the college search and application process? 2. What do you know now that you wish you had known when you first began the process? 3. What resources were most helpful to you (people, books, internet resources, etc.)? 4. If you had a close friend about to start the college process, what advice would you give that friend? We video record each interview, then transcribe it (type out what each interview participant said). We then look for common themes across the many interviews, and develop our titles from the topics our families present to us.