New site Unigo provides student reviews of colleges

Princeton is now the most viewed college on unigo.com, a free website launched in September designed to connect students to colleges. Unigo doesn’t hire professionals to write reviews of colleges and universities but instead uses student reviews to create school profiles. The student reviews are coupled with the Unigo editors’ own review of each institution.

There is “more content [on Unigo] than any other book and website put together,” said Jordan Goldman, a Wesleyan graduate and the creator of Unigo.

And it’s free. “Not everyone has the money to go out and buy [college guide] books,” Goldman said.

In addition to providing free information on 225 schools across the United States, Unigo also serves as a social-networking site that allows high school students to interact with college students and for college students to interact with each other.

“[Unigo] connects students across campuses,” Goldman noted. “If you have an issue ... [Unigo allows you to] give voice and be heard.”

More than 30,000 students submitted reviews before the site launched.

About 130 Princeton students have contributed material to the website, uploading pictures and videos and writing comments on their Princeton experiences. Unigo also lets students promote their favorite extracurricular activities and disclose their political and academic preferences.

Katharine Westfall ’09 and Hannah McDonald-Moniz ’10 are the two Princeton representatives to Unigo, and they are “responsible for reporting on topics that ranged from Princeton’s history, to its student life on and off-campus, to clashes with the administration,” Westfall said. She added that the editors at Unigo are “just out of college, very excited and creative.”

Last semester — when unigo.com was still called bystudents.com — Westfall and McDonald-Moniz surveyed the demographics and the opinions of the Princeton population.

Both Westfall and McDonald-Moniz found it difficult to get students to participate. “My personal feeling is that students at Princeton already have so many commitments,” Westfall noted, explaining that “they’re reluctant to sit down to do things like this [survey] when they actually have free time.”

Despite less-than-desirable participation rates, McDonald-Moniz was “impressed” by the “wide variety” of student reviews found on the site.

Nearly all attempted to rebut the stereotype that Princeton students are all either nerdy or preppy.

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“Yes, Princeton very much used to be an old boys’ club that favored the rich, white, and male, but then again, so did most of the other top universities in the country,” one reviewer wrote. “Today, Princeton is much more diverse and offers incredible academic opportunities to a much wider segment of the population.”

The Street makes frequent appearances in the social life section of many reviews, and most students on the site have good things to say about academics and their professors.

“It’s not hard to forge connections with professors — they’ll invite you over for dinner and are more than willing to spend hours talking outside of class or to write a recommendation,” one student wrote.

Unigo marks a stark departure from traditional college guides like the Princeton Review, widely used by high school seniors. Though the Princeton Review provides a section that incorporates students’ comments on schools, it does not give users the opportunity to comment any time they wish.

Mac Steele ’10, who appears in an interview on Unigo, acknowledges that the website should be “just one part” to be considered by high school students as they make their college decisions, adding that traditional guidebooks and other resources can be useful, too.

Though helping future college freshmen choose their homes for the next four years is the main objective of the site, it also allows college students to become better acquainted with their own schools.

“[Working for Unigo] opened my eyes to different things going on at Princeton [and] to different activities I didn’t know existed,” McDonald-Moniz said.