With the arrival of spring, high school seniors and their families experience a great deal of nervousness and excitement as they await the return on college applications.
Newport Beach resident Michael Fong embarked on a mission in July 2019 to help students — and their parents — make informed decisions about where to pursue post-secondary education.
Once a communications major at Long Beach State, Fong now gets his message out to anyone willing to listen through a podcast called “The Student Manager.”
The show is appropriately named, as Fong served as the student manager for the Long Beach State men’s basketball team while he was an undergraduate student.
His time with the program fostered an insatiable love of college campuses, sports and athletic facilities, so when he had a family of his own, college visits came naturally.
Fong, 51, has three children, two of which are now in college, but he spent several summers taking them on trips. During those journeys, he had a goal to check out at least one college campus a day, and after those regional excursions, he had a proposition for them.
“Then I told my kids, I said, ‘Hey, when you guys get to high school, any college that you remember, we’ll go back and see,” said Fong, who speculates that the return trip is why his younger daughter, Julia, decided to go to the University of Wisconsin.
The Student Manager podcast was launched after Fong was asked by friends to share his knowledge of colleges across the nation.
Now more than 60 episodes into the life of his podcast, Fong has had a wide range of guests on his show. He said he has had interviews with college students, student-athletes, athletic directors, coaches and people who work in college admissions, among others.
Guests should have a story to tell, so some do not make the cut.
“I don’t like to interview freshmen because freshmen aren’t really going through that much experience right now,” Fong said. “Parents or kids are like, ‘Hey, I want to be on your podcast,’ and I said, ‘You’ve got to at least go through a freshman year, right, to have the experience to share stories.’”
No topic is off limits, either. As the goal of the podcast is to find the right fit for the student, some guests have been asked about social life at their schools and how to rush a fraternity or sorority, Fong said.
There are also discussions on the college experience like game day and the town, class sizes and retention rates, as well as how to handle adversity such as finding a fit after not getting into a dream school or facing the prospect of an impacted major.
Melissa O’Brien, 50, of Newport Beach is a listener of the show, and she said she has found it helpful to draw from different perspectives.
“At the end of the day, it’s their life, and he really focuses on that,” O’Brien said of Fong empowering the student. “This is their decision. It’s not you reliving your college days. It’s all about your kid figuring out what is the right fit for them, and I think that’s a very refreshing perspective because especially in Newport Beach, it’s super competitive.
“You, of course, want your kid to go to a great school, but at the end of the day, what you really want for your kid is to be happy and find the right fit.”
O’Brien later revealed during a phone interview that her daughter, Grace, had been accepted into Georgetown University on Friday.
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