Carbondale Community High School (CCHS) took seniors with at least a 2.75 GPA on a field trip to attend the Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) open house on November 6, 2025. SIUC hosts multiple open houses all throughout the year, with it starting in October and going all the way to April.
Large parts of the field trip are walking around the campus, attending the resource and academic fair so you can talk to your future professors and the directors of the major you plan on going into, and the on-campus academic info sessions where you can get a tour in the building you will be studying in. Cade Cockburn is the SIUC Admissions Advisor, and he believes that these open houses largely help people get to know about the university and decide whether or not they would like to attend.
“This is a way for people to experience life as a Saluki,” Cockburn said.
Cockburn describes the open house as similar to how a realtor will show potential buyers a house they might want to buy. He intends to get people who attend the open house familiar with the large campus and inform them of the different things they offer at the school, such as their wide range of programs and scholarships. These programs can range from being centered around agriculture, computer science, education, and aviation. They also offer a variety of scholarships, like the maroon, silver, gold, and university excellence scholarships that all give you a certain amount of money depending on your grade point average (GPA) when you leave high school.
Emile Wien-Frankowski is a student at CCHS who attended the field trip, and he plans on going into the computer science major at the university.
“I think that the field trip is useful for a lot of students to help find academic opportunities and career choices,” Wein-Frankowski said.
SIUC has very few requirements for automatic admission, with the requirements being 2.75 GPA or higher and meeting the curriculum requirements that everyone should have once they graduate high school. They also give more consideration to CCHS students and have offered to waive the application fee up until November 1st. If SIUC has piqued your interest, look into the open house dates they have later in the year.
