THE COLONIAS MANIFESTO
How Colonias Compares to Expectations
By: Victoria and BS
Colonias is an annual overnight excursion to a location in Spain offered by BFIS. It happens every year at
the beginning of the year. As it's at the beginning of the year, the new students are able to build friendship. Old
students are also able to interact with people that they don't usually talk to.
This year, we decided to find out how much students liked Colonias and how their expectations for the trip
compared to the reality of Colonias. We asked twenty students and teachers to rate their expectation for the fun they
thought they would have at Colonias from 1 to 10. We found that the average expectation was a low 5.6. It seemed
that people did not expect Colonias to be a positive experience. To dive further into the subject, we asked them why.
The most common answer was Colonias’ bad reputation amongst students in BFIS. Many people that had gone to
Colonies had had a negative experience during their time there. This would probably have influenced their
expectation for this Colonias.
After Colonias, we asked people how much fun they had at Colonias from 1 to 10. We surprisingly found that
the reality of Colonias had actually exceeded the student’s expectations. The reality of Colonias was 6.3, a 0.7
increase than what students initially expected but this shows that Colonias has fulfilled their expectations. Usually,
everyone shares one opinion: Colonias “sucks”. Though, this year most students actually enjoyed Colonias. This
probably happened because of the various fun activities that were proposed and the additional freedom that was
given to students compared to previous years. For example in 7th grade, the snorkeling was very cold and not very
fun because you couldn't see anything. This year, there was rafting, archery, and other activities that were truly
entertaining.
In conclusion, our hypothesis was that the expectation would be much higher than the reality of Colonias,
but this year, Colonias actually fulfilled most student’s expectations. This is momentous for BFIS, as when
questioned, almost all students said that Colonias was always a disappointment. In summary, this year’s Colonias
vastly outperform any Colonias in the past and the student satisfaction in 7th grade was very high this year.