It was a travel-filled week as the Amazon AWS EdStart Builders’ Workshop in Palo Alto kicked off just as the Super ACAC conference in Arizona wrapped up. After such a terrific few days with fellow counselors and college admissions teams, meeting such innovative members of the EdStart Program got me thinking about new creative solutions to help counselors and students through the college process. There is so much happening on the technical side that can support our planned Corsava features, I cannot wait! Discussing trends in admissions, meeting with potential partners, and learning about technical innovations to support our new applications combined to make the jump to summer and lead into fall all the more inspiring.
Sarah Loring de Garcia, Independent Educational Consultant Monterey, Mexico
Sarah Loring de Garcia is an independent educational consultant in Monterey, Mexico. We first met on Facebook where she is a great contributor and supporter on the Independent Educational Consultants group page. I reached out to see if she would tell me more about her work with her students who are considering international options for college. I am always interested to learn more about how counselors in international settings help their students evaluate and compare US colleges and which attributes are most important to them to consider throughout the college process. Sarah is a highly experienced counselor who worked for fifteen years at the American School in Monterey and has a wide range of really interesting resources that she has built over the years. She is an innovator for sure, and I had fun chatting about everything from interest and strength inventories to her custom questionnaires and the unique challenges of finding a good fit for students studying abroad.
Sarah uses Corsava in her work, mostly the cloud version as about 60 percent of her work is done remotely. She also holds a college prep boot camp, and her students use Corsava to start the process and create reports summarizing their preferences. Sarah had originally created her own cards, but after ordering a set of Corsava cards and using the cloud-version-with-report generation, she decided this was a better option and now uses this exclusively. She has created her own Google forms for some of her career counseling applications, tweaking everything to make it better. I really enjoyed her creativity in honing in on what was important to students, from career to college fit. Her “self-awareness piece before going shopping is essential” comment really hit home.
This self-awareness with regard to everything from lack of access to a particular major, to residential life, to food options is why some international students choose to transfer, so she places a lot of importance in discussions of these aspects of college early on. Many students are confident about majors in her cohort, so she often customizes her Corsava deck to remove majors and focus more on residential life, campus culture, educational culture, and extracurricular activities. Most counselors keep these in to get a feel for whether or not their students are more STEM or humanities, social science or pre-professional, so this was a unique twist and led to an interesting discussion.
Sarah had great feedback on the cards and how we can think about our list-building features while keeping international students in mind. For example, the Test Optional card may have been selected by her students, but the number of colleges that don’t have the same rules for US and international students with regard to test requirements is large. Her students don’t use fairtest.org as those in the optional category often are not for them. We will make note of this in our list-building feature development, taking into account whether or not the test-optional rules apply.
We wrapped things up by discussing a recent symposium presentation where she saw Slate in action from the college side. I have had that same conversation with other counselors over the last few weeks, and it has been enlightening for us all to learn more about how colleges manage this process from their end as they try to understand their applicants better. Whether you agree or not with the information that is being tracked, I feel it is better to understand the process and help our students engage in ways that help them understand the colleges on their list better to make a better final choice. Colleges want to find students who will engage in both the academic and non-academic aspects of college life on their campus so that they will thrive and graduate. It is critical that we are all united in this common goal.
I am grateful to counselors like Sarah who agree to share their stories to help us learn more about Corsava in the field. Her final comment that the campus culture piece of Corsava is helpful to her in her work with students meant a lot, adding that it has been an awesome tool for which she is forever grateful.
Super ACAC Conference in Arizona
Much of my conversation with Sarah hit home as I was preparing for our session at the upcoming Super ACAC conference, “Looking Beyond the Rankings: Exploring Emotional Preferences to Find the Right College Fit.” The idea that students should kickstart the college process by focusing on self-awareness and introspection was first covered by all of the participants in our presentation, each from a different perspective.
Kathleen W. Odell, College Counselor at Design Tech High School in the Bay Area, spoke from the counselor perspective about the importance of having her students look deeper before exploring their options as this is an integral part of the process, from finances to campus culture. Kathleen suggested flipping the experience to be one in which students first explore what matters to them, then use those points as the guiding stars in the same way that location, size, and rankings would normally be used.
Christine Bowman, Director of Admissions at Southwestern University, a Colleges That Change Lives member in Texas, spoke from the parental perspective. She said that when she first started talking to her son about the process, he was not able to narrow his preferences, and as with many of our students, everything sounded “fine,” making it difficult to narrow the college search. She used Corsava to help him consider things that were not on his radar, making list building easier. I liked her comment that visits were easier as well, helping him focus on the key things that mattered most to him and on the important conversation of what would lead to his engagement on campus.
Adam Miller, Director of Admissions at Whitman College in Washington, another member of Colleges That Change Lives, came to the session from the college side, reminding us all that colleges want to also understand what matters to a student while reaching out, as well as once they are on campus.
I found the process of working with our group of presenters inspiring. Leading off with the Stanford School of Education & Challenge Success Program study, “A Fit Over Rankings, Why College Engagement Matters More Than Selectivity,” I had the opportunity to lay the groundwork for our presentation while also getting another excuse to review this important report. The research they reviewed as part of this study led them to conclude that there are six key college experiences that correlate to whether students thrive in life after college, which I would like to reiterate here:
• Taking a course with a professor who makes learning exciting
• Working with professors who care about students personally
• Finding a mentor who encourages students to pursue personal goals
• Working on a project across several semesters
• Participating in an internship that applies classroom learning
• Being active in extracurricular activities
Students who benefit most from college, including first-generation and traditionally underserved students, are those who are most engaged in class and out, taking full advantage of their college’s opportunities and resources. And finally, if we know that what students do in college matters more than where they went and that engagement in their college community is central to their success, it is critical to help our students understand what matters to them first, their more emotional preferences, before launching into the college process. I remind my students daily that the college process is supposed to be fun and exciting and that it doesn’t have to be overwhelming when they think more deeply about why they’re going and what they’ll do once they are there.