A lot has been going on at Corsava as the school year comes to a close, and an update is overdue! Let’s start with an exciting new feature in the Corsava Café.
Corsava Café
I have always been a map geek. As I pondered ways to make the Café data more visual and pull the curtain back on all the counselor and student impressions that are building, an interactive map just seemed like the perfect platform to help us all view and add impressions and shared notes. You can now quickly determine if impressions have been added for individual colleges and also access the overall counselor and student score.
Each college has a color-coded pin to show which colleges have had more than five counselors give impressions (green), those with at least one set of impressions (yellow), and those that have none (red). I am excited that it is now live, and my hope is that all of us can take some time to make those red colleges see the love with at least some counselor impressions, and those yellow colleges turn green! Once you click on a pin on the map, the college’s profile page with all of the cards will appear. You will see each card with stars available for your impressions, an overall rating for each card at that particular college, and, if notes are available, the Impression Notes box icon in red.
We have a great team of over 135 counselors who have signed the Honor Code and have been granted access to the Café based on their experience and interest in building and using this tool. These are people with vision, people who have connected the dots and see the future value of counselors from every corner of the country building knowledge and sharing information. More impressions will strengthen our counselor knowledge, as our collective impressions will be more powerful, just like those restaurant ratings that come in handy in any search for a better night out. The Café is the only place that allows counselors to build collective impressions in a systemized and sustainable way, continuing to grow and become more powerful the more we share. I like the idea of having a trusted medium to manage our counselor impressions over time.
New Cards
Thanks to your feedback, we added five new cards to the Café. The first is College and Admissions Update. I’m really excited about this one because it is the equivalent of the student Campus Information Session card and is the counselors’ way to share the great information we often get during college visits or when meeting with college admissions representatives. The second is Overall Campus Impression, that gut feeling we get when we visit a campus. These are both good places for notes as well as impressions. As a reminder, the Café defaults to “private” for notes, so remember to toggle to “shared” if you want fellow counselors to be able to view your notes on any card. We counselors all have private information we know will help us in our list-building but that we aren’t always comfortable sharing. Not to worry. Those notes you add that are “private” are just that, as we all want to make sure they remain that way.
The other three new cards tie in well with the student impressions and deal specifically with the features that can be so important when we do our research and support our students. These include College Social Media, College Website, and Campus Tour. We know how important these attributes are to students, so giving our own impressions will help us understand not only what our fellow counselors think, but also the differences in the overall score of each when it comes to students versus counselors since they come from a different generational perspective.
Student Impressions
As our students continue to sort Corsava cards and build their own impressions, we will all be building data about each card at each college over time. Patterns will arise as more and more impressions are provided and notes added. That takes time, but we are on our way, and it is exciting to finally see an alternative to the rankings we are having to deal with in our work every day. What makes the Café powerful is that these are our own impressions, from the people who meet with the admissions representatives, tour colleges, and, most importantly, get feedback year after year from our students.
Which brings me to students... It is exciting that since we launched the student impression feature, we are seeing students outperforming counselors 5:1 in giving their impressions of colleges! I thought that was a fun fact. Students are sorting cards, adding colleges to their lists, and then giving their impressions of their “Must Have” and “Would Be Nice” cards at each of their colleges at quite a clip. Go students! You can see the overall college impression score for students at specific colleges as well as the overall student scores for specific cards in the Café. If your students have added impressions for the colleges on their list, you can view them in your Corsava account on the student’s profile page.
Want to be a part of the Café?
If you are using Corsava, or soon will be, and would like to become a part of the Café, please request access by logging into your account and clicking on the Café icon. You will then be guided through the steps to request access and read and sign the Honor Code.
Have a great summer, everyone!