We are excited to announce that the Corsava Counselor Café is now live! We have also added features that allow your students to share impressions of those characteristics that matter most at each of the colleges on their list. “Browse Cards” also got an upgrade, so you will want to check out these features in What’s New.
We now have thousands of students and counselors around the world using Corsava, and the feedback has been tremendous. We hear stories of students in all settings engaging in the college process in a positive way. Your feedback has helped us build in lots of innovative features, with more on the way. Our small, passionate team has been laser-focused on the development of new features to help you in your work. Most importantly, we continue to think about creative, fun tools to engage your students and are testing completely new ways to help improve the often stressful process of college counseling.
What has driven us throughout the development process is the fact that we need innovation to impact an industry that has become overwhelming for so many of our students and their families. There is growing pressure from those who are not stakeholders in the process to prey on students and reduce the role of the college counselor. Our hope is that with counselors everywhere working together to support one another, we can create a positive, supportive, and invaluable resource for us all.
Counselor Café
The Café allows counselors to explore college criteria and see which match a student’s preferences. After a student completes a card sort, the Café is the perfect place to explore options without having to log into multiple platforms, go through guidebooks, or check scattered notes. The Café allows counselors to anonymously share feedback with colleagues, as well as keep private notes about colleges and students.
Mockup of the page where counselors enter their impressions
As we launch, we have over 4000 notes and almost 12,000 impressions of colleges added to the earlier beta version of the Café, thanks to our outstanding team of early adopters! The Café allows you to search notes, impressions, and research for particular colleges and filter your searches by category, card name, and college. You can also sort individual college cards by the level of overall counselor impressions.
How many times have you written notes about colleges or programs on scraps of paper or on your phone, never to retrieve them again. We built the Café to make it easy to add your impressions, notes, and resources quickly. Your notes can be shared anonymously or kept private; that is up to you. Whether you just toured a college, heard tips from other counselors at conferences, collaborated with colleagues, or met with admissions representatives when they were in town, you can easily access the Café online and add this information in one place. And with other counselors doing the same, the power of our collective knowledge and impressions will build more and more knowledge into the Café so that we will can make better recommendations for students’ lists—colleges that meet their deeper preferences. As the information grows, by exploring this shared knowledge, counselors will discover colleges they may never have considered. Imagine the potential as counselors and students add their impressions of each card at individual colleges and we start to discover consistent patterns in our expertise.
The Café is already full of impressions, notes, and resources for specific colleges, and this will continue to grow as we all share our knowledge both regionally and nationally. Now that counselors have a central location to go to, we can start building enough of our impressions so that recommendations of specific colleges can be made as we build students lists.
The Café is a private network of counselors in high schools and community-based organizations, as well as independent educational consultants. Access will be granted after a review process and pledging to our honor code. This will help us maintain the integrity of the information being added and support our goal to create a positive place to share reliable resources and trustworthy information. To request access to the Café, you must already have a Corsava account set up. You can watch a video about how students set up their accounts here.
First, make sure to update your account information to include your organization’s website and affiliation.
Log in to Corsava, click your name in the top right side of the page, and hit the “edit” button.
Click the “Café” menu button to open the summary page and choose “Select Eligibility Access” to see if you have pre-authorization to access the Café.
If pre-approved, the Honor Code page will open for you to review and pledge. If not, you can select the “Request Access” button, and we will be notified of your request.
You will receive an email once we review your account and will be able to access the Café after we verify your affiliation.
The strict onboarding process and Honor Code helps to maintain the integrity of the information we all share.
We are a group of counselors from all parts of the world, with talents and collective knowledge that when combined will be powerful. As the information continues to grow in the Café, counselors will have access to information on colleges they might not have considered and can share their feedback and impressions with others to make all of our work better. If we can share this reliable knowledge that we have built over the years and make it quick and easy (and fun!) to access, we'll save ourselves so much time and reduce the stress that comes with the massive amount of unreliable information coming at us from so many directions. Now counselors in underserved high schools, those with large caseloads, those exploring colleges in areas they are not familiar with, or those new to counseling will have access to trustworthy information.
Every counselor has something to bring to the table, and by using this collective knowledge, we can have another tool to help students make informed decisions as they go through the college exploration and final selection process. So jump in and explore what is there and feel free to add your impressions, notes, and resources, either shared or private; make this your own!
Student Give Their College Impressions
Your students now have access to many new features through their Corsava accounts. As students identify their preferences and then focus on colleges that are potentially going to be a good fit, adding their impressions of these college features will allow them to make a more informed decision when the time comes. Once they have completed a sort, you and/or your students can add colleges to their list, and students can provide their impressions and notes about particular colleges. Students can keep their notes private or share them with you so you can view them through your account.
If your student completed a hardcopy sort and you entered their results, make sure they set up their own account so they can start providing feedback and you can view their information. You can do this by going to the “My Students” page and sending them an invitation. If they completed an online sort, their account is already set up and will be tied to yours so that you can view their feedback and impressions. Once they provide their impressions of their “Must Have” and “Would Be Nice” cards for their individual colleges, an overall student rating will appear, allowing them to compare each college based on their deeper preferences. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to help your students dig deeper into each of the colleges on their list, while also keeping you in the loop!
Make sure that students heading out to visit colleges this spring do a sort first and then add specific colleges to their list so their impressions can be inserted. If your students cannot visit colleges, this is a great tool for helping them research college features that are important to them. These student impressions are an invaluable tool when the time comes to write that “why this college” essay, to interview, or to chat with an admissions rep at their high school or college fair. Your students will have much more focused responses that
Student Corsava accounts with our newly added college impression features are a great self-help tool. Students can discuss their preferences with their counselor or have their counselor view the results they have entered on their own. Additionally, counselors with large caseloads can simply assign the sort with the link from their accounts and have their students follow up with independent research and then note their impressions.
I am looking forward to seeing what my students think of the colleges on their list in an organized and targeted way as I view their impressions, their shared notes, and how their “Must Have” and “Would Be Nice” preferences line up with their list. My guess is that a lot more of them will pick up their phones and tap to select a rating while on campus or at home doing research, giving me real-time feedback and their families another opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of their choices.
Next up
We are busy creating more videos, so keep an eye out for these in the weeks ahead.