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College Match

Achieve your Dreams

LOCATING SPARKS: value & uniqueness

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Part 1, Ch. 2
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What are the sparks, strengths and passions that ignite a fire of transformative growth for your student?
If you’d like help finding out, read on!

COLLEGES GET THOUSANDS of applications each year, and it’s their job to decide whose life stories are most compelling and most deserving of acceptance. Admissions officers get a fleeting glimpse of who your child really is. They see test scores and grades. They note the extracurriculars and they read the essays. They take into consideration the experiences and achievements, and they make a story about who your child is.The challenge is that after reading thousands of applications, admissions officers see the same roles played out over and over. The stories blend into repeated types, none of which stand out. Therefore, the first thing College Match staff do when we meet with students is to find out what they care about most, what they’ve excelled at, and what has given them a sense of pride.

Our goal is to locate the sparks, strengths, and passions that can ignite a fire of transformative growth. the sooner students grasp these sparks, the sooner they know who they are and what they need to pursue in order to get what they want in life.

Many students learn to survive high school by conforming to other people’s expectations, by fitting the molds and labels that will get them the approval and sense of value they seek. From an admissions standpoint, conforming is the opposite of what a student wants to do. Colleges look for students who know who they are and what they love. If a young person spends their time trying to conform, standing out in the application process is very hard to do.

It’s hard to be unique, and in certain environments—where young people face bullying or intimidation—being different can seem downright scary. Yet individuality is the key to getting into the right college and thriving thereafter. That’s why your child needs your support, to make sure he catches his sparks.

As admissions consultants, we often take the role of guiding students toward their strengths as the first steps in the journey to college. In addition to working with your child to discover his unique talents and interests, it’s helpful to meet with mentors, teachers, coaches, counselors and other adults your student admires.

Exercise 1: Finding the Sparks

Goal: To help students recognize their favorite growth experiences, and where they get a strong sense of pride.

Instructions: Working with your child, discuss the experiences, activities, teams, clubs, hobbies, that have given your child the greatest sense of satisfaction. For each experience, explore what these experiences offered in terms of skills, lessons learned, and feats accomplished.

Exercise 2: Mentor Interviews

Goal: To create mentor connections to support of your child’s unique talents and interests.

Instructions: Make time to meet with your child’s favorite mentors, (teachers, coaches, counselors, employers, etc.) Interview them to find out what they feel are your child’s strengths and talents, and where they see opportunities for your child to grow.

BRAND U –  the path ahead

  • Finding the transformative experiences to instill a sense of vision and purpose for the future (FIRE)
  • Developing a strong vision for the future that will guide your child through the college selection process (VISION)
  • Creating the Brand statement that conveys the unique value your child o ers a college (BRAND)

Thank you for tuning in, next time we start on Part II: FIRE!

collegematchus.com

A Hopes & Dreams exercise; & How to Think like an Admissions Officer

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Continuing from the last blog post… (2 sections today)

An Exercise:

Have you ever written down (whether on paper or typed) your dreams for your student/child? Here’s your chance! We’ll get to that in just a sec….

Brand U offers parents and students a fun and rewarding collaboration that will help students maximize their college experience and enter the real world with poise and momentum.

We begin this collaboration by exploring what your hopes and intentions are for the journey ahead. Take the time to express to your hopes for your child, and listen closely to what your child envisions, observing ways you can lend support.

The Exercise: Hopes & Intentions (30 minutes)

Goal: To explore your hopes and intentions for the journey your child will take into adulthood.

Instructions: Write all your hopes and dreams for your student, for college, and after college. How do you imagine your child leading a happy and fulfilled life in the decades to come? Write whatever comes to mind.

Have you thought about sharing this with your student/child? How did they respond?

Have you asked them if they’ve written down theirs yet?  Did they share them with you? 

(excerpt from BRAND U)  Think Like An Admissions Officer – Uniqueness

You’re an admissions officer at a major university. For three very intense months, you spend somewhere between six and twelve hours each day reading applications—hundreds of them—from nice, well-meaning kids, and you have somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes to decide their fate.

In that time, you have to figure out who the student is, what makes her special, and what unique value she can o er the university. Unfortunately, as you flip through the files, you find the same molds repeating themselves, an endless succession of honors students and varsity athletes, math club members and science team leaders, all with good track records, but with little to help you distinguish what’s special.

Your vision blurs. You yawn, stretch, and toss another file into the 50/50 pile.
You reach for another, wondering how much more you can take, when suddenly, you wake from your stupor, reading about a student with unique promise—an unusual combination of passion and talent who has constructed a rock-solid picture of who she is, what she loves, and what she wants out of life.

Her unique experience will add value to your university in ways that no other student can, and her knowledge about your school proves how vested she is in creating her future. You feel a tingling, a thrill of pride as you place her in the acceptance pile, giving her a springboard into a promising future.

It’s moments like these that make the job worthwhile.

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Thanks for tuning in!

Next time we move onto Part 2 from the BRAND U book – ”LOCATING SPARKS: Value and Uniqueness”

www.collegematchus.com

PARENTS – this section is for you

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This next excerpt from ”BRAND U – 4 steps to the College of Your Dreams” talks about what forms the basis for the 4 steps.

After working closely with parents for close to two decades, I’ve seen the effort and sacrifice that comes with raising a child. Trough every high and low of childhood, you’ve felt the joy of your child’s transformations—from first smiles and first words to the first days of kindergarten, elementary school, and junior high—all with the devotion of helping your student thrive.

That is the spirit that inspires this book.

Love and hard work leads us to the greatest transformation of all, the gateway into adulthood: college. To get there, kids need help. Even the most independent adolescents need guidance and perspective. As a parent, you’ve seen the challenges and pitfalls of life. You know success stories of those who develop their talents and passions, and you know the trials of those who don’t.

In the sections that follow, we’ll guide you through the process of preparing your student for college selection, admissions and beyond, working in a step-by-step collaboration that will empower your student to nourish through the challenges to come.

BRAND U -the path ahead

SPARKS—We help your child find his or her unique talents and interests to get excited about the process ahead.

FIRE—We ignite the inspiration, helping your child find unique and transformative experiences that will instill a vision and purpose for the future.

VISION—We navigate the complex process of college selection to pinpoint the undergraduate experience that matches your child’s values, hopes, and ambitions, and offers the life he or she wants to have.

BRAND—We empower you through the admissions process with the time-tested tool that stokes the re of ambition and conveys to admissions officers how your student offers a unique value that few other students can.

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Next time, ”Creating SPARKS – the Need for Method”.

Thanks for tuning in!

CollegeMatchUS.com

2 Ways to Approach College – The Typical Approach to College

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This post will start out by discussing Two Approaches to College – The Typical Approach and then in the subsequent post we’ll discuss the BRAND U approach.

For most students, the ”typical” college approach consists of the next 4 steps or parts, here’s a graphic to help visualize this and then each part will be discussed in brief immediately below:

Effort Line vs the Admissions Hurdle
Effort Line vs the Admissions Hurdle

Part I:
Too few students find and embrace their core interests and talents, and as a result, end up choosing extracurriculars by conformity, to please peers, parents, or coaches.

Part II:
Students pursue activities and clubs out of a sense of duty, because they have to. Since these e orts feel tedious, students waste valuable time avoiding activities they don’t enjoy instead of pursuing what they love doing. Consequently, many students get to the college selection process with no real sense of what their strongest skills and passions are.

Part III:
College selection feels overwhelming. As a result, parents and students look to superficials like magazine rankings, sports games, and party reputation, and make hasty choices that lead to poor college matches. Poor college matches lead to financial waste and personal frustration as students drop out, transfer, or fail to use their education to its fullest.

Part IV:
Applications get filled out without a strategy. Students send in their applications, hoping for the best, not realizing that their applications are just one among thousands. When applications don’t stand out, students get rejected, miss out on scholarship aid, and su er a feeling of disappointment, all of which is completely avoidable with the right strategy… ”

This ”typical” approach most students take has much to be desired and that’s putting it mildly. Is this what you’ve been doing? There is still time to turn that around!

In our next blog post we’ll discuss the BRAND U approach which will contrast how much more strategic, focused and RESULTS-ORIENTED it is compared to the ”typical” approach we just discussed.

Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

-College Match

www.collegematchus.com

College Admissions: Top 5 Unusual Colleges in USA

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Are you bored with the same ol’ same ol’?  Or are you simply interested in doing something totally different and venturing into completely unknown space? If so, one of these 5 colleges may be the perfect college match for you!

Monday, June 13, 2016

by Cristiana Quinn, GoLocalProv College Admissions Expert

PHOTO: Deep Springs.edu

Are college tours and info sessions leaving you bored and listless? Do you feel like the campuses and curricula are all pretty much the same? Well here are five colleges that shatter the mold.

They aren’t for the faint of heart or traditionalists, but they do present opportunities rarely found in the realm of higher education:

1. Deep Springs College

Located in the high desert of California, Deep Springs College is home to just 26 students. Although the college intended to adopt co-education three years ago, a lawsuit brought by alumni has blocked women from attending to date. The college runs a cattle herd and an alfalfa hay farming operation. Self-governance is a critical part of the Deep Springs educational program and students determine policies on admissions, curriculum, and faculty hiring. Tuition, room, and board are not charged, but students work at least 20 hours a week on the ranch or in positions related to the college and community. In a given semester, you could find yourself as cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy or feedman. For students looking for the ultimate ranching experience while earning a college degree, Deep Springs is a rare opportunity. All accepted students are given a scholarship to cover tuition, room and board.

2. St. John’s College

St. John’s College boasts two campuses in equally stunning settings: Santa Fe and Annapolis. Each location enrolls about 450 students. Textbooks, lectures, and examinations are shunned, in favor of a series of manuals and classroom discussions. The Great Books program was adopted in 1937, and demands that students read and discuss the works of many of Western civilization’s most prominent contributors to philosophy, theology, mathematics, science, music, poetry, and literature. Intensely cerebral, St. John’s is the perfect fit for students interested in a rigorous core curriculum focused on the classics.

3. College of the Atlantic

Set amidst the beauty of Maine, College of the Atlantic has just 350 students. The school’s curriculum is based on human ecology, and all freshmen are required to take an introductory core course on the topic. Other requirements include Environmental Studies, Arts and Design, Human Studies, Quantitative Reasoning History and Writing. COA students are often knee deep in experiential learning and the frigid Maine waters during their classes. The intention is for students to explore ideas from different disciplines and to construct their own understanding of human ecology. All students complete a term-long senior project and essay in their final year, in addition to a mandatory internship. COA is a great college for students who embrace a rural, coastal environment with a small student body and hands-on learning.

4. Marlboro College

Located in Vermont, Marlboro College is home to a group of 300 eclectic students. A recent freshman class included: two military veterans, nine homeschoolers, two world-class pianists and composers, a trained firefighter and EMT, a beekeeper, a Taekwondo black belt, a hitchhiker of 5,000 miles, and a Civil War re-enactor. The mission of the school is to produce clear thinkers and writers. Students create their own curricula with the oversight of a professor and are given the freedom to study just about any topic. The school is governed in a town meeting style, and student votes hold the same weight as faculty votes. Marlboro is the perfect environment for students who thrive in a small school with no core curriculum and have an environmental, artistic or writing flare.

5. Olin College of Engineering

Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts is a shining example of new wave education with a brick and mortar presence. Although Olin was founded in 2002 and has just 350 students, it now rivals MIT and CalTech in the engineering rankings. Olin disregarded past frameworks for engineering education and instead has sought to create a new type of learning that is project based and free from the confines of traditional engineering cobwebs. This mission extends beyond the classroom to residential life where social skills are nurtured and leadership is emphasized. Olin students race robotic sailing teams, travel to West Africa to help empower women entrepreneurs and design gadgets that allow seniors to get out of their cars more easily. It’s a unique place where learning means doing, every day or the week. All accepted students are granted a scholarship that covers half of their tuition for four years, which makes it among the most affordable, top-rated technical institutions in the U.S.

by Cristiana Quinn