Can’t take the SATs/ACTs this summer? Your spikeview profile can help pick up the slack!
The current public health crisis has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another. Social distancing policies have forced us to find other ways to connect and socialize. Folks who were technologically challenged have flocked to online platforms like Zoom in order to stay sane. A Mutual Aid network in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood called Bed-Stuy Strong started using white-collar business platforms like Slack to connect its residents and create workflows to better organize. For education, The World Economic Forum estimates that “Globally, over 1.2 billion children are out of the classroom, as schools and educators have rapidly transitioned to e-learning platforms. While the results are mixed in terms of the effectiveness of these e-learning platforms, schools and educators have acted admirably to adapt to such a sudden and unprecedented transition. Regardless as to when society gets back to “normal”, this sudden shift to online discourse has collectively given us a crash course in digital platforms, and it’s never been a better time to use new online platforms like spikeview to connect with other like-minded students and find interest-aligned opportunities.
As a college admissions advisor, I’m constantly looking for new ways to get my students involved and active outside of the classroom. During this crisis, I’ve encouraged my students to use spikeview to help them find new online summer opportunities, organize new clubs, and keep teachers and counselors apprised of any updates in their accomplishments.
Discover new opportunities
One of the most useful features that spikeview offers students is the ability to visualize and organize their “spike”. From an admissions perspective, the “well-rounded” approach is a great way to get ignored, and leaning into one or two extracurricular or academic “spikes” is the best strategy to help stand out. spikeview helps students lean into their interests by connecting students with new opportunities (summer programs, internships, competitions, and online clubs). It helps them not only organize their extracurricular profile, but also to enhance it. The platform also suggests interesting articles for users based on their profile, helping them to also get better educated in their fields of interest. By looking at the student’s spikeview profile and recommending quality opportunities to them based on their interests, the platform is helping students to organically support a winning admissions strategy.
Find other student leaders to start clubs
One of the major challenges of starting an online club is really getting to know the people that you meet online. While chat functions allow students to talk about interests and goals, you can’t really get to know another student’s work ethic and commitment. But the spikeview platform does more than help students find each other and chat. The spikeview profile is itself, a digital resume that can be shared directly through the platform. Once shared with another student, it gives context to their interest in your club/organization and can help vet other students online. Without having to add a number of limiting steps to the organizing process, spikeview allows students to make better decisions with who they’re aligning themselves within a new venture.
Share new accomplishments with educators
In the admissions process, teacher and counselor recommendations are quite important to corroborate what type of student an applicant is. While recommendations are up to the teachers and counselors to write, students and parents do have a responsibility to make sure that these educators know exactly what a student has accomplished so that they can write a well-informed recommendation. Current juniors/rising seniors, in particular, should be thinking about who they’re asking for recommendations and how they’re going to update them on what they’ve done, especially outside of the classroom.
The current public health crisis has pushed classrooms online, and there’s oftentimes a lack of meaningful student/teacher interaction that allows teachers to really get to know their students. And while a resume does help to bridge this gap, resumes are limited in the amount of context they can give to a student’s accomplishments, and it’s hard to make clear what a student’s spike may be. Through a spikeview profile, educators get a more comprehensive view of their student’s admissions spike and, therefore, can plan their recommendation to better synergize with the overall message a student is trying to convey. It’s easy to digitally share a student’s profile with an educator and students can even choose between two different formats: the standard, “linear view” or the more stylized “presentation view”.
We’re seeing innovation happening all around us: from the brave men and women at the front lines fighting this epidemic to our leaders in education. While this seemingly endless quarantine seems like a great excuse for students to take a break from their normal extracurricular achievement, the students that get innovative and leverage technology to affect change, even from the comfort of their homes, are going to be rewarded in the admissions process down the line. More students are flocking to online communities like spikeview every day, and this paradigm shift isn’t reversing course anytime soon.
