Organize Your Data!
If you’re a parent of a high school aged student, you know the drill. AP courses, SAT subject tests, ACT prep courses, oboe lessons, track meets, math competitions, summer programs, campus visits – the list of things to keep track of for college admissions can be overwhelming. But admissions officers don’t just want a laundry list of accomplishments. These data points, these accomplishments, need to tell a cohesive and compelling story as to why a student wants to go to a certain college or why they want to pursue a particular career.
The simplest and most powerful platform to collate and present this data is spikeview. Not only does it help organize and present your child’s multifaceted skills and expertise, it helps them discover other unique opportunities based on their interests, like internships, summer programs, and leadership/community roles. Spikeview also helps professionals like me to work more effectively with our students.
I’ve been in the test prep and college consulting field for almost a decade, and I can tell you that most of the work that we do revolves around organization and communication. We help students collate resumes to help address a major issue in the admissions process: imperfect information. Teachers and guidance counselors have no idea what students are doing outside of the classroom, and even if they do, they have little context as to how important or impactful these activities are. But it’s not enough to just show a resume to a teacher or counselor for a recommendation. The student needs to sit down, meet with the teacher, and explain why they pursued this extracurricular opportunity and how it connects to their long-term goals. Spikeview is able to help with all of these things. Through a streamlined app that’s intuitive and comprehensive, students can present a narrative that makes these connections and effectively presents the full narrative.
As an educational consultant or parent, it’s also our job to communicate to our student’s key educators about what the student is passionate about and how it connects to the work that they’ve done. Does Jimmy’s math teacher know about his programming skills? Or his perfect Math SAT score? His interests in entrepreneurship? Does his guidance counselor know just how good he is at the piano? Without knowing the full picture, it’s impossible for these educators to give effective guidance on the admissions process, and while a resume helps to address this lack of information, it lacks a narrative. This has been a fundamental gap in the admissions process and spikeview addresses this gap.
At the Admissions Angle, we seek out and leverage any technology or tool we can find to help organize our work and make us more efficient. The first step in working with any student is to understand everything about them as a student and as a person. We go through a number of meetings and interviews to get to know the student and identify key interests or accomplishments that we can use in the admissions process, which can be difficult when the students themselves don’t know the value of their own interests and activities and oftentimes, neglect to tell us valuable information.
This fragmentation of a student’s accomplishments and interests is our primary barrier to providing effective advice, so when we heard about spikeview, we were immediately interested not only in its potential use internally between consultants, but also in facilitating the communication of a student’s narrative to the educators in their lives. A narrative that is clearly geared towards educational or professional success.
Own your narrative today by downloading the spikeview app from Google Play or the AppStore.
