Category: University

Originally posted on July 31, 2016 @ 9:00 am

In this final post in my series reflecting on my first years experience of setting up a University & Careers guidance program I write about working with colleagues, students and their parents.

Giving advice 

Advising students is the central role of any guidance counselor, and for me actually represents the biggest challenge of the job. My background is as a science teacher having been a Head of Biology at my previous school and working with students in the ways required of a guidance counselor, while not entirely new to me certainly present a challenge for my style. I suppose that stepping into this role has been a major catalyst in growing my thinking about education in general. There have been some other factors, like the push from the IB for the integration of ATLS into teaching that have got me reflecting recently on the dynamic of learner-teacher and how this should be manifested in my own practice. I intend to write more on this soon, I just hope that it is possible for the leopard to change its spots.

Stepping into the shoes of guidance counseling I had to become very aware of my own preconceptions and prejudicies that I have carried with me from my own experience, and put these too one side. Guidance isn’t about telling students what you think is best for them in terms of your own limited understanding of where they are at and what options you think are better than others. It is much more about conversation, gaining trust and advocating for the student in what can be a very difficult time for them. They are adults and yet not quite, and whilst dealing with a lot Biological adjustments they can be going through some of the most pressured situations academically, socially and at home.

Looking back it seems as though the skills that I was introduced to and began to learn through Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and meditation such as paying attention in the moment and bringing awareness to sensations, feelings and thoughts could not have come at a better time. They prepared me to be aware of the “baggage” in terms of my own ideas/prejudice that I was initially bringing to the role, as well as my tendancy to feel like the more that I talked at a student the better at counseling them I was.

Over this year I have come to see the role as more about questioning, about striving to build that authentic relationship with a student to help them to begin to articulate their own motivations, thoughts, worries and perceptions. Doing this will help them to bring more awareness to their own search for the right next step for themselves.

I still have a long way to go to fully develop the questioning and listening skills required to do this job well but I have made a start and I am aware that this is an area for improvement for me not just in counseling but in my teaching practice in general, as I strive to give kids the tools be become aware life-long learners in their own lives.

The actual practice of counseling comes on a cycle and this year because we had no grade 12 I was able to spend a lot of time working closely with our grade 11s in the first term, a luxury that I will not have next year as my teaching load increases and grade 12 comes through for the first time.

The hardest part was having the knowledge of different universities and courses, with which to advise my students and help them prepare their research and build their lists. None of my students are applying to just one country, and my knowledge was fairly limited to the UK and fairly prejudicial concerning what I knew about that system. This was a major driver for me to lobby the management at school about the need to get a system in place to help students and parents do their research. At this first stage the net needs to be cast quite wide, results can always be removed but they can be hard to find! This is why I opted for BridgeU, they offered a very competitive price for their services but they were also truly global unlike some of the other systems available and their offering comes with a calendar of when to work on the various projects with students, meaning that planning the delivery of particular interventions and meetings with students was simplified. I have posted about BridgeU here and here.

Working with your community

This year I certainly learn’t a lot about internal and external communication within a school environment this year and a lot about parents, partly because I became one myself, a process that had enabled me to empathise much more with parents but also because I have been working so much more closely with them.

Working with parents in this role is tricky one because, putting it bluntly, they pay the fees. This is a thought that I have struggled with this year.In a fee-paying school that runs as a business i.e. to make sales and profit, what are you selling? Who are the clients? the parents or the students?

If your child needs life saving treatment and you out them in a private hospital, you pay the hospital to pay the doctors to work in the interests of saving your child’s life. The hospital is run as a business to make a profit and it is selling its services. The doctors work for the child in the sense that they are saving this individuals life, not for the parent. You would have to be an idiot or mentally ill to think that as a parent, you had the skills and training to save your child’s life in this instance.

Things are much the same in a school like ours but sometimes parents do think that they have the skills and expertise and in my experience much more ready to challenge yours. There are many reasons for this, the communal respect that the teaching profession holds not being a minor reason but I am mindful of the Dunning-Kruger affect which states “The less people know the more the think they know”. This is a measurable effect and has been demonstrated in a few studies.

This is all well and good in work that is obviously highly skilled and one that requires a lot of expertise and training. But can be the same be said of guidance counseling or teaching? Well my experience this year would tell me that yes it can. Obviously to teach well requires years of experience for most people; I’ve been doing it for eight years and I am still along way from mastering it. For counseling the same is true. To understand how to mentor and question to serve students as a guide, as well as become an expert at the changing admissions landscape for several countries not just the UK or the US requires years and years of expertise. Unfortunately some parents that I have come across don’t seem to realise this. Speculation on the reasons why could fill another blog post. The fact is these are skilled professions and educating parents  suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect can present a real challenge to the work of the counselor.

When I first start this work, I was unsure of how to handle this dynamic and was a trifle fearful of upsetting the parents as the fee payers. I guess part of this can be solved by having trust that your senior management will back you and trust you to know your job.

When I first started this role my Head told me that he didn’t rate the counselor in a previous school. They said that the counselor was telling students what they could achieve but telling them not to apply to the “name” schools. In this one year I have come to question this attitude from that Head, perhaps they too were suffering from Dunning-Kruger, but also because I firmly believe that nobody should be telling the kids what they can and can’t do. If I have learned one thing advising isn’t about telling, its about guiding and advocating for students. Even as a dad to a one year old daughter I don’t want to be telling her she has to do something when she is older, I don’t want to have preconcieved ideas about that. Instead I hope to be able to guide her to follow her interests and model the hard work that she will need to put in to achieve whatever she wants. Financially I am already planning to allow her to have the opportunities that she wants to pursue.

I am beginning to have more trust in myself and my convictions but I also recognise that part of this process is about also trying to mentor the parents as well as the students to help them through this confusing and difficult terrain.

One aspect that needs further workis communication with parents. I was astounded by a conversation I had with a parent this year who, after one of the university presentations commented on how it was a shame that not more of the parents were there, going on to say that she had spoken to another parent that morning who had no idea that this event was taking place.

To put this in context, I had sent a letter out to parents, posted a message on ManageBac, put it on the ManageBac calendar, put an announcement in homeroom and put it in the school newsletter.

The parent continued to tell me that none of the parents use ManageBac, the schools curriculum and communication platform, before suggesting that I set up a What’sApp group instead to let the parents know. I was polite and maintained composure but inside I was really riled by this conversation.

I wonder whether we need some communication routines to be developed within the school? And whether our parents need to be educated a little more about taking responsibility for reading the information schools send out? Another parent told me how she was annoyed when teachers didn’t immediately respond to her emails.

Again this is a topic for another blog post I suppose but I am still wondering about where the buck stops? Obviously as a school we need to get more intelligent about the way we communicate with parents and communicating the expectations that we have of parents to keep up to date with school news but on the other hand teachers and staff working with pupils shouldn’t be expected constantly find new ways to communicate with parents and reinvent the wheel. For one thing it just wastes time, time that is better spent in other ways like reflecting on practice, working with students, planning etc. The list goes on.

Any solutions? Answers on a post card please.

Careers Day

Originally posted on July 24, 2016 @ 9:00 am

This is the second post in a series of four dealing with my experience in setting up a university and careers counseling department in a start-up school in the school year 2015-16. At the time I had little background in this area. The first post covers how I approached the resources I would need and this post looks at building relationships with external agencies and institutions, the next post deals with essential registrations that need to take place when setting up your department.

Putting the School on the map pt 1: Building Relationships

Aside from the getting materials into place and organising them which has been an ongoing activity throughout the year the next big task I felt that needed to be started was that of contacting and communicating with admissions representatives and student recruitment representatives. It was immediately obvious to me that the guidance office had an important role in putting our school on the map from a university admissions perspective. We needed to market oursleves to these institutions because universities who knew we were here would be more likely to visit us when they were in the area on European recruitment drives or attending conferences. Having more university visits, I also felt was essential for building parent confidence in us and demonstrating that the school was taking guidance of students seriously.

I began this process before the summer holidays in fact now that I think of it. I was first introduced via a colleague at work to an marketing executive for Laureate Education who own both Glion Institute of Higher Education and Les Roches. This person put me in touch with Glion and I arranged my first site visit to these campuses on the day before the 2015-16 academic year started.

From there I was quick to respond to any emails that I received from university professionals who were interested in visiting our campus. This was particularly challenging. I have already mentioned in this post about receiving hundreds of emails from outside agencies all demanding your time. Part of the job requires an ability to sift the worthwhile from the less worthy. The fifteen minute inbox technique that I was introduced to in on of our inset days has proved especially useful here. Initially I was open to most universities that contacted me. During the course of this first year, due purely to email, I had visits from:

• Geneva Business School
• Esade
• EHL
• IE
• Bocconi
• Karl Benz School of Engineering
• Webster – Geneva
• Saint Louis – Madrid
• John Cabot – Rome
• Franklin – Lugano

At the time our school was going through and still is going through accreditation with the council of international schools (CIS). CIS run a Forum on Higher Education and last year this was held in Edinburgh; next years is in Barcelona. The International Baccalaureate also run a Higher Education Symposium and in addition there is the IACAC Annual Conference.

I wasn’t sure which of these would be most appropriate for a new college counselor and which would be the most effective in helping me support students. To help make the decision I sought other counselors views through a medium which has been incredibly helpful in getting questions answered: Facebook.

On FB there are three groups that I have found particularly useful. The first I joined and was put onto by my DP Coordinator is the IB Counselors, Coordinators and University Relations Group, the second is the UCAS Advisers Group and the third is the International Association for College Admission Counseling Group which you can only join as a member of IACAC.

Each of these groups has been extremely useful in getting answers to rookie questions and for clarifying information. There are loads of counselors and university representatives on these groups who are more than willing to share and support.

I first used these groups with questions about the advice that the DP coordinator and I were giving to the grade 10s last year as they finalised their DP options but the advice that I got regarding conferences was that the IB symposium was largely useless for someone in my position, especially as I already knew the IB having taught Biology DP for eight years. I was advised to aim for the CIS forum or the IACAC conference.

I eventually decided to go to the CIS forum as we believed that as a school it would be better suited to our needs.

I found the CIS forum incredibly useful both for the chance to talk about the processes of college counseling with experience colleagues and attend some very insightful workshops that covered the mechanics of applying for Engineering courses or applying to study in Canada, but also for the chance to network and meet university representatives. At this event I deliberately targeted American Universities as these are the institutions that I personally know the least about and are also the furthest away; until we have larger numbers of students I think it will be doubtful that I will be heading out to the US on a work trip. I did also spend some time talking with UK and Canadian Universities and learned about the CIS UK Universities European Tour. I was able to make contact with the organiser of this so that our school would be contacted in future when these Universities were visiting.

Many of the people I met were surprised that my education group had a school in Switzerland; they had come across our campuses in Dubai. Following on from this event I made useful contacts that were useful in getting our school on the map so to speak. A  number of conversation subsequent to this event led to me making connections with QMUL and RHUL, both of which I subsequently visited when in London for some UCAS training and one of which ended up coming out to visit us as part of our first “future-you” festival the careers event that I organised in the third term.

The CIS UK Universities tour unfortunately didn’t make it to Switzerland this year due to the events in Brussels in April that shut the airport down for a while.

However CIS did run a college night in Geneva in September which I attended. From all these events I built some excellent connections that our school will take forward and I was directly able to arrange visits from:

• Westiminster College UTAH
• Royal Holloway University of London

Positive relationships with Universities will help to drive more visits to our school, make universities become aware of our school and help us work with universities for the best outcomes for our students, ideally so that they will trust as a school to listen to our recommendations.

When universities visit us I like to show them the school, give them a chance to observe some teaching as well as meet with our students. This side of the role really does take time and effort but it will certainly be worth it in the long run in terms of the outcomes for our students and also to allow parents to have confidence in our ability to advocate for their children.

Building these types of relationships led to me being invited on two counselor fly-ins this year. One of which (to ESADE) I have already blogged about. Another opportunity came up that I wasn’t able to participate in and this was with the Karl Benz school of Engineering.

In the next post I will write about the agencies that your school needs to be registered with including UCAS, The Admissions Testing Service, CollegeBoard, CommonApp and others including the process of supporting students who are applying for Athletic Scholarships in the US.

Originally posted on July 27, 2016 @ 9:00 am

In the third post in this series about my experiences setting up the guidance department at my school I describe which agencies you need to ensure that your school is registered with to support students applying to the UK, US and Canada as well as some information on the Athletic Scholarship system in the US.

Putting the school on the map pt 2: Essential Registrations

The other side of putting the school on the map when setting up the guidance department is to ensure that the school is registered with the various international agencies through which students apply and take tests. In the case of the UK this is UCAS for applications and the Admissions Testing Service for certain specific tests needed for certain tests in the UK. Registration for the latter is not essential as there may be an open centre near your school.

Register with UCAS as an application centre is essential if you have students applying to the UK. You should register as soon as you can and take advantage of all the free training that they offer. They also hold a International Advisers conference in June each year. I haven’t attended it yet but have heard excellent feedback about it and will be attending this academic year.

Be aware that applicants to UK may need to sit additional testing if applying to Oxbridge or for Med/Vet Sci courses etc. All the information is on the UCAS site but you may wish to have your school registered as a test centre for some of these tests.

For applications to the US and Canada and a few other universities students may need to take the SAT or ACT. While you don’t need to register for your school to deliver these tests you can of course at the relevant site. Again however students can take the tests at registered open centres nearby.

What your school will need is a CEEB (College Entrance Exam Board) Code. These are controlled by the college board and schools outside the US can apply for a code by emailing: international@collegeboard.org.

Students will need to give the CEEB code of your school on the CommonApp and on any standardised tests that they make take. In this way you will ensure that any results of these tests will be sent to you as the high school counselor.

For US applications you may also wish to register your school with the CommonApp. It is not immediately obvious as to how you do this but you can do it by registering as a school counselor on the website.

There are many other resources out there that are useful to sign up to but these are the ones that I have come across this year as the essential agencies to ensure that your school is registered with, on top of making sure that your details are in the database of as many admissions officers at as many universities as possible.

Not necessarily “essential” for college applications but certainly very useful to you as a college counselor would be registration of your school with CIS; their forum on Higher Education is very very valuable. In addition I would strongly recommend registering with IACAC. It only costs $50 and you get access to their facebook group (a life line) as well as the Annual conference. I haven’t yet attended but have been assured that it is another excellent resource.

Athletic Scholarships in the US

Finally I had the issue in this first year that one of my students had decided that he wanted to apply for scholarships in the US to play basketball. This area of applying for atheletic scholarships is a whole other minefield but the IACAC Webinar Wednesday and the CIS forum both provided materials that helped me navigate this process. To be clear this student is still in school and so I am not charting a path to success here, merely documenting what it was that I learned about the process of apply for atheletic scholarships in the US during the last academic year, hopefully most of it is correct and I am more than willing to be corrected if it is not, thats how I learn.

There are three federations which support college level sport in the US: The NCAA, NAIA and NJCAA. Different universities and colleges in the US will belong to one of these federations. From what I have worked out this year from my office in a school in Switzerland, it seems to me that the NCAA is premier association, while the NAIA is almost like a second “division” although the NCAA has three divisions, so the NAIA comes below this, while the NJCAA supports sports in two-year US colleges.

Before a student can apply for an athletic scholarship they have to register with one of these bodies. These bodies assess each athletes eligibility for a sport scholarship. If you have a student who is playing a sport  at a high level and is interested in this route then their work for university has to start earlier than most. As a college counselor you probably don’t have the expertise to assess the students sporting ability so its best that starting in G9 or 10 they start speaking to their coach about their suitability for University level sports. They should certainly get themselves on to a summer sports camp at a university in the US where they can be assessed but where they will also be able to get advice from coaches about which federation and which division they should be looking at. Another way to help is to have students go on to the team pages of particular colleges and look at the profiles of the team members that should give you and them a good idea of about what it takes to get into that college’s team in terms of physicality and skill.

Once the student-athlete knows what federation and division they should be aiming for based on advice from coaches they need to register with the divisions eligbility centre. It is the eligibility centre that will give the yes or no for a student to obtain a scholarship not the university.

Students need to begin this process in G9 or G10 and they need to get familiar with the rules as each federation has very specific rules on what qualifies and what doesn’t for athletic scholarships in each sport.

Students should also build a CV that details their academic and their sporting acheievements, film their practices and games and build a profile on Instagram and Youtube or any other social media platform where the coaches they write too once they are eligible can get an idea of the students level.

Originally posted on April 17, 2016 @ 9:00 am

On a rainy Friday morning in Barcelona a group of University Guidance Counsel(l)ors are shepherded onto a executive style bus. We are heading out of Barcelona to Esade’s campus in Santa Cugat, 25km outside of Barcelona. Our hosts are welcoming and warm in juxtaposition to the uncharacteristically cold weather.

Esade are a private but not-for-profit foundation business school in Barcelona that is consistently ranked as one of the best in Europe. For me, as a new guidance couselor, this is the first campus visit/fly-in that I have been invited to and particpated in and it is a very welcome chance for me to chew more ears about my particular predicament that I face at work, as well as network and get under the skin of a non-british university.

As a Brit, educated in British public schools and university I recognise that my appreciation for other Higher Education systems and establishments is somewhat limited. I began this work mindful of my internal Brit-prejudice, and so coming to Esade is a welcome tonic to this.

Esade operate two campuses – their law degree is taught at the Barcelona campus and is taught in Spanish. Their English taught BBA is based in Sant Cugat but they have plans to make all their programs taught in English over the years.

The drive takes about 40 minutes but we are caught up in traffic. I am assured that students can travel into Barcelona by train in under 30 minutes, so students can live in Barcelona and commute into class, but many opt to stay on campus at the purpose built residences.

The campus is charming and understated. The architecture is modern and functional but quite pleasing to look at none the less, and there is a feeling of togetherness on the campus.

The BBA looks like a very interesting option, that appears to be academically rigorous. We are stressed the need for Maths. IB students need to have studied SL Maths at least and A Level students need to have study A2 Math as a minimum for entry. There is an mandatory internship and international exchange program that students have to undertake in the 4th year of their study, that Esade helps its students to access. Teaching is carried out by experienced professionals who still work in business themselves. 270 faculty members are professionals as well.

The students that we speak to and hear from our convincing and impressive. Clearly they have been hand picked from the marketing department but they respond to difficult and testy questions from counselor with calm and laughter. I am particualrly impressed by one student who, when describing his experience in China for his exchange program and internship, is able to deftly demonstrate one of the benefits of this kind of education. His understanding of intercultural subtleties and a tangible demonstration of international-mindedness through his description of life in China as a French national studying in English at a Spanish University, all of which the people he meets have never heard of is applaudable. It is the type of student I hope to create.

The advantages of having an internship as part of your degree aside, Esade has an impressive rate of recruitment from Business. Some business, it seems only recruit from Esade and one other University in Spain. Students are recruited directly into Business and from the marketing it appears that Esade students are respected and sought after.

https://youtu.be/JAJm0gvwCFs

Esade has a global scope with a large number of nationalities making up the student body, plus roughly 150 exchange students at anyone time. This academic exchange in compulsory, as well as the academic internship; students have to go out and make a real connection with the business world. There is also an optional Summer University Development Service where students can undertake voluntary service in Latin America for a summer.

Esade BBA Course Structure

One of the additional strings to the Esade bow is the focus on language learning. Students are required to study Spanish even though the course is taught in English, as well as a second language from French or German. They receive official recognition of their proficiency in these languages as part of their certificate. Thus students become equipped with language skills that open the door to working in businesses in the Francophone and German speaking world and either french or german. As an institution they aim  to guarantee the language abilities to the graduate market.

During the course there is a specific focus on developing practical business skills. Team work is explicitly taught for example.

A final aspect that I thought was really cool and that I had overlooked initially was Esade’s Associations. These are sort of like clubs and societies but with a business twist. Students have to apply to join them, and they have entrance interviews. Each association has a marketing and HR department! and they are often linked to entrepreneurial ideas. One student stated that her DP CAS program taught her all the skills she needed to succeed in the wider life of the school.

Admissions requirements for BBA

Mathematics is essential. Students need to have taken maths during every year of high school and then Maths A level or SL and up for DP students.

There is no need for IELTS test if final two years of school are 100% classes in English. IELTS from 7.

Selection committee meets in January. Decision based on predicted grades. 1 out of 3 applications are rejected. Conditional admissions on passing the school leaving exams.

Deposit only refundable if they are not admitted.

Scholarships and Financial Aid

Average scholarship 9,500 – 58% of Esade students receive it. Not a loan, this is a grant. last year 1.7m euros in the budget.

Awards for academic excellence – 100% and awards for academic merit  – 2,500 euro – first year only.

Talent scholarships – need based 50-70 or 90 of tuition. Good academic record. all 4 years.

Housing scholarships covers 50% of the cost of the residence.

Originally posted on July 17, 2016 @ 9:00 am

Update July 31st 2016: since publishing this blog post earlier in July I received an email from Lucy Stonehill the founder of BridgeU which contained the following correction and update:

Dear Will,

First of all, thank you for the detailed and extremely helpful feedback via your blog post..

We’ve seen that there are certain features that you suggested which we actually already have, but you haven’t seen (obviously that’s our fault for not making them easy to find!) but i wanted to bring them to light in any event: 

• A search function for specific courses or universities exists (in the shortlist page)
• The ability to ‘un-discard’ courses or universities and to view them in a discard list

However, I also wanted to raise some of the great points you mentioned that are top priority for us to work on over the summer, such as:

• Recommending courses on a SL/ HL basis (to remove the possibility of showing courses where the student doesn’t meet the minimum requirements).
• Enabling you as the counselor to set internal deadlines for your school while ensuring external deadlines are tracked and kept.
• More detailed annotations on previous successful essays.

Earlier this year I blogged about my discussions with BridgeU and my decision to purchase their platform for use in our school, initially as a trial with our grade 11s (who are currently our oldest grade and just starting their applications to university). It was my intention to keep a running blog of my experience with BridgeU throughout last term, but unfortunately I was not able to meet that commitment, so I am intending in this post to provide an update of my experience with using BridgeU from last term.

Many of the counseling colleagues that I have met with in the last couple of months have been quite interested to hear what our experience of using BridgeU as a school has been, particularly that of the students. I write these reflections with these conversations in mind.

Logistics this term

We launched BridgeU with our cohort on 19th May and a representative of BridgeU ran a session for our 12 students first thing in the morning. Time was unfortunately a little more compressed for this event than I would have liked however the majority of the information was able to conveyed to the students in approximately 40 minutes.

During this session students, signed on to their accounts on the platform that had been set up for them previously. They were shown an overview of the different sections of the platform: University Matching; Strategy Advisor; University Scrapbook and Writing Builder and then began to complete their section entitled Profile Builder.

After this I  set up tasks for the students on BridgeU, met with my students individually at least once for 30 minutes over the next few weeks to discuss their profiles and matches and then in the final week ran a university applications workshop which we started by having students finish the tasks that I had set them over the previous weeks on BridgeU before looking at UCAS and the CommonApp in more depth.

The Platform

The insides of the platform are fairly straight forward and easy to understand. As an advisor I set up tasks for my students to complete. Each of these tasks corresponds to specific parts of the application cycle. The first being University Matching. Before completing this task students need to have completed the profile builder which is the area of the platform where students enter their details around country of interest, type of university, courses of interest and predicted grades.

Once the profile is completed, students can then see the university matches generated by the platforms algorithm and begin to “shortlist” or “discard” universities and courses. Under university matching, courses are presented to students in three categories: Reach, Match and Safety. In each group students will initially be presented with three choices in each of these categories. To see more choices for a particular category they have to opt to either “shortlist” or “discard” a course. Once they have clicked either of these options the course will disappear and a new option will be presented. In this way the students sift through all of the options available to them, discarding the ones they don’t like and shortlisting the ones that they remotely like in all of the three categories.

Once the matching phase is completed, students will be able to click through to their shortlist, the area on the platform where all the courses they shortlisted are stored. It is from here that students can begin to narrow down their shortlist to the courses that they intend to apply to be clicking the apply button that shows up on every course. This will add that particular course to the applications section of the platform.

Students can also complete the strategy advisor. This can be started at the same time as the profile builder section and essentially this task asks students to list their experiences against a set of prompts like “describe how your course may fit into your long term plans” or “describe any experiences where you have been in a position of responsibility” or “describe any special or unusual academic achievements you have had”. Students move through the prompts and write reflections against these. Then they categorise those experiences against “strategy factors” like “diligence”. “formative experience of the subject”, “critical thinking”, “Leadership”, “Resilience” etc. Finally they can peruse a “strategy report” which tells them how strong they are in each of the “strategy factors”. This task aims to help students begin thinking about their personal statements and college essays and the types of experiences that they have had that would support these the writing of these application elements.

The strategy report can be printed and it appears to be good jumping off point to get students thinking about how they use their time in and out of school to help themselves stand out from the crowd.

When students have completed the University Matching, selected the courses and universities that they wish to apply to as well as the Strategy Advisor, they will begin to see information populated into the applications area of the platform. Here they can see deadlines for applications for some of the courses they have selected, use the “writing builder” to begin the personal statements and essays, and manage their recommendations if necessary as well as find out information about any particular tests that they may need.

My students and I have not quite got on to using this area yet, but they should be using the writing builder this summer to make a start on writing the first draft of their personal statements etc. Having browsed through this area, I can see that there are a lot of exemplar annotated personal statements and college essays, although I am not sure of the source of these and so cannot comment on their reliability or the reliability of the annotations and feedback on them. Students can also get advice on selecting teachers to be recommendation writers, as well as information about testing – ACT vs SAT and UK based tests.

Pros

BridgeU is clearly very new. This gives the team a dynamism, responsiveness and flexibility that can be lacking in other, more established platforms. They have given me the impression that they want to work with counselors and develop from the feedback that they are given to produce a tool that will benefit all their stakeholders: schools, counselors and students alike.

Working with the BridgeU team this term I can say that they have been truly responsive and careful to respond to all my questions and emails and in a space of about 6 weeks I emailed them several times. There responses were always helpful and they didn’t shy away from difficult questions. For several weeks I was emailing asking about when the Netherlands would go live as some of my students want to apply to universities there. Each time I was fully updated on what was happening and why it wasn’t yet live on the system.

The platform is global. When I first signed, the UK, US and Canada were represented and now the Netherlands and Hong Kong are on there. I am sure that over the next 12 months we will see more countries added. This for me as a counselor in an international school where students each come with a vary different international background and who is also teaching 18 hours a week represents the biggest selling point for the platform. In one place I have a single area where my students can research and find out about university options in a variety of countries. It will make my task of advising them that much easier, especially when in one place I can sit down with a student and look through the options that are being presented across several countries. I am able to learn a lot and my students are also able to.

The platform is logical. From the students and counselors end the tasks are laid out and grouped in a manner that makes sense. The progression of tasks and the links from one area to the next are on the whole intuitive and smart.

The platform provides an inherent structure. As a new guidance counselor who is also setting up the counseling department in a new school, the timeline provided by BridgeU and structure of the platform give me a scaffold by which I can structure the counseling interventions for our grade 10, 11 and 12 students. This is also a real time saver for me and I already have a lot of ideas about restructuring my termly interventions schedule with my kids.

In addition its pricing as was explained to me is very competitive. We are only charged for the students that are in grade 11 but we can use it with students in grade 10, 11 and 12. The minimum number of students however is 20 and the price changes as student numbers increase above 20.

Cons

BridgeU is clearly new and is still under development and this brings some issues. Some of the resources that are available seem to lack robustness. For example the annotations provided on the exemplar personal statements seem to me to be a little superficial.

Some of my students and colleagues in other schools that I have spoken to have raised questions regarding the University matching algorithm. One of my students was able to find courses on UCAS that she wanted to apply for but were not coming up under BridgeU initially. I found this was because the “culture” match of the universities was low according to how this student had entered in the profile builder and yet this student had self identified these universities from UCAS and was adamant that she wanted to apply to the, even after I pointed out that these universities wouldn’t match the type of experience she had selected for in the profile builder. Improvement: Perhaps BridgeU would be able to add a search function so that students can search for specific courses and universities they already know that they wish to apply to.

Another student was also shown courses that she didn’t meet the minimum requirements to apply for. My students study the IBDP and this student was taking Maths Studies SL and was shown courses that needed Maths SL or HL and wouldn’t accepts Maths studies. If this is the case then this represents a fairly serious flaw in the programs algorithm.

Once students have discarded courses there is no way for them to go back to these universities and courses. In the event that a student may change their mind or if they decide to take a gap year and reapply then they have no way to get these courses back. Improvement: Perhaps BridgeU could provide a discard list in the same way that there is a shortlist.

In the applications section only some university application deadlines show up. I have a student who will be applying to Cambridge but the UCAS deadline of 15th October doesn’t show up on the calendar. In addition as a school counselor I need time to write the references for these students and so as a school we publish internal deadlines that are two weeks before the UCAS or other university deadlines. There is potential confusion for students if they are getting one deadline from me and another from the platform. Improvement: Perhaps BridgeU could provide a way for counselors to input internal school deadlines.

The testing management area seems a little limited to my eyes at this stage. Again the testing dates for UK based university tests do not seem to appear in the calendar.

Finally one of the first issues I discovered with BridgeU is their philosophy regarding predicted grades. Currently predicted grades are inputed by the students themselves and the platforms algorithm then uses these to churn out its recommendations. Counselors and teachers are not able to input predicted grades, although I can view students profiles individually and make any edits I deem necessary although this will become time consuming for counselors with large case loads. The problem for me is that while students do need to think about what their scores are likely to be, it is the school that publishes these grades, and it is the teachers professional judgement that these grades are based on. Schools need to develop a reputation with universities that the predicted grades that they produce are reliable as this develops trust from universities and therefore supports the applications of all future students. From this perspective BridgeU need to streamline the process by which teachers of students can input their predicted grades into the system.

Conclusions

BridgeU is clearly new and is still under development. I have come to think of it as in “Beta”. Many of the cons mentioned above are things that would be very easy to critise and cite as a reason for not using the product. However this is not a complete and finished product and this is something that counselors need to understand. For this reason It can’t be compared directly with established platforms like Naviance, that have a fixed product that is established in the arena of college counseling technology.

What BridgeU already have in place is logical, thought out and while still fairly simple, has the students and their school staff in mind. It is clear that the development team have thought about the different stages of the application cycle and have tried to build a product that supports students at different stages with the different tasks that they offer. What is exciting about BridgeU is that it is new and under development and this offers us, as counselors, the chance to work with them, to make suggestions and to help create a product that is truly global in perspective.

While writing this post I tweeted that I would be writing it and BridgeU immediately got in touch to send me this email:

Dear Will, 

I hope you are very well! As promised please find below the list of what we are currently working on:

Customised tasks – Allowing counsellors to assign students customised tasks, for activities and projects not covered in BridgeU.

Granular Tasks – Allowing customers to specify specific requirements within BridgeU projects – e.g. complete profile builder, submit first draft of personal statement, complete common app essay.

Tagging and filtering of students – Tag and filter students by labels such as Oxbridge, Russell Group, Medicine  and set specific tasks for groups of students

Refine subject tree – allow for simpler subject searching, ensuring students can find specific courses they are interested in

More data – further course specific data, within UK subject preferences

Parchment – Document sending to U.S and Canadian Universities

And as you already know, the new destinations for later this year:

Australia & Singapore 

Likely but not guaranteed:  Germany / Korea / other european destination   

BridgeU has already got me thinking about what I will change in my counseling program for next year, which will be my second as a guidance counselor and the second of the department I am building. I will certainly be running a morning workshop for the new grade 11s in September where I will introduce the concepts of university research and help them to begin thinking about how they can best utilise their CAS program to enhance their University applications, with a focus on the strategy advisor.

I will follow this up with a second workshop in term 2 as a checkpoint before the introduction to UCAS and the CommonApp workshop at the end of term 3. In this second workshop I will aim for the students to finish their university matching and strategy advisor before beginning a first draft of their UCAS personal statement and college essays in time for early May.

In the the final workshop I will take the students through the UCAS application and get students to focus on any test prep that they may need.