School Favorites Showdown 2023

Applying to College
13

It probably feels like a popularity contest because it is. :wink:

I’m not sure what you don’t like about them, but since I’m not a fan either, I can guess:

  1. They tend to be uninteresting because we usually know what’s popular without having the vote.
  2. They tend to be superficial.
  3. They tend to result in a one-size-fits-all outcome.

If you take School Favorites Showdown 2023 seriously, it has all of these problems (and more!).

So why are we doing it? Well, there are a few reasons. One that I’ve mentioned a few times is I think there could be interesting discussions about these hypothetical match-ups. That hasn’t happened (yet?) but I’m not discouraged. Why? Because I have a few other reasons for doing this:

  1. There’s always a large drop-off in CC participation after March because students think of us as the place to find out about regular decision announcements. We’d like to find ways to sustain interest throughout the college selection process because we think the forums are a great resource year-round.
  2. At a previous job we had an annual event around winter break. Due to the nature of that community, people stopped using the site during the winter. That’s not a problem in itself, but it cause an unnaturally inactive vibe for the month of December. This sort of ritual fosters community health and is a source of “solemn frivolity”, to borrow a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche. I figured we could do something similar for our low season.
  3. On less philosophical ground, we want to encourage people to enter their admission status and favorite schools. We’re working on making that part of the site more useful for students who are already stressed out by finishing high school and applying to colleges. I don’t want to go into to much detail before we know what’s in the works, but I’d love to offer students individualized information for the schools they are interested in. The Regular Decision calendar helped thousands of people track those announcements, so it’s something we might be able to build on.

Ultimately this is an experiment. It’s relatively easy to try out and we can make adjustments as we go. I’m hoping we can find a way to make this is a fun event people can look forward to each year. But if we can’t, that’s ok too. We’ll try something else.

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