CC Updates for September 2022

College Confidential Community
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It’s hard to believe September is nearly over. I haven’t even picked out my Amazon first reads selection! Here’s what’s happened on CC since August:

Moderator election

The big news of the month is the first CC moderator election. The two new moderators are:

This is intended to be a regular event (at least once a year), so there will be more chances to nominate fellow members of CC to be moderator.

Maintenance tonight

We have scheduled a maintenance window that we believe will reduce or even eliminate site instability issues. A lot of work has gone into this behind the scenes and we can’t wait to see it pay off.

Hispanic Heritage Month

@CC_Sorin has been posting about Hispanic heritage. I was a bit confused why this starts in the middle of the calendar month, until I looked it up:

The day of September 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of independence for Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on September 16 and September18, respectively. Also, Columbus Day or Día de la Raza, which is October 12, falls within this 30 day period.

Student Ambassadors

This is a bit behind the scenes right now, but we’ve brought on our first class of Student Ambassadors. We had so many excellent candidates and it was very hard to narrow it down. We’ll have more details to share in October, but I wanted to make sure you know we hadn’t forgotten about them!

NACAC 2022

For the first time, CC had a booth at the NACAC conference:

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What is NACAC? It’s the National Association for College Admission Counseling and their conference has been described as the “Super Bowl for high school counselors”. We learned quite a bit including:

  • Many people are unaware that CC is entirely free to use.
  • Counselors sometimes suggest students use CC without having registered themselves.
  • Conference attenders love swag.

It was a valuable experience and we’re likely to have a booth in future years.

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Thanks for the update. I’m curious how CC was received at NACAC. I’ve heard snarky comments about it from both college AO and high school college counselors.

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@CC_Joy was there at the booth. I’ll ask her to comment on what she heard from the many conversations she had!

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Site on my phone seems much faster btw… Hope it stays that way… Thx

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It would not be surprising if the site is faster to load in general. That would be a pleasant side effect of the improved database performance we expect from the upgrade.

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So far it’s faster but good luck with the upgrade. I know there are lots of surprises with this kind of stuff.

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Overall CC was received very positively at NACAC. I’d say of the college counselors that came by the booth, about 1/3 say they check it regularly and/or refer families to CC, 1/3 knew of CC but hadn’t been there in a while or had concerns about CC stressing students out, and 1/3 had never heard of CC at all!

All seemed interested and excited to hear some of the new things on CC, like drastically reducing ads, adding school profiles and the ability to save schools to your list, and the fact that we are FREE resource dedicated to helping families research schools and find the right fit. We mentioned that while the CC of the past might have been primarily focused on students applying to the Top 20 schools, the community has changed a bit over the years and we aim to provide a space for students with all different kinds of goals/ school lists.

Let me know if you have any more questions - happy to share! I really enjoyed being there and talking to people face-to-face about CC.

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