Following the great response we got on the Jeff Selingo’s AMA and listening to your suggestion we have asked reputed authors and experts come to the forums and answer your questions.
We noticed the first two AMAs did not get a ton of engagement so I wanted to get your thoughts on the matter. Is it something we’re doing wrong, is the topic not interested, are the experts not appealing, can we do something better/different? Let me know your thoughts so we can make this better!
For full transparency, these initiatives are not commercial, the guests do not pay us for promoting them in the forums. We’ve invited them hoping they can share their knowledge/expertise with the community.
I think you will get more and better responses if you move this back to the Parents Forum where these AMAs are actually featured.
As I’ve repeatedly said…this Community and Forum Issues area is well hidden in terms of accessibility (something I hope will be changed if this is really an important area for announcements).
I agree with @thumper1 and I usually ignore the pinned posts on Latest Posts because they aren’t always relevant to me. Now it is just habit I guess?
If you are looking for suggestions, I would like to maybe see someone who can talk about nursing school admissions, as well as maybe accommodations in college or navigating the search with medical issues? I personally would like to see more diversity in terms of the topics discussed. Not everyone is interested in elite colleges, although it is great to have those experts as well!
I guess I reacted to the Grown and Flown as a promotion, honestly, whether paid and/or intended or not. I also feel that this kind of post may coopt the purpose of the forum, where parents discuss things with other parents, sometimes experienced parents and sometimes parents going through the same thing. (I know on the music forum, when admissions folks have come on, which happens very rarely, people don’t really like it because the community sort of takes care of each other. And there were privacy concerns as well).
I saw both of those advertised and didn’t participate in either of those two because with D21, I felt we are somewhat past that at this point and have limited energy to invest.
Jeff Salingo I found relevant to us at this point in time, as it gave some insight into where we are currently in the process.
I don’t think people come to CC for parenting advice. By the time parents get here, their students are 16/17/18. Their ideas about how to parent a teen is pretty much set. I saw the AMA on parenting a teen through the pandemic. I thought about whether I had any questions to ask and whether there was any advice that I needed. I decided against posting because the answers to both questions was “no”. I’ve been parenting a teen through a pandemic for 7 months now. If I’ve been doing it wrong, oh well. Everyone’s situation is different. Some kids are in face to face school, some are virtual. Some parents are working outside the home, some are working at home, some have lost their jobs. Some have a lot of cases nearby, some have hardly any. Some have lost family members or close friends. There are too many variables for a paragraph of online advice to be worth anything, imo.
The AMA on extracurriculars and leadership has more potential and it looks like it got some interest.
I think the Georgetown admissions officer AMA should get more interest. CC posters are always interested in the admissions officer perspective.
Why was the Jeff Selingo thread shut down? Was it becoming one of the megathreads that CC doesn’t like? As far as the AMAs for parents, other than kelsmom’s financial aid AMA thread, the AMA topics could easily be covered on the board.
Perhaps it should have been made clear in the first post of the thread that it was a limited time offer, but I don’t think that people who are volunteering for AMA are signing up to answer questions until the end of time.
I think the G&F AMA would have had more traction this summer before students were heading back to school, either virtually or in person. At this point, I think parents have figured out what is working and what isn’t in regard to the pandemic.
I am finding that the AMA’s are making certain topics brought up, less accessible to people than if they were posted as separate topics. They seem to end up sort of a hodge podge. I hope that new people are encouraged to post their own threads to get more responses than they are getting on the AMA’s.
I’m finding it off putting when guests promote their books in the responses. “I talk about this in chapter 2” is a sales pitch. IMO that has no place here and is not helpful.