I just listened to an old podcast episode of the College Essay Guy (#120 if you’re curious) that was an interview with a woman who devised a set of cards (now also available online) that help identify preferences for things like academic programs, setting, res life, demographics, etc. The card deck and related program are called Corsava. It sounded pretty cool – a better version of the menu-clicking match algorithms and filters on many sites. You apparently end up with a insightful picture of what you’re actually looking for in a college. I’m curious for D20 to try it but not eager to drop $$$ on it without some CC reviews. Anyone?
It looks like it’s only $20 for unlimited students?
Good point - that’s like 6 min of a private college counselor’s time. ?
So I blew the 20 bucks and signed up for a counselor (?) account – there didn’t seem to be a way to just sign up as a individual parent/kid – so now I just have to convince D20 to invest the 20 minutes to do the sorting exercise. Will report back.
Interested to hear how this goes!
We’re cheaper…
@Itisatruth Hey there!! How did the Coursera cards go?
Hi @intparent - so D20 finally did the Corsava card sort yesterday. She really enjoyed the process, said it was fun and got her thinking about what she was looking for. She ended up with many cards in “must have”, more in “would be nice”, the most in “don’t care”, and several very instructive ones in “absolutely not” (like “pressure cooker” and “big time sports”). You can also do a state-by-state or country sort (e.g., Connecticut = would be nice, Colorado = absolutely not).
The next step after the sort is to add schools you are interested in, and then the kid Is supposed to go back through and figure out how the individual schools stack against the different card priorities. [Like, if you said modern or renovated dorms was a must have, then you can indicate whether Schools A, B, C have that). You can also do a state-by-state or country sort (e.g., Connecticut = would be nice, Colorado = no way).
I will confess that I thought the program was going to take her sort results and do that matching and filtering automatically and report back with a list of schools that would be a good fit that she could then compare to her actual list, but I suppose this engages the kid more on evaluating an existing list based on newly-articulated priorities.
So - I would say it was worth the $20 to get her engaged in a fun activity for a bit and it initiated a good conversation about priorities and such. No big surprises and no new schools added to the list.
Hey @Itisatruth - just found out S1 & S2’s school’s college office just ponied up for the physical cards and the software.
So far, kind of as you said, they’re reporting that the physical cards themselves are a good way to engage the kids and start some conversations. (They’ve been leaving the deck out on a table in their reception area.)