Today, Collegewise is celebrating its 12th birthday. It’s hard to believe that in just two short years, we’ll be working with kids who weren’t born yet when I filed our paperwork with the County Clerk’s office in 1999 and started driving to kids’ houses to help them fill out college applications at their kitchen tables. We’ve since helped over 3,000 kids find, apply to, and attend the right colleges for them. And we’re still doing what we’ve always done—helping families appreciate just how many great colleges there are, not just the famous schools, and we’re showing them how to make the process enjoyable and exciting.
And while our counselors have been busy helping this year’s Collegewise students, Arun and I have been working to release our projects I mentioned back in May in this post. It’s taken us much longer to finish these than we thought it would, but we’re very close to bringing Collegewise to a much wider audience of families. Here are a few updates.
New page on our website
We’ve added a page with bios for Arun and me so we aren’t just faceless mentions on the blog. Neither of us is entirely comfortable being photographed (or writing bios of ourselves), but we’re trying to follow our own advice and share everything—and everyone—behind our small business.
The Collegewise Store
Our designer has done all the design and programming for us to offer a suite of Collegewise products. We’ll be testing it for the next couple weeks to make sure there aren’t any bugs, and as soon as it’s ready, we’ll put up some of the products below.
Is There a Future Doctor in The House?: A Guide to Choosing a College and Preparing for Life As a Premed
We’ve finished our guideline and will be selling it as a PDF that families can download from our store.
Online Collegewise counseling
Sometimes, you have to do the hard thing, blow up a nearly-finished project, and start again from scratch. We were just about ready to launch our online counseling where students anywhere in both the United States and the world will be able to meet with a Collegewise counselor by video chat. But we thought the interface was just too complicated and didn’t like that a user would have to click through 8-9 pages before they could buy a product. So Arun and I hunkered around our laptops one day at his loft, rewrote the entire project, and got it down to a much simpler, cleaner version for the user. Our designer says it will be ready to go in 2-3 weeks. After we test it, we’ll make a big, bold announcement here on our blog.
Story Finders: How to Help Students Write More Effective College Essays (Without Helping Too Much)
This project is done and is currently in the formatting stage. We’re going to sell this as an on-demand published book for teachers and counselors, sharing our entire Collegewise system of brainstorming and editing essays (and how we do it without hijacking the kids’ process and helping too much). We’ve also prepared a resource page where buyers will be able to download clean copies of our materials.
Collegewise seminar videos
Over the next two weekends, we’re bringing a film crew to our offices in Irvine and filming four of our most popular seminars.
- Financial Aid and Scholarships
- College Essays
- College Interviews
- Highly Selective College Admissions
We’ll then be selling them as streaming downloads, and also as DVDs for counselors and schools that want to show them to larger audiences. I’ll post some photos of our blockbuster-type video shoots (plus I get to say “video shoots,” which makes us sound so Hollywood).
How to Make your Common Application A Lot Less Common
We’re 90% done with our step-by-step guide to filling out the Common Application, sharing all of our tips to make your application more compelling. We also secured permission from the Common App folks to include screen shots in our guideline, which really helps make our explanations clearer. It’s currently at 54 pages, and we’re just finishing the final few pages explaining how to double check everything before a student hits “Submit.” We’ll be selling this as a PDF download on our store.
If you follow our blog, you’ve probably noticed that this isn’t our first mention of these projects. We’re learning just how long these things take as we go, but we promise that we are, in fact, working to finish all the cool products we’ve mentioned so excitedly here. We’re feeling a lot better about our progress now, and we promise to post loudly and proudly when they’re done.