Resources - Advice from other Members, Build your database An answer from our community of members
The list of roadblocks that counselors faced when researching and building college lists was long. CounselMore changed how college advisors build college lists. The CounselMore tools are not the process we are used to and when you first begin using the CounselMore list builder it does take a shift in thinking for the better.
CounselMore researched the art of college search and list building by sitting at the elbow of college counselors while they built their lists. This took two years and hundreds of counselor behavior collection and study.
What stood out was that counselors were taking hours to build THE college list, passing it to parents and having the list returned to rebuild...this was the most common of pitfalls, a guessing game at the beginning. Also, counselors had to start from scratch each year or kept their own private spreadsheets to update information incessantly, even hiring part time data collectors. All these practices and others caused extreme time loss and leaked additional counselor-expenses.
Add college by name by searching for the keyword of any school.
Example: Enter "University of California" and the list of all UC will appear.
Put the emphasis of college selection on the comparison tools and less on the unrealistic expectation that a silver bullet admission match exists. You and I know it does not. You will distill the schools you have applied to the counselor list by comparing data points, adding your own esoteric information, adding notes to the specific student and promoting schools to the Student list. Hold back some schools on the counselor's list to offer later. Perhaps those are schools that are a better match but the family is not prepared to consider yet.
The college counselor does a deeper more selective process in choosing schools beyond any algorithm capability. CounselMore supports the counselor's deep investigation by putting hundreds of data points not found elsewhere partnered with your ability to add your own custom data seamlessly, increasing your ability to compile lists and capitalize on your research year over year.
Continue with the comparison tools, using candidate shaping tools to see the gap between the student and the admissions qualifications. Shaping the student's preparation towards the desired admissions.
"Add college by name" will move you forward to building the lists you normally expect.
Then goto "Data menu" and begin pulling over columns and shopping through the unique data points to compare. Choose to show data that are "must-have" qualities.
Compare those qualities by comparing information columns in the Counselor's list. Promote schools to the Student's list a few at at time to collect the family's feedback and allow them to add schools to the list from their portal. Any school the family adds will be indicated to you. What is most beneficial is that the family can add their schools but still see the columns of information that you have chosen. This allows the family to see that what they believe a school to have or not have was based on their incomplete understanding. That highlights the value of the counselor right away, which changes the dynamic of the list discovery process.
Begin using search to open up ideas and add new schools to the counselor's list. Freely trash information columns and pull over new ones anytime, no information will be lost.
Also apply different columns per list. The counselor list and the student list can have assigned completely different data columns.
The database is a working tool not a static bank of information. It took me time to build my list building flow and making my database my own. I noticed in my second year of list building with CounselMore that my list building time had changed significantly. I felt less stressed and had more time to dig into the details the way I wanted to work without sacrificing my time or money. Good luck to you!
Best wishes,
Kate Humphries
College Goal
- Search backwards using Synchro Search button
- Add reference links to any school and make any of those available to any student in the future.
- Add college notes and make those available or not to students.
- Search all of your college notes by key word.
- You can add your Fiske notes to you college notes column and then search by key word.
- Save Tags to build your own topic lists
- Save filters for student profiles you use over and over
- Inside every cell is a question mark, click there to find out the date and resource of the last update for that specific c data point.
- Goto "My database" and import "Community Starter Lists"
- Add colleges to the database that do not exist in the data yet or submit a list to support@counselmore.com
- Correct data by entering the data correction mode, or submit corrections to support@counselmore.com
- Create custom columns for data you like to collect and want to be at your finger tips.
- Customize your App Tracker with the specific tasks you apply to each student's app process. And choose any of those independently.
- And there's even more ways to build and save the data you need.