The UVA Admissions Chatroom Experience

Earlier this month I posted about how the University of Virginia Admissions staff was hosting an open chatroom session to answer any and all questions. I was intrigued by this new web-powered admissions activity, but alas, my schedule kept me from participating.

Well, it must have been such a success that they announced an additional session for tonight. This time I was able to join in.

Slight digression... I found out about tonight's session because Greg is interested in UVA so I monitor their admissions blog RSS feed. If I hadn't been watching closely I would have missed this opportunity. I stongly recommend you look to see if there are active admissions blogs for your target schools. If so you should visit them regularly or subscribe to their RSS feeds. I've found they're invaluable resources for learning about the colleges, and their admissions processes. (Now back to our regularly scheduled post on the UVA chat rooms...)

So how was it? Pretty chaotic and of marginal benefit in my opinion. This approach has potential but the way it was set up by UVA, and the technology they used, were problematic.

There were three chat rooms with between 25-45 participants each. It seemed like each room had just one admissions dean. This meant the poor dean was outnumbered at least 25 to 1. Questions were flying fast and furious. As you can see from the screen shot above there weren't that many lines for questions and answers so they'd scroll off the visible window in just a few seconds. You had to really concentrate to follow along. The deans did a pretty good job of answering most of them, but the questions were super random and the answers were brief and fragmented. If you had a very specific question this was probably a good way to get it answered immediately (vs. emailing it and waiting for a reply). But if you were just lurking, hoping to learn about what it's like to apply or attend UVA, it was less worthwhile -- at least for me.

Admissions Directory Roundup (11/18)

Here are the most recent additions to AdmissionsDirectory.com, the web's most comprehensive and helpful directory of college admissions resources:


Financial Aid Calendar
A Gap Year Brings a New Direction for Life
List of Top Women's Colleges
11th Grade College Preparation
College Application Checklist
Are My ACT Scores Good Enough?
Are My SAT Scores Good Enough?
Jane Bryant Quinn: The Student Loan Shuffle
My Rich Uncle EFC Calculator
FastWeb Critique
Most Common Federal Student Loan Programs
EFC (Expected Family Contribution) Calculator
MIT is Hard
My College Essay (by a MIT Senior)

Will the Financial Crisis Impact Selective Admissions?

Have you wondered how the current financial crisis is affecting college admissions plans? Here's a poll that About.com took recently that suggests it's having a big impact. The results: 1/3 are staying the course. 2/3 are lowering their sights, including 4% that are now planning to put off college.

Another harbinger of future issues is that many college endowments have declined "steeply". Could this reverse the recent trend of increases in financial aid at the well endowed elite schools?

Over the next year or two the financial crisis could make it easier to get into that selective college, but harder to pay for it.

11/18/08 Update: Accepted Admissions Almanac has just posted about a Yale Daily News article reporting record numbers of early applicants. One of the reasons cited is their strong financial aid program.

Estimating your EFC (Expected Family Contribution)

EFC. It's one of the important acronyms related to financing a college education. The Expected Family Contribution is the amount the government (and colleges) expect you to contribute toward the estimated total educational costs every year. This becomes the foundation for calculating how much financial aid you're eligible to receive (estimated college costs - EFC = financial need).

Your EFC is 'officially' calculated once you've completed and submitted the FAFSA form (here's a student-friendly video explaining it). But since that can take some effort, and it's not even possible until after January when the FAFSA form becomes available, it's possible to estimate your EFC using handy online calculators. Here are two from MyRichUncle and FinAid.org. Both are from student loan oriented sites which I plan to look into more closely.

The only 'hard' part of this exercise is gathering (or estimating) enough of your own financial information to complete the form. This was about a 45 minute exercise for me the first time. Since I already had all the data it took less than 15 minutes the second time.

I did learn a couple of interesting facts in this process that make my situation better than I had expected. The following two assets don't count 'against you'. That is, the government doesn't expect you to use these assets to help pay for college:

• home equity (except by some private colleges)
• retirement accounts (e.g. IRAs, 401k's)

Because of this it's a good idea to pay down credit cards and contribute to those retirement accounts before filling out your FAFSA . I sure plan to.

FastWeb: Is it worth the effort?

If you've thought any about how you're going to pay for college you're probably familiar with FastWeb -- the Internet's largest scholarship database/matchmaking service.

I'm starting to focus more on how to pay for Greg's college education and it sure would be nice to win some scholarships to supplement what we've saved. Of course FastWeb was one of my first stops and after spending a few hours with it I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

Rather than write my own detailed critique I'm just going to point to a recent article from Newsweek that accurately reflects my experience. FastWeb throws an awful lot of 'chaff' at you in the form of intrusive advertising and bogus 'promotional' scholarships, that you have to sift through to find the few kernals of relevant scholarship wheat.

Of course, they're supposed to have the largest database of scholarships and they may be the best there is. I plan to look at some other scholarship discovery sites to see if there's a better alternative. If there's one you like, please leave it in the comments.

MIT is Hard

This is another great post from the student bloggers on the MIT admissions site. It describes how the intensity is cranked up during sophomore year. An excerpt:

I say magic, but we actually had to go through the proof for this and I promise you, it was definitely the scariest and most overwhelming thing anybody in that class had ever seen. Ever. There was some weird partial differential equation separation of variables thing, variable substitutions in integrals, Fourier transforms, and algebra (read, witchcraft) that somehow produced this long, hellish equation containing a bazillion variables. Oh, wait, reviewing my notes, there was also something called a "Similarity transformation," an "Error Function," and an "Error Function Complement."

My favorite part was the variables. We actually ran out of variables and started to have to reuse variables we'd already used, but assign them different values. Yeah. I looked around and saw some students just sitting with their mouths open, others laughing, and still others were trying to learn but failing miserably. At the end of lecture we all just kind of sat there, dumbfounded, before standing up to leave. There's a lot of academic rigor at MIT. The classes are hard. They're totally doable, but hard.

Here's another post from the MIT Admissions blog "Work Hard, Play Hard, Work Hard Some More" that gives a freshman perspective.

If you're interested in attending MIT I highly recommend following their admissions blog. It's the best one I've found for painting a detailed picture of the student experience there.

UVA Admissions Chatroom Open House

The UVA Admissions blog has announced open sessions in their chat room tonight (Wednesday 11/5) and tomorrow night from 7-9 Eastern time:

We'll have students, faculty, and admission officers on hand to answer questions in a few different chat rooms. You'll have to register a username to participate and you can do that now or just before entering the chat. Hope to see some of you there!

Here's the link to register

This is another interesting way to answer applicants' questions and build connections to a college. I'm going to try and participate and will report back how it was.

[Update] I missed these sessions but was able to attend one a couple of weeks later. Here's the report on my experience.

Admissions Directory Roundup (11/2)

Here are the college admissions resources that were added to Admissions Directory over the past few weeks:


Essay Advice from Three Admissions Directors
Six Steps to Get Admitted to College: Dance with an Admissions Officer
Artist Portfolio Review at National Portfolio Day
AP, IB, and Dual Enrollment (or PSEO): An Analysis
Austin College: A Great Place to Work
Defense of College Endowments at Private Colleges and Universities--College Consulting

Greg's SAT Math Tutoring Results

I wasn't as diligent as planned keeping you posted on Greg's SAT math tutoring experience. As you'll recall from this post in July we had decided to hire a tutor to help Greg raise his SAT math score into the 700's. His writing and critical reading scores were already in the 700's and 'good enough' so we wanted to focus all available time and attention on math.

The results from the October SAT test are in and I'm happy to report the tutoring helped accomplish our goal, with a 70 point improvement, and a score solidly in the 700's!

Here's a quick summary of how we chose the tutor, and my thoughts on how the tutoring process worked.

From the begining we ruled out the standard, canned SAT prep classes. These have the advantage of being easier to find and set up (and potentially less expensive), but since Greg wanted to focus on Math their broad coverage of the whole test didn't meet our needs, leading us down the tutoring path. The first decision was between a local, 'in person' tutor or one that was on-line. I checked out both options. We happened to have a Huntington Learning Center 'store' (a national tutoring chain) nearby and they had a college math teacher on staff that was willing and able to tailor a tutoring curriculum to meet our needs. I believe the cost was $65 or $75/hour. This seemed like a good option and was within our budget. There were a few other local tutoring companies that I called but didn't work out. I bet that most communities have one or more local academic tutoring services and that most of them provide some form of college test prep tutoring.

For 'online' there were many more choices, as you would imagine. Just google 'SAT Test Preparation' and you'll be overwhelmed with options. I quickly gravitated to a service called Global Scholar that I had read about as one of the new, hot online tutoring web services. Global Scholar offers tutoring on a broad array of subjects, including test prep, and provides several key benefits. First it aggregates tutors and tutoring companies from all over the world. So while I only found a couple of SAT Math tutoring options in Marietta Georgia, there are literally dozens listed on Global Scholar. Like other web-based directories the tutors on Global Scholar have detailed information describing their qualifications and user-generated ratings (thought since the service is new, there weren't many for the tutors I checked out).

A second potential benefit is that Global Scholar provides an online place to meet. You can use the system to talk live, send instant messages, share documents or write things on an electronic whiteboard. It's not quite like being in the same room with the tutor, but it's pretty close. The other benefit is that once you set up an account with Global Scholar, and enter a credit card, it takes care of all the payment and scheduling details.

Since Greg and I are both tech-saavy we were drawn to the on-line option. I liked it because of the wide selection of tutors that were available and ease with which I could research their qualifications. Greg liked it because of the convenience. It saved him the ride back and forth to the tutor and it gave us great flexibility setting up tutoring sessions.

To find out who we picked and learn about the actual tutoring experience, check back in the coming days for the second part of the story.