How our students earned $5.5 MILLION dollars in Scholarships!

Alright, here we go.

We're getting started. Just a few more minutes as we let our guests in. Time to celebrate. Alright, they are still coming in. Welcome everybody.

Hello.

Welcome!

The dog's happy to be here. All right, fantastic. They're still coming in. All right, I'm going to go ahead and get this party started. So thank you all for joining. As other people come on in, we'll welcome them as well. Thank you for being here and taking the time. My name is Shellee Howard and I'm the founder of College Ready. What you will learn tonight is we're going to have a lot of fun. We are going to take the stress out of college admissions and have some fun with it. Number 2, you will be able to find where are the biggest scholarships. And 3, How do you get your share of the $9 billion scholarships available? So our hostesses this evening are myself, Shellee Howard, and you get a chance to meet Sheri very soon, and she's going to be leading us through this party. So I will introduce her in just a moment. College Ready is one of the sponsors as well as Imagine Scholarships, and That's about what we're going to share with you tonight. Um, we are all about getting your students, or students, we're all about getting you into your dream college and graduating without debt. Sherry and I have partnered together because we both feel how important this is. So without further ado, I'd like to tell you a little bit about Sherry. She's going to be celebrating this party with us. She's the founder of Imagine Scholarships, Imagine College Coaching, Imagine Educational Solutions, and a nonprofit Scholarship Queen. She was named an Up-and-Coming Woman to Watch by Austin Woman's Magazine, and on average her students win $21,000 in scholarships. So without further ado, I'd like to go ahead and turn it on over to Sherry.

Hi, I'm so excited that you're here. There are so many of you and it makes me so happy because it's just possibilities and potential for lots of people to gain money to go to college. So, um, you might wonder why this is my passion, how I got where I got. Um, I have 4 kids, one in medical school, two in college, and one in high school. So scholarships are critical to the success of my family. So I began Many years ago, just printing out scholarships, laying them nicely on my kids' beds, thinking they would, you know, just apply to them and win money. It's just not that simple. So I came up with a system to help people find scholarship dollars and some other really cool things. And that's kind of how I got where I am today. And I'm super excited to share with you, I developed a software application that makes looking for scholarships super, super easy. So in just a minute, I'm going to have someone on my team. She is basically the queen of multitasking in our company, and her name is Jennifer, and she is going to ask each of you to log on to our software application, and then we're going to actually play a really cool game. We're going to have a scavenger hunt. So you might, you know, get prepared, tie your tennis if you have laces or whatever you need to to do. We're gonna have a quick scavenger hunt because at the end there's going to be some really cool prizes, um, including a year free for scholarship access to our system. So I really, really hope that you'll stay and participate, and then we'll get information at the end for those who are the winners and we'll contact you. So I'm going to pass it over to Jennifer, who's going to help each of you log in, and you can log in and we'll take it from there.

Hi, I hope you can all hear me. I want to say hello to everybody and we're excited.

Scholarship meeting.

Can you hear me? Um, I've got a cute little scavenger hunt planned for you, so while we're getting that up, go ahead and go to www.

Imagine-scholarships.com.

You're going to need to sign in. Can you repeat that? www.imagine-scholarships.com.

Can you see my screen?

It's, it's, uh, here's our little scavenger hunt.

Yep, we see it.

Great.

So basically, while you are getting logged in, we're going to need for you to go ahead and log in, and we'll do all that in a minute. But right now, let's all look, who has a pink highlighter? I'm sure that that's something that everybody has in their backpack or in their desk drawer. So let's look for a pink highlighter. Maybe some of you have a green mechanical pencil. I see Michelle has a pink highlighter. Here's a green mechanical pencil. You can just keep track of your points if you'd like. We can take care of that later.

Show us what you've got though. If you've got the pencil, if you got the highlighter, show it to us because we're going to be choosing some winners. We want to see who's got what going on.

In what city would you find the word "imagine" on the ground? Have you ever seen the word "imagine" on the ground somewhere? Who sings a famous song called "Imagine"?

Yeah, put it in the chat if you know the answer.

We've got some definitions for you. Who can define "imagine" in their own words? Get really creative. And tell me, why did we decide to name our company Imagine Scholarships? We love the word imagine around here. Imagine, imagine your dreams.

Okay, some of these people are with it. They understand who—

Okay, we got it.

They got it. They got it.

I love it.

I love this.

Oh my goodness.

I love your answers. They're excellent.

Awesome. Well, I want you to go ahead and let me know if you've logged into Imagine Scholarships. When you do that, when you do that, you'll need to go ahead and just quickly type in your name, type in your email address, type in a quick password, and I'll go and share that screen also.

Let's see.

I see someone saying they can't. Ooh, that's a really good one, Kit. Let's see if we can, Jennifer's gonna walk you through how to get signed up on the site because I see a couple of people saying they can't get logged in. So we're gonna, we're gonna make sure everybody can get logged in and we're gonna go from there. So it's imaginescholarships.com.

Once you get onto the website, you'll see that, like I said, just put in a email address, a quick password, and it should take you straight to your user profile. You can fill out that information quickly if you're in high school, college. First name, last name, stick an email in there. And you don't have— if anything has a red asterisk next to it, use that. Otherwise, you can leave those blank and you can go back later and take care of that.

They're telling me that it Some people— works better on Chrome than Safari is what someone just said. Huh, very interesting. So let us know if you are in website. Give us a thumbs up.

Smiley face.

Yes, give us a smiley face. Okay, anybody in? Anybody in? Send me a smiley face, or I guess they don't have emojis. Oh, there's a smiley face. Great, great, great, great, great.

All righty.

You guys are pretty creative. I'm super excited about this group of people. On both Safari and Google Chrome, it says not secure, so nothing shows up. Oh no, we have to get you in.

Uh, well, I will play and show you the different scholarships that are available.

Yeah, we're going to— I'm going to do a demo for you. So you're going to easily be able to see what's going on and then we'll get you in afterwards. Okay, how are we doing on our scavenger hunt?

Okay, scavenger hunt. So I wanted you to go to video resources. And I wanted you to be able to see— you'll click on video resources at the top.

That's not it.

Bear with me, everybody.

Oh my gracious.

It's okay. Let me jump in.

Please do.

So I'm going to share my screen with you all, and we are going to take a look at how we can actually get some scholarships in your hands. So when you get to the site, it'll look like this, Imagine Scholarships, and one of the things on the scavenger hunt is actually actually this video right here. So the one that says students and parents. So that might help you win some points for your scavenger hunt.

Our question for the scavenger hunt is to watch that video and let us know what is weird about the people in the video. And I think you can figure it out in about 2 seconds if you'll just click play on there.

Yeah, yeah, I want to click play on there. Yes, let's see. There we go.

So you found the college of your dreams, and now you're wondering about how to pay for tuition. Well, there's good news. Paying for school just got easier with Imagine Scholarships. Imagine Scholarships offers an extensive collection of scholarship opportunities and an organized way to apply for them through our easy-to-use website. With Imagine Scholarships, you can save time and money by selecting scholarships and internships that are unique to your gifts, talents, and specific criteria, and you can apply to as many of them as you'd like. No, ma'am, our database is updated every 24 hours by our research team so that you can have the maximum access to all education dollars available for you. Plus, Imagine Scholarships is the only site that provides a video communications package with personalized courses to guide you through the application process. Imagine where you can go with a scholarship and a dream. For more information, visit us at imaginescholarships.com.

We love it.

We want you to know where you can go with imagining your dreams. I love it. No masks, no eyes, are they really eyebrows if you don't have eyes?

Those are all great, all great answers.

Okay, so let's go back to, let's go back to our match Scholarships.

Okay, I'm gonna go— is everyone able to see my screen? Okay, all right. Okay, we are gonna— once you get logged in, it's gonna take you to a screen of matched scholarships, and in these scholarships are $9 billion worth of scholarships. And so often students— some of the questions I get are, why do I have so many scholarships? Um, some of the other questions I get are, why did none of the scholarships apply to me? And I really believe after years of doing this, it's because students don't take the time to really slow down and look through what's going on. In my database, I have made a conscious effort to not allow scholarships that are just there to get your email address and put you on a marketing list. I want real quality dollars that are for real students going to real schools. So here's one that you might easily zip through, but it's summer and ice cream go hand in hand. In fact, July is National Ice Cream Month. What's the inspiration behind this award? We think people are very similar to ice cream. Some are nutty, others a little exotic, or some are comforting. If you were an ice cream flavor, which would you be and why? What a great— I mean, there's no one that cannot apply for this. This, this is for everyone. So when I come across something that I think might be a really good fit for me, I'm going to click on save. So the premise behind this site is 3 very simple buckets. You have matched scholarships, you have saved scholarships, and you have applied scholarships. In addition to people going to a 4-year university, We also have scholarships for students who are going to a 2-year university or choosing a trade. Like here we have a beauty school scholarship, a Make You Laugh scholarship. We have scholarships for Christian organizations. We have scholarships for international students. We have scholarships for just about every single major that you could be pursuing. And one of the scholarships that I want to make sure that everyone sees today, I'm going to go up here to the search box and I'm just going to type in the word celebrate. And we are going to see what comes up. Looks like we have several things. And one of the things that comes up is this Celebrate You Scholarship. College is expensive. We want to help. In a world that tells us that we aren't always unique, we want to hear about what makes you special. We wanna celebrate you. This is actually a really fun group. I can tell by your chats and your comments that you really are very unique and you really are special. So I want you to know that we recognize that, we value that, and we really want to capitalize on what makes you unique. What are your special gifts and talents that you were born with that you can use to make a difference in the world? So that's what this scholarship is all about. We believe that each person has unique gifts and talents they can use to make the world a better place. The world would not be the same without you, and we want to celebrate you today with a chance to win a $2,500 scholarship. We've made it really simple to apply. Just tell us in 200 words or less what makes you unique. So the beautiful thing about this is that it's given away multiple times a year. So even if you don't get it the first time, you can continue to reapply. And I love that. So as I mentioned earlier, we have matched scholarships, saved scholarships, and applied scholarships. And I told you how easy it is to save a scholarship. So you simply just click save. I also want to point out that there's a list view, so you can look at it in a different view if you prefer. So there's this, this other view, but I'm going to go back to my grid view and then I am actually going to take us to Saved Scholarships. So here we have a list of scholarships that I have already saved. So I've looked through this, I've identified, hey, here's an animal rescue scholarship. I might be really good at that because I love animals. It's something I'm very interested in. And so I might want to do an animal rescue scholarship. So I'm encouraging you, for everyone, there is something here for you. Now, as Shellee mentioned, my students usually on average find about $21,000 in scholarships. And the reason that they're so successful is I continue to encourage them and I continue to remind them that this is a marathon, not a sprint. You can't do this this week and assume that all of your money is going to come in and pay for college. You have to recognize that this is a process. That if you will apply to 3 to 5 scholarships every single week all the way through college, which might surprise some, some people think that scholarships are mainly for students who are in high school, but the truth is, is that we have $9 billion worth in here and it's about equal for current high school students and even some middle school students all the way through all of college and graduate programs, law school, and medical school. So we have scholarships here for everyone. Bless you! Y'all are so cute. Okay, so as you are finding ones that you like, you can save them, put them in your saved scholarships, and then you may be looking through them and think, you know what, this is not actually a good one for me after all, and you can remove it. Okay, then we have our bucket of applied scholarships and we can see which ones we've applied for. And so we can also, after we've applied, it has, have you applied? We can say yes, and we can tell it we've applied and are awaiting results. We've applied and didn't receive an award, and we've applied and did receive an award. And then we can actually save the changes to that, and it will keep track of how much money that you have earned. And I actually love that feature because it keeps everything in one nice little tidy thing. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons I believe that my students are so successful is just constant encouragement. I know it's like tyranny of the urgent a little bit. My daughter was in a competition about a month ago and we went to a hotel and we had the best customer service. And I kept thinking, you know, I'm going to call and let them know what a great job they did. And even though I had the best intentions, It just never made it to the top of the priority list until one day I sat down and thought, you know what, I am going to do this right now. And so one of the things I wanted to do to make sure the students have continued encouragement is I built a library of videos. And so if you can see my screen, you can see that there are all kinds of videos here. And so These are mostly videos of me, whether that is something that you're interested in or not, the content is really good. So you have all kinds of videos here talking to high school students, talking to parents, 5 ways to get into college, summer opportunities, your resume, the importance of college fairs, leadership roles, information for high school juniors. Like the list goes on and on. And this is All just a great resource for you to be able to utilize. So I really wanna make sure that you know about that. I'm gonna go back and show you one other really awesome thing, and this is internships. And you may wonder why I think that is so important, but it is because internships really give you a chance to stand apart from your competition as you're applying to scholarships and as you're applying to college. So it's really, really important for you to think about what are most people going to write their college essays on and think of something completely different. But as you are putting in your applications, you need to be mindful of what have I done that no one else has done. And internships give you a great opportunity to stand apart. And so I have filled my site with some really cool Internships. So like here's a Dolphin Research Center, FBI student jobs and internships. How fun is that? US Intelligence internships, remote marketing and social media, Young Filmmakers Program intern, virtual high school internships. So believe it or not, there are a lot of virtual internships. So for those of you who are not able to travel to a place or if there's not one located near you, there are still options of virtual internships. I do want to point out that oddly enough, some internships, which kind of was surprising to me, some internships actually charge, which is really weird. A majority of internships, I would say, either pay a small amount or ask you to work for free. And while that may not sound like a great deal to you, I invite you to reconsider. So several years ago, there was an entrepreneur in our hometown who has some really cool things going on, and she wanted to have 3 interns for the summer, but she didn't know where they would live or how they would pay for their expenses because she wasn't able to pay them anything. So as it turns out, I housed one of those interns in my home for the summer, and it was such a wonderful experience. That entrepreneur went on to partner with some incredible people, make some beautiful products. You can see more about that on my blog. So if you look in the menu, you can, it will take you to some really cool things like our blog is right here. So there's, there's other resources for you as well. So I want to just go back to the internships and tell you that not only is it a really cool experience, it also gives you a great opportunity to meet some amazing people, people in the fields of interest that you have. So this then allows for networking. And if you're not familiar with the word networking means, it means getting to know other people who have the same interests as you so that maybe you can bring your creative bright mind and their creative bright mind and put them together and collaborate on something really cool. And as some of you may know, and some of you may actually have one, and if you don't already, you probably will soon, is a LinkedIn account. So LinkedIn is kind of like Facebook if you will, for professionals. And so having an opportunity to network with other people who share your interests is such a valuable tool. And internships actually give you that same opportunity. So internships are so, so valuable. Here's a fashion creative design internship, computer science, mechanical engineering, finance and accounting, entrepreneurship, Sustainability, Environmental Health, Wellness and Sports Management.

Air Force.

Fisheries biology internship. I just want to encourage you that whatever your gifts and talents are, whatever interests you, kind of like we talked about earlier, celebrating you and who you are. I really believe that you are uniquely made and you have gifts and talents that this world will not be the same without. So, helping you nurture those and find those is really important to to me and then helping you find the money to go to college where you can actually refine those interests and skills is super important. So there's a few key things I want to tell you about being successful when you search for scholarships. And one of those is to start early. It's just, you can start in middle school, but I don't, I don't want you to continue to think that that misconception is, oh, there's really only scholarships for a very limited window of time. The truth is, as long as you want to learn and participate in education that has expenses, there will be scholarships to help you. But again, it's a marathon, not a sprint, remember. So starting early is critical. The other thing I really want to focus on is your social media. I, I love it too. I love Pinterest. I have Snapchat so that I can see what's going on with my own kids. Like, I understand how much you love your social media, and while I support that, I want to bring to your attention that it's actually one of your best tools. You can set yourself, self up for success if you know that college admissions counselors— and I think this latest statistic I read was 72% of college admissions counselors do go stalk you. And I guarantee you, if I were a corporation giving away money for a scholarship, I would want to see where that money was going. In fact, the more money, even more so. If I were giving away $80,000, I would want to go see if this student represented themself on the application one way, I would want to see if that student also represented themself in real life, on their social media, in the same light. I call that integrity. When you open something up, I always think of a jawbreaker. So when you open something up, integrity to me means that it should look the same on the inside as it does on the out. And so I encourage you that how you present yourself in scholarship applications and college applications should be the exact same way that you present yourself in your social media. I think it's really, really important that these people have an opportunity to see you. In fact, a lot of my students that I've worked with in the past, I encourage them to have an online portfolio, which is really a resume where people can see you and get to know you. And this next part seems very simple, but it's really important to have a professional email. And so I almost encourage you to set up a new email for the college admissions process and/or the scholarship process. So that it doesn't get mixed in with your other email and it is something very professional. And I understand, so one of my favorite students, her email was ballerina with a racket because she danced and she played tennis. And while I love it, I think something more professional would be more beneficial in this case. And having a great resume, and that is another thing that internships offer. They offer you an opportunity to have something on your resume that most people do not have. So building a great resume, having internships, all these things not only help you in the college admissions process, they help you with scholarships. They're all a piece of the puzzle. So setting yourself up for success is really, really important. And finally is a great essay. So when you're applying to both college and for scholarships, having a couple of really good essays in your back pocket is super important. And Shellee Howard can tell you more about that in a minute. But I kind of think of essays like this. If you've ever had an artichoke— I know it's kind of a funny green vegetable that maybe you've never even heard of. But anyway, artichokes, you might look it up on my blog. I actually do a whole blog post on artichokes and how people are like artichokes because they kind of are. Anyway. An artichoke, the real good part of the artichoke is in the middle. It's in the heart of it. And that's kind of how a great essay for scholarships is. If you peel back all the layers of who you are and all the superficial stuff and you get to the heart of who you are, what are your gifts and talents? What makes you different? What makes you shine? What makes you stand apart? Why should they give you the scholarship money? These are all questions you should ask yourself. And in order to be successful, successful, you need to put those down in a way that connects the reader to your story. And here's the thing, you may think your story is boring, but it's not because you're the only one with your story. So your story, everything that you already have in your life, is exactly what you can use to help you win scholarships, gain internships, and college admissions. So I'm going to take a little break and let Shellee tell us a little bit more from her side of things.

Excellent. Well, I hope you guys are having a blast because we're talking about money. I always love to do this. Let's take a moment and just kind of let your brain relax for a minute. And if you have notes on your phone or if you have a piece of paper to write it down, I want you to think about this. If I gave you $1 million— okay, you're not even smiling. Come on. $2 million. If I gave you $2 million and you had to spend it, or in 24 hours, or I would take it all back, what would you do with it? Write it down because this could equal a prize for you. So as you're doing that, I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to give you guys an opportunity to see some other ways to earn scholarships because In this process of college admission, there is no one right way. There are a lot of really good opportunities, but it is just as unique as you are. So, all right, can somebody chat that you can see my mouse moving on my screen, please? Anybody?

Yeah, we sure can.

Excellent. I was having— I don't know about you guys, but Zoom's been a little, you know, wonky lately. This is our, our student portal. This is a fake student of ours, so I'm not sharing anybody's information, but I wanted to take a few minutes to show you where the biggest scholarships come from. So as I've told you before, this year alone our students have earned $5.5 million for the class of 2021. And we're not even halfway done yet. How did they do that? I get this question all the time. How did my son go to Harvard and graduate debt-free? And my daughter go to nursing school and graduate debt-free? Hundreds of our students, thousands of kids all over. This is the genius. So I have my fake student here. This is, um, Vincent's portal. And so I want to show you an example of how you can go and get some great scholarships. So I don't want to pick on Utah or Ohio right now. Let's go ahead and pick on— let's see, what are some places? Let's go to University of Alabama. So University of Alabama has been a really popular school, and so I want to just kind of show you an example of what— this is real numbers. This is not U.S. News and World Report. This is actual numbers of students who got in last year. So as you can see here, the first thing I like to show my students where the money comes from is if Vincent has a 3.5 GPA and the average GPA is 3.71, the chances of Vincent getting a scholarship for merit at the school is very low. So this would not be a really great scholarship opportunity for Vincent. So with that, we're going to keep going and go, okay, well, maybe there's still hope at this school because I really like their football team. So now you look at the purple section here for the SAT and the ACT is the average score. So if your mark, your, your test score is on the low end not a lot of money at the school for you. If it's in the middle, the average, now we're talking some reduced tuition. And when you're this far over like Vincent, show me the money. So this is important. Picking the right school is the most important critical piece to going debt-free. Then I come down and I show students 57% of all students full-time receive aid from this school. That's important. Some schools are down here. Those are not going to get you free or reduced. So picking the right school is critical. Then you want to come over and you want to look, do they have my major? Yes, absolutely, they have my major. If you want to do taxation as an undergrad, this is not a good school for you. So we match that up and then we get into essay requirements. So at this school, you may love this, no essay to get in here. Really? This is quite amazing. Then you look at the supplements. If you want to attend a school, there is no supplement or optional. So you definitely want to apply or share anything you can with this university. The last thing I will tell you about where the money comes from— so it's your GPA, your test scores, your community service, your leadership, your extracurricular— but also this section right here. At a university, they give you options to do early decision, early action, regular decision, early decision 2, and so many more. If you click on this one right here, early decision, you are now telling them you are happy to pay full price to attend their school. So if money is a concern and you don't want to consider any other schools, this is a binding financial commitment. If you want reduced or free, this is not a good strategy. So As you can see, it's not just one thing. It's many things that are going to get you into college. And then, of course, there's the essays. So in our portal, we walk students through, what does test optional mean? What are the best fit colleges for them? What and how should I apply? Is going to go on my calendar? What type of assessments can I take to really figure out what I should be applying for, for scholarships? And then of course you wrap it up with a bow and you have your essays. So now you have a much better understanding. So when you think about the big picture in how my son got into Harvard and graduated free, It is not one thing. He didn't have a perfect GPA. He didn't have a perfect test score. Don't tell him I told you that. He didn't even have the best first draft of his essay until our editors helped him polish it up. They did not write it. They did not take away his voice. But yes, they made it more interesting. They made it so it was fun to read. Because you have to remember, these admissions readers are reading thousands of essays. So if yours doesn't have a strategy, something that's going to hook them, something that's going to make it— them want to read it, you're going to go into the wrong pile. So as you think about scholarships and what's most important, we help our students understand it is a strategy. If you take the strategy of I'm just gonna apply, and if I get in, I'll figure out the money, that is a very scary proposition because then you leave yourself wide open for massive amounts of loans, for putting your family in a financial bad situation because your parent doesn't want to say, I'm sorry, you can't go because we can't afford it. That's when you're calling up my friend Sherry and saying, ooh, I didn't do it the right way the first time. Help me figure out how do I fill that gap? And that's why I invited Sherry and her team, because there are students who didn't quite come into our program early enough. In other words, they came in at the very last minute and didn't quite work the strategy And now they're left with this huge gap of how do I fix the problem. So as Sherry said, what's really important is the marathon. We help students as young as when they promote from 8th grade. So if you're thinking— I get this all the time— ah, yes, my son or daughter is a junior and I know we're really early and I'm like, huh, Early for what? Because it's hold your breath, it's fire hose the information, it's I want to help you but can you keep up with the pace we need to go? Or do you start early and do it gently, start applying for these big scholarships all the way through? It's not one and done, right? It's not just filling out one thing. So My assistant, my wonderful assistant Michelle, has put a poll up there in the chat, and I would encourage you to complete this because it's linked to a gift. It's linked to a prize. Remember, we're celebrating. We're celebrating the success of all of you. You wouldn't be on this party if you didn't see the value of a college education, the value of not going into debt. I will share one more story and then I am going to turn it back over to Sherri. It is really odd. Sherri and I just met each other. I don't even remember how we met, but both of our sons are in medical school. How ironic, right? My son just completed medical school and he is heading off to residency. He is going to be an orthopedic surgeon. Why I share this is not to brag because I didn't do the work. It is to let you know that he has no debt. And that's why he's able to do what he's doing, because I promise you, if he paid $63,000 a year to attend Harvard times 4, there wouldn't be no opportunity for more medical debt because this mama didn't save that much money. So having the strategy of how you're going to negotiate, what is the best college for you, where the best money is going to come from, and then wrap it up with a bunch of scholarships. That is how you do reduced and free education. So with that, I'm going to turn it right back to Sherry.

Howdy. OK, while Shellee was speaking, I was able to look through some of the chats. And oh my goodness, these students are truly, truly on top of it. I can tell that they're motivated about their education. They're eager to learn. They've got a lot of momentum behind them to find scholarship dollars, which is super exciting. So I want to, um, address some of the questions that I did see in the chat. So one of them said, I don't have social media, do I have to have that? And the answer is no, absolutely you don't have to have social media. There are many, many ways to begin networking with admissions counselors and with people who are offering scholarship dollars. And so it would just mean that the other parts of your application would be even more critical. And so that is easy to do. You just got to figure out what makes you different, what makes you unique, and definitely capitalize on that. Another one of the comments I saw in the chat is that schools are test blind right now. That is a partial truth. And so, um, you have to think of things from the university perspective. The reason that schools are test optional right now was not because they were just trying to do a favor. It's because students were unable to take the test, and so they needed to level the playing field. However, I will tell you that from my perspective, I think if you are a good test taker and if that is your strong suit, that I think this could absolutely provide some financial benefit from the school for you. So if you are a good test taker, I encourage you to try harder than ever on that test right now. While others are not, it can give you a huge competitive edge. However, some of my own children, and I work with students on 3 continents, a lot of them are not good test takers. And so for those students, I would advise you to take advantage of the test optional situation that we have right now. And I have no idea how long that will take. But that's just my personal perspective. It can work in your favor. For financial benefit. If you have other questions, please put them in the chat. I would love to answer them. I do want to tell you that the scholarships that you're looking at right now are very limited view. And so there is a fee to have access to the whole thing. We're actually going to give away a whole bunch of those later this evening, kind of from the results of the scavenger hunt. So if you will contact us on my site, there's a contact link, and if you have any questions, you can contact me there. I'll answer anything that I can, or if you have things in the chat, I'm trying to look at those. Um, oh good, somebody who wasn't logged in was able to get logged in.

Good.

The deadline for the Celebrate U Scholarship is— it is, it is cyclical. It is going to happen 4 times this year, and so, um, it just continues going. So every 3 months we will choose someone new And if I were you, I would continue to apply. Oh, Shellee Howard, someone's asking if you will discuss early action. That is another question I see. Okay, so like I was saying, we're going to give away several years free access to the scholarship database. And if you want access to the entire thing, it is $16.99 a month, which I feel like is for all the internships. I think there's 7,000 scholarships in there right now. All the video resources. I personally think it's an incredible deal. So I would encourage you to look at that if you feel that it could be beneficial to you. So I think that is all that I personally have for now. Again, you can contact me on my website. If you are not able to log in, um, please let me know. We want to make sure that you have access. And it looks like in the poll we learned some really cool things, and I am going to give it to Shellee and let her take it from here. And I really appreciate you letting me have the opportunity to visit with you this evening.

Excellent. What great information. I know there's so many questions. I'm trying to keep up with them as we're going, and just know that we value your time. If you would like to speak with us, here's the best way to do that. We're giving so many opportunities completely free because we don't want this to be about us selling you anything. You're asking us for that information and we're just trying to give to you. So if you have questions for either myself, College Ready, or Imagine Scholarships, you know, college consulting is all about the strategy and Imagine Scholarships is all about the scholarship. So together they are just an incredible opportunity. We will also be reaching out to you students by email because we want to make sure you're checking your email. I want to share with you, I have a student who last year was not checking their email. They had 24 hours to accept a $40,000 scholarship from a university and they missed it. Do you think those parents were a little upset? Absolutely. So I'm going to encourage you instead of— we were going to give it all away and celebrate and go crazy, but I kind of want to use this as an opportunity for you to go in and clean out your email and get it ready to start receiving free money. So I'm going to be offering a free strategy session We're also having an amazing opportunity for passion projects. So I know people who understand the college admissions process understand the unique opportunity that you have to stand out. So if you do not have a strategy, do not just count on your GPA to get you into college. You absolutely need to have a plan, and that plan needs to be bulletproof. Please know the difference between test optional and test blind, how many service hours you need to before you start applying, what is good leadership. These things are, are not a dart going to a dartboard. They're actually a strategy and a plan. So we're doing a Passion Masterclass where I personally am going to be meeting with students across the globe, um, 1 hour a week for 5 weeks. It's on a Sunday in the afternoon, so you can sleep in, and I'm going to teach you step-by-step process on how you can not only start a passion project You can also join others. You can make it nationally or rec— or globally recognized because we'll have students from everywhere. So if you want more information on that, I'm happy to give that to you. And then of course, my book is always available because I want everybody to have the opportunity of not only getting into college, but graduating debt-free. So Couple of last questions. I want to honor your time. And that is, um, let's see, let's talk about early action, early decision. These have to be based on your family's financial strategy. There are pros and there are cons, and it needs to be on your specific strategy. There is not one best way to do it unless you're willing to pay full price, don't care, you know, there, there's even some, some strategy to that. So without confusing you, the person who asked that, please feel free to hop on a strategy session with me. It's completely free and I can speak to your specific situation. So with further ado, I'd like to say thank you all so much for joining us this evening, and if you need to reach us, please do that. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Have a wonderful evening.

Thank you.