Shellee Howard shows College Ready's Knowledge Vault, a password-protected portal that combines messaging, academic planning, a global college database with admissions criteria and costs, deadline calendars, and task tracking. Built on 17 years of admissions expertise, it keeps students, parents, and consultants aligned through the application process.
Chapters
The Knowledge Vault is an incredible piece of technology that I hope that you will enjoy starting today. I wanted to give you a brief overview of what you can expect from the Vault. We call it our Knowledge Vault because it stems from 17 years of knowledge and staying up to date of who got in last year. So the first thing you will notice is that our vault is password protected. Every student has their own StandOut strategy, and therefore the student can work in here and feel protected. The only people who have the password is your parents, the student, and the consultants. So the first thing you'll see is our message board. This is where we discuss what is happening right now. Things that need to be taken care of today and in the future, resources from everything that you would need from research, internships, and summer opportunities, as well as prep programs. In here you'll also see an opportunity to view meetings. If you purchased one-to-one with a college consultant, you would do that right here. Otherwise, you will have access to our email, which is right here. You can leave questions directly in here, and we will get right back to you. The next thing you'll see is whatever the student is currently working on or still needs to do to keep the process moving. This is just the dashboard. Then you can see there are several other tabs. There is the testing tab. This is where the student can come in and look at what kind of test, test dates, register by, when they need to register, when it's too late, and any results. They can add test dates directly here and keep track of all of their testing scores. The next one is my favorite tab, and this has every college in the world. You simply click the button, you add a college, you click on it, add it, and now you have the opportunity to see what it does. Like I said, this is not something you will find on Google. This is part of your Vault. So once you click on any school that you add, you will see some very important things. You will see quick facts. You will see admissions. You will see GPA, test scores. You will see total cost. You will see financial aid, how generous they are, and other campus activities. You will also see notes that I have left for our students. You will see the program that each college has. Most people don't realize this, but not every college has every major. You can see that if there's no checkbox, they do not offer it as an undergrad major or master's or doctoral. So in here is everything you need to see. Is this an academic fit for the student? Then you can see the details, when it was started, what's important, everything you would possibly want to know. From here, you get to see what does it take to get in. At this school, there are 10, 13 essays for one school. So we help the student understand what are the prompts, what are the activities, what are the additional, what are things that are optional, are they truly optional? And then we have scholarship opportunities for the student. You can add any school in the world. The next one is the calendar. Once you decide what colleges you truly are going to apply to. All of them drop into the calendar. You can have this hooked up to your cell phone so you never miss an application deadline, due date, or test opportunity. From there, we have the to-dos. When a student is getting started, it may be a simple to-do. They click on it, they have all the details. When they're working on it, they move it to in progress. When they have completed it, they simply move it to completed. We get notified that the student is making progress. As they get down, we add more to-dos so we don't overwhelm them with the 67 things they need to do. We only add a few of them at a time. Every email that we send out to our college-ready families gets put in here so it's easy to find. In here you will find the Vault Files. This is our intellectual property of all of the details that you will need to know to have a successful college application season. So there are so many things in here that we want you to be successful that I can't go into all of them at this time. You You are always welcome to check this out. Have fun with it. Ultimately, this is for you and your student, for their success and your success. Thank you so much, and I hope that was helpful.
