One of these movers and shakers will be awarded with the Inherent Prize in recognition of their social entrepreneurship. The grand-prize winner receives $50,000, with the runner-up nabbing $25,000. Get to know more about each below, and check back after November 15th to read about the winner.
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Tag: education apps
Which College is Right for You?
There are thousands of community colleges, state colleges and universities all over the country. How does a high school student know which one is the right one for them?
For every high school senior who’s dead-set on becoming, say, a UCLA Bruin after graduation, there’s another who has no idea where on earth to spend the next two or four years.
The new website, Admittedly, is out to help students find a little bit of clarity. Described as an OKCupid for college, the site acts like an personal online college counselor.
In fact, founder and former private college admissions counselor Jessica Brondo started her site last year because she was concerned about the average ratio of high schoolers to college counselors (476 to 1), which makes difficult for kids to get the personal attention they need when it comes to this important decision, TechCrunch writes.
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Here’s how it works: After answering a bunch of short questions, the site matches students with colleges that are in line with their personality, academic and extracurricular interests.
It also categorizes schools into reach, target, and safer categories based on a user’s high school resume.
Users can also take the information from the site to plan visits to these institutions, plus it has tips to improve those crucial college applications, too. Admittedly — which just secured $1.2 million in funding — is currently a free service.
Admittedly is a definite boon to students who want to go to college but don’t have access to high quality counselors and can’t afford campus visits . As we previously reported, a large majority of high-achieving, low-income students don’t apply to selective colleges or universities because they simply don’t know about the opportunities out there (application waivers, financial aid, scholarships, grants) to help them in the college process.
Turns out, choosing the right college doesn’t have to be such a painful process after all.
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These Student Hacks Make Choosing Classes Less Nightmarish
Crafting a college class schedule is no easy task. It’s a delicate balance of finding the right classes at the right time with the best professors. Inevitably, poor souls (mostly freshmen) will have no choice but to take 8 a.m. classes Monday to Friday with instructors they never wanted because all the best classes are already full.
However, two ingenious college students from different institutions have figured out how to beat the minefield of class-shopping time, the New York Times reports.
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Vaibhav Verma, a Rutgers University student in New Jersey, was frustrated about not getting the classes he wanted. So he built an online app, called the Rutgers Schedule Sniper, that surveys the university’s registration system and notifies users whenever someone drops out of a class. After developing it, 8,000 students used it the following semester, according to the Times.
And Zach Hall of Furman University in Greenville, S.C., created Classget.com that allows students to search course offerings based on teacher, time, date and general education requirement. Users are also alerted when the class they want has an opening.
While students crave these types of digital tools, universities can be less than enthusiastic about them, in part due to laws protecting students’ privacy. Which is exactly what Brown University student Jonah Kagan discovered when he created an app that enabled users to submit their three favorite classes, which, in turn, helped course shoppers find interesting electives. Because he couldn’t access student data and enrollment figures, the project never took off.
“Students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies can,” Harry R. Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard’s computer science department, tells the Times, “since bureaucracies tend to have messages they want to spin, and priorities they have to set, and students just want stuff that is useful. I know this well, since students were talking to me about moving the Harvard face books online seven years before [Mark] Zuckerberg just went and did it without asking permission.”
To help mediate the disconnect between students and university administration, student developers from across the country held a Campus Data Summit last summer. From the gathering, they published a Campus Data Guidebook that includes advice on making friends with faculty and asking for forgiveness, not permission.
Some lucky app developers, like Alex Sydell and William Li from University of California, Berkeley, attend schools that see the value in their creations. Sydell and Li created Ninja Courses, a course comparison website, and were paid by Berkeley for their innovation.
With STEM being such a hot button topic in education these days, we can only imagine that it’s only a matter of time before all universities welcome this type of student innovation with open arms.
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