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February Goals

Reviewing Award Letters

As our scholars begin to receive more acceptances and financial aid packages, it’s our job to help make sure they fully understand the offers they have on the table. This folder of uAspire award letter review materials has fantastic resources to work towards this goal, including this year’s spreadsheet analyzer tool and talking points/example scenarios around these potentially difficult conversations.

If you and your students want to brush up together on award letter terms, the uAspire Award Letter Review Workbook (download the pdf to zoom in more easily, and check out the Award Letter Glossary beginning p. 28 of the pdf if you haven’t already) we’ve shared previously should help!

Making Campus Connections!

We’re excited to roll out the ScholarMatch Campus Ambassador Network for students. See the announcement to the right for more! ➡️

Beyond this SM coach network, we’d love for you to tap in to your personal networks around the core of this goal: helping students gather information about colleges they’re seriously considering from those who can speak to it best. Imagine how many people could be available for students to speak with if we include one or two degrees of separation for our hundreds of volunteers!

It’s also invaluable for any HS senior to connect student-to-student with an undergrad, and colleges’ admissions offices can often put accepted students in touch with current undergrads at their institutions.

Announcements

Click here to read Our January Newsletter!

Varsity Coaches

Have specific content questions? Don’t forget to leverage the knowledge of your Varsity Coaches who have expertise on everything from FAFSA to socioemotional support to scholarships and more.

2019 Volunteer Convening

Returning coaches: save the date! Our annual volunteer convening will be held on July 12-13 in San Francisco, CA. Since we know summer schedules fill up early, we wanted to get the date on your calendars!

Campus Ambassador Network

Click here (pw: College; coach-facing FAQ here) to access the gallery view of campus ambassadors! We’ve shared the link in out student newsletter as well, but it won’t hurt for you to plug it as well. Here’s how you can play an active role in leveraging this tiil:

1. As you encourage them to search for colleges represented in the ambassador network by typing institution names into the top-right search bar, emphasize that all of the smiling faces in this gallery opted-in to make themselves available!

2. If a student has identified someone they’d like to speak with, make an introduction! HS students can be understandably nervous about emailing strangers (even friendly, knowledgeable, eager-to-help coaches who we’ve trained and background-checked), so you can play an invaluable role just by kicking off the correspondence.

Winter & Spring Student Engagement

As students finish submitting their applications, they often feel they are “done” – but there is of course plenty for students to work on! Student engagement begins to dip in the winter. Now is the perfect time to revisit your engagement expectations with students. Review our State of Student Engagement doc for more context, and of course let us know how we can help.

Scholarship Action Plan

Goal: find at least 2 scholarships to apply for!

For the winter and spring, after college applications are submitted, students identified scholarships as their most-requested area of support.

You can refer to our Scholarship Action Plan to help your student(s) stay organized, develop a search strategy, create their scholarship brand, and practice interviewing. (Remember our College Application Tracker? If you used it with your students, take advantage of the Scholarship + Fly-in Programs tab!)

Walking your student through the scholarship research and filtering process on any of the major scholarship websites is a great use of a January call!

A note on outside scholarships: we recommend that students look in to the outside scholarship displacement policy for schools on their list. Some schools decrease or remove loans first; others unfortunately decrease or remove institutional gift aid.

Free Interview Access for ScholarMatch Students!

There is still time for your student(s) to create a FREE account through InitialView, which allows them to record and share a 90 second elevator pitch with as many schools on the platform as they would like.

Feel free to browse some interviews here from students who used InitialView and were accepted to their first choice schools!

Students can also use 2 virtual stars to demonstrate preferences to their top 2 schools.

Fin Aid Support

Has your student been flagged for FAFSA verification? Do they need help finishing the CSS Profile, or navigating IDOCs?

If so, check out this CollegePoint folder (also housed in our College Toolkit) of up-to-date, thorough resources from uAspire.

Don’t hesitate to reach out if we can help troubleshoot any particular challenges!

College Toolkit

The College Toolkit contains documents, resources, and links on topics as wide ranging as how to build a balance college list, how to submit the FAFSA, scholarship lists, and more.

Click Here to Open the Toolkit

Program Calendar

The Program Calendar displays information about major monthly goals, data deadlines and reminders, scholarships, webinars and other training opportunities, major university system deadlines, and more. We are continuously updating this with new information! You can also view this information, organized by date in a grid view, here

Click Here to Open the Calendar!

Scholarship Spotlight

New Scholarships!

Due 12/14: Foot Locker Scholar Athletes
Due TBA: Liv Más Scholarship

Upcoming Deadlines

Review & share our November Scholarship Spotlight document with your students for more information! You can also find all of our previous Spotlights in the College Toolkit.