Branding

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A Conversation About College Part II

Last week, I wrote Part I of a series called, “A Conversation About College” which covered some of the more pressing questions that were asked at a workshop I recently conducted at Sacred Heart Church in Southbury, Connecticut. Today, I am sharing Part II with you:Q: We’re not sure what the best type of school is for our son. He might want to be a history teacher, but he’s not sure.As far as figuring out what type of school is the best one, that’s something that comes with time, conversation and research. There are many factors that go into defining what type of school your son will do well at. For example, he should be thinking about attributes such as location, size of the student body, cost, private or public and reputation. Once these bigger ticket items have been identified, he can start doing some visits and online research to see what appeals to him and what doesn’t.  When I work with clients individually, I walk them through developing a college list and this exploration I just mentioned is the first step.

Q: What type of extra-curricular activities are admissions counselors looking for?We talked about this at length the other night, so this may sound repetitive, but the best activities for your son to be involved in are activities that mean something to him and which help complement his brand – here’s a blog I wrote about branding back in the fall that may help shed some light on the concept. Ultimately, you want to encourage him to think about quality over quantity.Q: How important is the essay and the essay topic?

This is a great question because while the essay can be very important, the topic isn’t necessarily what makes it important. What matters in an essay is how you tell your story. An essay really can be about any topic, big or small, but it’s how the student connects to the essay and what they are able to reveal about themselves that matters. A student who can show some depth, who can demonstrate a level of reflection and who can get me to see that what he is writing about truly matters to him is a student who has done a great job with their essay. The best way for a student to accomplish this is to really invest some time in their essay and make peace with the fact that they will write and rewrite several times before their essay is done. In fact, what their final essay looks like may not look anything like the original concept when they started.

Q: We are just starting the college search and our son is a sophomore – where do we start?

For freshmen and sophomores, the focus should be on helping them figure out what is important to them, what their strengths, skills and abilities are and introducing the idea of what college is about. If you go to my website, you will see that I offer a package called the “Early Exploration Package for Freshmen and Sophomores.” Basically, I help students at this stage work through a self-assessment while exploring some long range goals that tie into the college process.

Q: How do we go about figuring out our financial aid & scholarship options?

Again, this is time sensitive for the most part since you cannot apply for financial aid using the FAFSA until January 1st of the student’s senior year in high school. If he or she decides they are applying to any private schools, they may be required to also fill out the CSS Profile. The Profile, however, can be filed prior to January 1st.  While you can’t do anything about filing just yet, what you can do is spend some time figuring out how much all of this is going to cost. There is some detail to this, but essentially you want to know what you will be expected to pay for school so that you have some time to plan. If you go on the College Board website, you can use their EFC Calculator to do just this. EFC stands for “Expected Family Contribution” and is a term you will get to know quite well as senior year approaches. Your EFC is what a college will expect you to pay and it is how they calculate what they will offer you in the form of aid, grants and loans. The higher your EFC, the more you will be expected to contribute and the less aid you will expect to receive. As of this past October, each college and university has been mandated to publish a net price calculator on their website. So, as your student identifies schools where he or she would like to apply, you can use their net price calculator to get a feel for how things might look financially. Here is a blog that I wrote about the EFC calculators.

Q: How to choose a career/major?

This is a great question and one that troubles many students as they work through this process. To be honest, I do some assessments with students to help flesh out their values, interests, personality style and skills – or what I like to call their VIPS. Once you have a good idea of what is important to a student, what they are interested in and what they are likely to do well at, it is a lot easier to present options for majors and to point them in the direction of some useful career exploration. If it turns out that their interests are all over the place, then you want to be looking at schools that offer a wide variety of majors and where a student can start off as an undeclared major and then take some time in first semester to continue their career exploration.

I wouldn’t worry about this issue too much as of right now, especially if your son or daughter is only a sophomore or junior. Over 50% of students end up changing their majors during their freshman year anyway.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the awesome moms out there! I hope you’re having a great day!

If you have any thoughts you would like to share on “A Conversation About College,” please use the comment box below – I would love to hear from you! You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.

Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.

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Eric May 13, 2012 , , , , , , , , , No Comments
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Why Your Major Matters….Sometimes

Why Your Major Matters SometimesI’m writing you from upstate New York this weekend. My wife’s grandparents live in Rochester and we decided to take a long weekend to visit them. Following my own advice, I took some time out of our vacation weekend to visit two colleges. Since we were right in Rochester, I chose to take a tour of Rochester Institute of Technology on Saturday and then, on our way back home to Connecticut, we plan on stopping off at Ithaca College. My wife is alumna of Ithaca, so it will be nice to see it through her eyes.

While touring RIT on Saturday, I was reminded of an article I saw recently that talked about how it really doesn’t matter what you choose for a major. In most cases, unless you need pre-professional training to be a nurse, accountant, speech language pathologist or an engineer, this is true. Just look around you and talk to the people you know – I will bet that most of them don’t even hold a degree that is directly tied to the work they do. And this brings me to what I want to talk about today. Sometimes, your major really does matter and a recent article in the U.S. News offers several reasons why a degree in a technical field such as computer science, software programming, or engineering really can matter.

According to the article, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects over a million new technical positions will be created by 2020. As our world becomes increasingly more driven by technology, data and information sharing, the need for talented individuals who understand how to design, produce, manage and secure these technologies will also increase significantly. In this case, majors do matter. Programs like computer science, information technology, software engineering, computer engineering, and information security can help point you in the direction of an exciting and growing career path. Don’t get me wrong – a degree alone is not going to deliver you to the promise land where you dream job is just waiting for you – having experiences along the way that support your brand as an aspiring technology professional while also showcasing your skills and abilities is what’s going to help you attain the jobs that you want the most.

In other words, you need to get out of the classroom and into a professional environment. You need to be able to show what you can do, not just what you learned. In the world of college, this is called experiential learning and it includes options such as volunteering, research, internships and co-ops. In case you don’t already know, a co-op is a full-time, paid work experience that can offer a student the chance to develop their skills and abilities while making valuable industry contacts.

RIT is a great example of a school where experiential learning is at the core of everything they do, especially in their co-op program, where over 3500 students obtain placements each year. A lot of these students are enrolled in programs similar to the ones mentioned in the article. As early as sophomore year, they are going out into the real world and obtaining valuable work experience and industry contacts. Some of them will complete multiple co-ops and, coupled with a degree that relates to critical needs in the world, these students will find success in their professional lives.

If you have any thoughts you would like to share on experiential learning and how majors matter (or don’t matter), please use the comment box below. You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.

Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.

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Eric Apr 15, 2012 , , , , , , , 1 Comment
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Seven Tips For A Successful College Interview

Last week I wrote about how important it is for students to be the ones to make the call when an interview needs to be scheduled. Today, I wanted to follow up on that idea with some tips on how to have a successful interview. In my career, I have interviewed hundreds of students – sometimes because I wanted to know more about them and sometimes because they wanted to come in and talk about their application and tell their story. I loved it when students sought me out first; when they wanted to make that concerted effort to demonstrate their interest and their potential.

From these experiences, here are seven tips to help you make the most of campus interviews:

1. Arrive at campus at least 10-15 minutes early and make sure you have contact information for your interviewer with you. This way, if you get lost, get stuck in traffic or cannot find parking right away, and are going to be late, you want to make sure they know WHY you are late. Don’t want to worry about this at all? Get to campus 30 minutes early and then you have some time to walk around on your own and collect your thoughts prior to the interview.

2. Have a game plan for what you want to accomplish. Yes, the interviewer is going to want to know certain things about you, but you also need to take an active role in the interview – what do you want the interviewer to know about you, your accomplishments, interests, and goals? Use your answers to provide specific examples the help demonstrate your brand.

3. Bring a list of questions with you in a small notebook so that you are prepared for when the interviewer asks if you have any questions for them. The interviewer will be impressed that you were prepared and it will show them that you are taking your college application process seriously. Just don’t ask basic questions that can be found on the school’s website. Focus on what’s important to you in your college search.

4. Try as hard as you can to be yourself. You don’t need to interview in a suit but do dress appropriately for the interview so that you are comfortable. The last thing you want to experience is a distraction from your ill-advised choice of clothing. Outside of your appearance, you also want to provide the school with a look at the authentic you and you’re not going to accomplish that if you are pretending to be someone you are not.

5. Speak clearly and listen attentively – you’ve earned this opportunity, now go in and own it. Talk to the interviewer, not the floor, walls or ceiling. Likewise, listen closely to the questions you are being asked and, if you need to, take a moment to think about how you want to respond. You want to make sure you are answering the questions but also sticking to your game plan of what you want them to know about you.

6. Don’t be afraid to follow up an answer to a question with a question of your own. For example, if you are asked about continuing a sport or activity, once you’ve answered, ask the interviewer about what they did in high school and if they were able to continue it in college. Did they find this difficult and what were the specific challenges?

7. Always thank the interviewer for his or her time. Get their business card or (contact information if it is a student interviewer) and send them a thank you card within 24 hours of your visit. Keep it simple and to the point but take the opportunity to restate your desire to attend or to reiterate a connection or pleasant moment that happened during the interview. Admissions counselors LOVE thank you notes!

If you have any questions about how to make the most of college interviews, please use the comment section below.

You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com for help on preparing for interviews and to complete a mock interview before you go in for the real thing.

Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.

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Eric Mar 04, 2012 , , , , , , No Comments
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Why Should You Go To College?

“If I want to start my own business, why do I even need a degree?”

This was a question posed to me recently and I was glad to see the student in question was really thinking about why he was going to attend college and what he may or may not get out of the experience. I thought it was a great question and while a degree itself may not end up amounting to much in the long run, the overall college experience absolutely can to many things:

1.) Develop Critical Thinking Skills: Any successful business owner will tell you that his or her day is spent solving problems. At any number of institutions, especially liberal arts colleges, one of the expected outcomes of their curriculum is to help you think critically. In other words, you should learn how to think outside the box, become a better problem solver, and be able to successfully navigate your way through issues involving moral dilemmas, diversity and conflicts of interest.

2.) Networking: While you are enrolled in school, one of the best things you can do for yourself is cultivate relationships with other students, faculty and staff. By expanding your network you will have the opportunity to share your ideas, gather support and fine tune what you want to do with your business. You may even identify future business partners or investors. Some schools like Yale even house entrepreneurial programs where students can develop their ideas into tangible businesses.

3.) Have a Back-Up Plan: More business fail than succeed and while you could turn out to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, the chances of this actually happening are not favorable. By going to college you can immerse yourself in a degree program that, should you need it, can help you put together a back-up plan in the event that your business venture doesn’t pan out.

Ultimately, college can offer so many benefits outside of just earning a degree. In fact, many of the greatest benefits may take place outside of the classroom. The people you will meet, the experiences you will have, the conversations you will take part in – all of these things and more will help you grow into the person you are in the process of becoming.

Have any thoughts, comments or suggestions on branding? Use the comment form below to tell me what you think!

Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.

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Eric Dec 04, 2011 No Comments
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What’s Your Brand?

The other day I was working with a current college freshman who is majoring in business. Our conversation rolled around to courses he should be taking in the spring semester and when I asked him how many business-related courses he had taken prior to entering college, I was both shocked and impressed by his answer: ten!

Now, most students with an interest in business should have a strong background in math – if they’ve taken calculus, that’s even better – and perhaps they’ve taken a course or two in statistics, accounting or economics. The ones who are really vested in their education at an early age and see the business world in their future will have taken all of the above. However, taking ten courses is another thing altogether. That’s building a brand.

What’s a brand you ask? Well, think about what you are interested in; how much do you really know about what it will take to do well in this program and, ultimately, in the profession? If you want to major in nursing, have you taken anatomy and physiology? For engineering, have you taken pre-calculus or calculus? Have you taken a CAD course? For business, have you taken statistics or accounting? If you’re like this student, have you immersed yourself in your interests to the extent that you’ve taken all ten of the courses related to your major at your high school?

If you’ve been taking this approach all along, if you have been preparing yourself for your major, then good for you! If you’ve taken the preparatory courses your high school offers towards your program, then you are in the process of building your brand. If they were AP or honors courses, even better – you could be in line to receive college credit from whichever college or university you attend.

The point here is that you can choose a major blindly and hope that it will be the right fit. You can operate on assumptions and hope that they will lead you to something. You can be ignorant of the course requirements for a program and assume that you will just make it work. However, you can also dedicate time to building your brand by doing several things:

1.) Take courses in your chosen field

2.) Complete a job-shadow with someone who does what you want to do 

3.) Volunteer your time to a cause or organization related to your field 

4.) Find a part-time job that gets you in the door somewhere where you will learn more about your major or your intended field

5.) Do some online research to see where your chosen major might lead you 

If I was still reading applications for an admissions office, I can tell you that this student’s application would have been one that I got excited about because it would have been readily apparent that his interest in business was authentic and informed. I would have seen that he started taking the first relevant courses as a sophomore and that he carried this interest through to senior year – he had consistency. I would have felt really good about how much more prepared he was going to be because of his prior exposure to the coursework, terms, ideas and issues involved in what is a very chaotic and volatile business world right now.

He started as a sophomore and you might be saying to yourself, “well, I’m already in my junior or senior year and it’s too late to build a brand.”

To this I say, “nonsense.” It’s never too late to start getting invested in that which you are passionate about. It’s never too late to start building a brand towards your future. You just have to choose to start…

Have any thoughts, comments or suggestions on branding? Use the comment form below to tell me what you think!

Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.

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Eric Nov 27, 2011 3 Comments