What advice do you have to help me grow my idea?
Idea Description
CollegeCounsel will be an online network for college-bound students with resources about the admissions process, selecting a university, and college life in general. It will allow high schoolers to connect with current college students and recent alumni who will be hand-selected to provide their own insight. CollegeCounsel volunteers will work with the student to provide feedback on application materials, suggestions for possible good-match universities and be an overall reference for students during the application process. This will be a great resource for all students, particularly those in schools with weak guidance programs and little funding for college counseling.
What will you do if you win $10,000 for this idea?
Establish the website, recruit volunteers to provide application guidance (perhaps with incentives), advertise that the resource exists to high schools across the country, connect with individual universities to get recommendations for volunteers and admissions information.
Vote for it now.
I'd definitely be interested in learning more. Keep up the enthusiasm! Check out my idea when you have a chance, huyuno.com. Hopefully you'll be one of the site's first members! Cheers :)
Is this already being done in your state? A Potential Challenge might be that there are sites already doing this, albeit not staffed with volunteers. Another potential challenge is going to be the training component- who will train the volunteers to answer the questions. Would each volunteer learn his or her own school and only represent his or her own school and be trained by the admissions office. Or, would you try to train a group of volunteers as cross-curricular admissions advisers to be able to answer questions across a wide range of university choices? I think you have a great idea. Just trying to help you think things through if you haven't already.
that is actually a great idea!... I always have people asking me things like this because my guidance office was OK in high school, but I knew how to get in there and find what I needed- this is a function I think a lot of high schoolers are looking for already (especially oldest children- even the parents aren't sure where to look at this point!)