The View from InitialView

We are excited to announce that more universities are excited to use CSAT (Suneung) scores in their admissions process!

The colleges/universities who will be accepting the CSAT and the InitialView interview for admissions include: Allegheny College, DePauw University, Dickinson College, Earlham College, Mount Holyoke College, Muhlenberg College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Otis College of Art and Design, Rhodes College, Rochester Institute of Technology, Skidmore College, Trinity College, The College of Wooster, Union College, the University of La Verne, and the University of Oregon!

In order to be considered by each of the sixteen schools, students only need to provide their CSAT scores to Uway and participate in an InitialView Interview and writing sample. Once they have completed their interview with InitialView, the universities will respond in approximately five business days. Importantly, students will not have to provide other materials in order to be evaluated for admission.

For more information, go to initialview.com/csat.

We're excited to announce Periscope, our new high school search tool!

We are often asked by counselors and parents for information about how students in their area use our interviews. After months of work collecting (and cleaning up!) the data, we are able to open this high school search database to all our users.

In addition to learning general usage patterns at your high school and its surrounding area, in many cases your high school will be accompanied by a video testimonial from a student who is a former classmate.

While not exhaustive by any means, we do have thousands of high schools from all over the world in our database, including high schools in China, India, South Korea, and North America. Every year we have a long list of new high schools to add, so if we don’t have your high school now we’ll likely add it in the near future.

If you are a counselor, reach out to us if you would like to know specific usage numbers for your school. And, you should definitely make use of the free tools we offer, tools that counselors all over the world are already using to help their students succeed.

Check out initialview.com/periscope!

There’s a saying we have at InitialView—that in admissions, everything always happens at once. That’s never more true than now.

Regardless—and maybe because of everything going on right now—we feel like we have an obligation to continue with our November 13th deadline for EPIC.

The first round left us with two observations that are hard to forget, even as we constantly refresh the landing page of The New York Times. First, the creation of an EPIC pitch was a confidence-building exercise for many students. Our CBO partners used EPIC to encourage students to put themselves out there. In fact, in response to CBO feedback, we had built a feature that allowed students to send their EPIC Pitch to their counselors for review. This turned out to be critical as it helped counselors reassure students about the quality of their pitches. What a great way to practice a critical life skill!

Second, students loved hearing from admissions officers. It made the process personal. Here’s a testimonial from one student: https://initialview.com/epic/testimonial.

One counselor had this to say: "In addition to the High Fivers, our students received feedback from college representatives via the Pool of Love and now some actually applied or are seriously considering applying to those as a result of college outreach. It is definitely an effective tool."

We polled all of the participating colleges after the first round. The part about EPIC that they appreciated most was the chance to “hear the students’ voices”. Since we all just participated in a national process to make our voice heard, we feel like it’s worthwhile to continue to help admissions officers hear the voices of your students.

So how to make this happen with such a busy schedule? Here are a couple of items:

1) New Colleges: The new schools are Babson College, Bard College, Dickinson College, James Madison University, Mount Holyoke College, Seattle University, UC Santa Cruz, UMass Amherst, the University of Vermont, Wake Forest University, and Whitman College. If you already did an EPIC pitch, you will have the chance to do three more “high fives” (so you should definitely take advantage of the chance to engage—you do not need re-record their video!). For students who have not done an EPIC pitch yet, you have the chance to meet all 40 schools on the platform!

2) Programming: We are going to do a webinar for any interested student/counselor on Wednesday, November 11th at 4PM PST/7PM EST. Register here: intl.vu/EPICwebinar. All first-time EPIC users (up to the first 1000) will also receive a gift card.

#makeyourvoiceheard #notyourtypicalcollegefair #makeyourcollegesearchepic