Admish Finds the Colleges Fit for You
[Update: Admish is now in public beta.] Created by several undergrad students aiming to help out prospective college students, Admish is a yet-to-be-launched community for “college admissions that connects parents, students, guidance counselors and admissions officers.” By filling out a profile including information ranging from GPA and SAT score to household income, Admish helps students find a school geared towards their particular needs and interests.
However, in the time that I spent tinkering around on Admish, I can tell it is built to do much more than just find colleges. There’s a strong sense of community with the ability for users, particularly students, guidance counselors and admissions officers, to message each other in addition to admishionary, a section of the site devoted to guiding students through a variety of articles.
Thoughts
It would have been great to use a site like this when I was going through the rigors of the college admissions process. I applied to 12 universities from ones in Texas to New York and ended up at Georgia Tech. When people ask me why I chose Georgia Tech my first response is usually “I wanted to get out of Texas and away from home” but it’s more along the lines of Georgia Tech’s world-wide recognition and ranking (#7 public national university for 2008), which in my translation means my degree will mean something. Although I tend to agree with what the other famous Paul believes; that it doesn’t matter what college you attend.
Admish has the potential to change the way prospective students search for colleges - long gone are the days of scouring through those phone book-sized directories listing stats about universities in hopes of finding one that fits your needs. As for feedback to the Admish team, it took me a while to figure out how to use the whole site. For example, after making a thorough profile how would users go about filtering their college search results by the information in their profile? Or is the private profile information primarily for the reference of guidance counselors and admissions officers?
The site design seems very busy and could reap the benefits of toning down a bit: less drop shadow, more content organization. Also, the tooltips and animated menus get a little annoying. I think it would be great to create a sort of “pulse” page highlighting activity on Admish or a “for me” page displaying suggested colleges, local and out of state, based on profile information as well as listing users with similar interests.
Admish plans on launching in late September and is finalizing a partnership with Princeton Review and ETS, so definitely keep an eye out. What was your college application process like?
First of all hi Paul (should I say Pavlo?) and greetings from Greece.
This is a great find, although I have almost graduated, I’ve been looking for something like this for quite a while.
My college application process was the same as all of the other students in Greece.
(Not so sure if I should give more details since you are Greek, but I dont know how familiar you are with the education system here)
Basically it goes like this fill out as many universities as you can, in the unified application form that is provided by the ministry of education, starting with the ones you prefer, and you will end up somewhere..
I ended up in Telecommunications :-)
Thanks for describing the process in Greece Spyros, I wasn’t too familiar with it. Over here there is a unified application form (”Common App”) for schools within Texas, and I’m sure other states have it, but when applying to schools across the US, you have to fill out many different applications.
You’re right Paul. The Common App is used by 150 independent schools nationwide http://commonapp.org
Very cool. Hopefully it’ll come in handy for me, since I’m searching for colleges right now. I also didn’t know you were from Texas, just like me.
I guess I spoke a bit too quickly, and didn’t read the fact that it wasn’t up yet… Oh well.
In Australia, you choose courses+universities- so you say: “I’d like to do Computer Science at Melbourne.” that has a code. You build a list of 12 preferences (ie, of codes of courses and place), then you get your scores from year 12, and have a chance to change your list of 12, then there are 3 rounds of universities offering places.
Somehow you end up somewhere. (of course, this is per state)
Hi Paul,
I just wanted to say that as a high school senior, this site sounds very helpful. It is very difficult to find schools that match what you want and what you want to do. The College Board’s “College Matchmaker” is helpful to a certain extent.
I’ll be writing essays and filling out applications soon enough! I’m looking to be an IT major, so it will be interesting.
Thanks for another great post!
Do the admish people actually believe that college admissions officers are going to take the time to read through tens of thousands of internet profiles in addition to the applications that they require?
With so many colleges on the common app, it’s already easy to apply to a lot of colleges through one place.
The site is sloppily put together and hard to navigate. They have too much fancy code and javascript that only adds needless complication. They should have remembered to Keep It Simple, Stupid.
My prediction is that this site is going to be a hyped-up flop reminiscent of late-90s tech bubble dot-com fiascoes.
Kevin M, It seems you misunderstood the point. You don’t apply to college through admish. It is a free information sharing community where people can connect with each other.
Good concept, but the biggest problem off the bat is that no one will (or at least no one should) start pumping all their personal information into an impersonal site. You want to know about me? You go first. There’s absolutely nothing here on who’s behind the site, contact information, etc. The privacy policy is also lame. It doesn’t give users any ability to control how all this info is used.
Their My permissions link is really cool and a lot easier to use than Facebook’s.
As a high school senior, I actually don’t find it that useful. It seems like a poor hash together of everything I already know about the college admissions process. Besides the over the top design, there don’t appear to be that many interesting features. I agree that very few college admissions personnel will actually take the time to interact with students.
Hi Danielle. You’re very fortunate and must have a good guidance counselor. Personally I haven’t met mine, so I think the site’s information is really helpful, and I’m glad it’s free.
Admish just launched a an intelligent college finder and dynamic ranking system:
http://www.admish.com/?q=the_best_college_for_me
I’m very curious to see where this gets taken and how it is perceived by universities–especially since some of these guys are from Princeton and MIT.