It's contest day!!

If you haven't done so, you have until 5 PM CST today to check this out and post it!!
http://www.anycollege.com/contest/index.cfm

Win a $250 giftcard for Target to deck out your future dorm room if you're an incoming college freshman in 2009 or 2010!!

New Contest!! $250 Giftcard to deck your dorm!

Win a $250 giftcard to decorate your dorm room! 3 easy steps below:

Step 1 Must be one of the following:

Follower of AnyCollege.com on Twitter (www.twitter.com/anycollege)
Fan of AnyCollege.com on Facebook (www.facebook.com/anycollege)
Friend of AnyCollege.com on MySpace (www.myspace.com/anycollege)

Note: Increase your odds of winning by adding AnyCollege.com on more than one social network!


Step 2: Must have the provided logo as your profile picture on August 12th
(Here's the link for the images: http://www.anycollege.com/contest/index.cfm)
Step 3 Make the following post to your profile on August 12th:

' Win a $2,000 AnyCollege.com Scholarship! Take five minutes to apply at http://www.anycollege.com/scholarship.cfm '

Special Instructions:

Twitter followers, RT @anycollege
Facebook fans, post to ‘What’s on Your Mind’
MySpace fans, post to ‘What are you doing right now?’ or ‘Bulletin Space’


Full Contest Rules:

1. Must be an incoming college freshman as of 2009 or 2010.
2. Must be a fan, friend, or follower of AnyCollege.com on Facebook, MySpace and/or Twitter. Note: Joining more than one network increases your odds of winning!
3. Must have the provided AnyCollege.com logo as your profile picture on August 12th (all day!) AND post the following link to your page – Win a $2,000 AnyCollege.com Scholarship! Take five minutes to apply at http://www.anycollege.com/scholarship.cfm.
4. Winner will be chosen at random for a $250 giftcard and will be notified on August 13th through instant message on Facebook, MySpace and/or Twitter. No information submission is necessary to win, however the winner must provide us with a mailing address for the giftcard.

New Scholarship!

New scholarship available at www.mycollegescholarship.com

Check it out and have a great long weekend!

Congrats to our $1,000 drawing winner!

We are pleased to announce that Paulding County High School in Georgia is our newest High School Member drawing winner!

Their high school will receive $1,000 to use however the school feels is best. (Hopefully they will let us know so we can share it on here.)

Congratulations!

If you need more information about entering the drawing, please check here:
High School Member Page

Data Use and Privacy Policies

Don't tell me THAT doesn't sound like an exciting title for a blog!

While it might not be the most exciting, I do think it's a fairly important topic to address, especially with all of the college search sites and scholarships available on the web. Most sites like this will, at some point, ask you to give at the very minimum your name and email address, sometimes a zip code. This can also include address, academic interests, phone numbers, test scores... etc.

Most of these sites, both scholarship and search, have affiliated colleges who will have access to this information. And these colleges, who are actively recruiting, will probably contact you at some point, whether or not you have specifically expressed interest in them. This may be via email (most common) but a few may send you something in the mail or even call you.

If you are undecided on a school I would recommend taking a look at what they send you. Sometimes an option presented out of the blue can be a good one! If you are fairly sure of where to go but haven't committed yet I would still recommend looking at the information if only as a test of how sure you are of your college choice. If you're wavering at all figure out why and what qualities you are looking for in a college that the initial choice doesn't have. There are enough colleges in the US that I can pretty much promise you that there is an ideal school for you out there- it just might not be close to home.

But, if you are decided and committed and all of those fun things, then politely let the schools contacting you know that you are already committed somewhere else. Believe me, they'll be OK with it, wish you luck at that school, and should take you off of their lists. Otherwise, if you receive an email that you never respond to most schools will (correctly) take that as a "no". (This, in school lingo, is called a double opt-in. It's why sometimes they'll confirm it via by asking you to reply when you do request information.)

However, if you're concerned about this ALWAYS check the privacy and data use policies when you submit your information. If you're not sure then contact the company and they should tell you.

I do receive quite a few emails asking me why schools are contacting them, but our data use policy states that when you submit a scholarship application your information (nothing sensitive, just mainly contact info and academic interests) is made available to our members schools. The hard part is that once we send out the information to the school it is up to that school as to what they will do with it, and while I can pull you off of the Anycollege email list I cannot remove you from XYZ College's email list.

As far as I can tell right now, that is how most sites function that are similar... so if you sign up for anything on a website that has anything to do with colleges, be prepared to hear from colleges!

Please let me know what questions you have on this topic... it seems to be a pressing one now that quite a few of the Class of '09 has selected their schools but are still on the mailing lists of many colleges and universities.

What would your high school do with $1,000?

That's the question of the day!

Fix the copier? Take all the teachers and staff out for a picnic? Create a new scholarship? Bring a performing arts group to the school? Replace some desks and tables? Buy a sports team some new equipment? Have the most rockingest post-prom party EVER?

Do you have a few ideas for your high school? Good!

Now, high school counselors, teachers and other staff... have you signed up for the Anycollege.com High School Member Drawing? It's free to enter, there are some other perks (i.e. get some swag for your office) AND if you win the drawing you win $1,000 for your high school! There are two drawings per year, and once you're entered you're in on all of them! (We have occasionally drawn a counselor who totally forgot they signed up... oops!)

Students- tell your high school teachers and counselors about this! Do you have something you think your school could use the money for? Tell them!

How do you sign up?
Just go here: www.anycollege.com/hsmembers and you can learn all about the contest as well as the information on becoming a Free High School Member!

Good luck! Next drawing is May 15th!

Questions? Email us at mail@anycollege.com!

Grammatical Notes

Forgive me, I have to air this out because it is driving me crazy. I have two major pet peeves with grammar: unnecessary capitalization and homonyms. Take note for scholarship essays!

There is no Reason to capitalize random Nouns that are not proper nouns while writing a Sentence. (See?) Please refer to the capitalization rules at: http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/capital.asp

Then there are homonyms. They sound alike but are not spelled alike. There, they're, their... you're, your... those are the biggest ones that I see being confused and none of them have remotely the same meaning so they are not interchangeable.

Here are four pages of these words, their definition and rules as to when to use each one if it is confusing (i.e. except and accept) http://www.grammarbook.com/homonyms/confusing-words-1.asp

Why does this come about, you ask? I see them quite frequently on Facebook status updates. Yes, it's "just" a social network, but I believe when many people can see you using grammar incorrectly it kind of looks bad for you. Sure everyone might be doing it, but wouldn't you want to look a little more educated? I also get them quite a bit in requests for scholarship applications, and it makes me worry a little bit that the reliance on computers has taken away the understanding of some of these grammatical rules.

I recall once a letter a friend sent to me to ask why it got such a negative response when she was coaching a youth cheerleading league. It was a letter to the parents of the children asking them to bring the children on time and prepared, and to be at practice every week. It had a fairly angry tone as she was quite exasperated when writing the letter. However, there were so many grammatical and spelling errors in the letter I had to send it back to her and tell her that I would have pulled my child out of a league in which a coach sends out a letter like that- not for the content or what it said but for the gross errors in the writing of the letter itself which reflected terribly on her.

So again, while not everything is of the magnitude of that letter or scholarship applications I think it is good to get in the good practice of knowing these grammatical rules and using them consistently... after all, you never know who is reading your Facebook status or Tweets!

PS- Are you following us on Twitter yet? www.twitter.com/anycollege

January Thaw!

I know it's February now. However, that still doesn't stop me from being excited that it got into the double digit range above zero for two days in a row!

Did you go outside? I skied all weekend and it was great! (Minus a few face plants because some of the tracks were icy...)

That reminded me of some of the websites I've been exploring lately for college sports recruiting. Most of them charge a nominal fee (under $100) for high school athletes to upload videos of themselves playing their sport and then allow college athletic recruiters to access the sites to view the videos of potential students. Definitely an interesting concept, I thought, even if some of the videos I watched were so shaky they made me borderline ill to watch. :)

I wonder what percentage of top tier athletes are using these, and also what percentage of coaches and other recruiters are watching them. I also noticed that it only covered sports that are considered "major"; hockey was sparsely represented, any snow sports were completely left out and running only had a minor showing- usually of the track and field variety. (Then again, I can't imagine a coach sitting through a video of a 5-10k cross country race!)

Are you using any of these websites? If so, which ones? Have you been contacted by anyone from a college? Or, on the collegiate side... are you a coach using these? Do you know of a coach who uses these sites?

I'm eager to learn more about this... (partially as a coach myself, though there wasn't a place for XC skiing...)

If You Want Free Money...

Anycollege.com has a scholarship.

If you go to the Anycollege.com website you will see a large link on the upper right corner that says "Win a Scholarship". That is what you click to find the application. It's on the front page... not hidden at all. If there are questions you can email mail@anycollege.com and I will be able to respond to any questions about the scholarship.

That being said, I do receive a few questions each day about the scholarship: how it is paid out (directly to the college), the dates for the drawing (The 30th/31st of March, June, September and December) and whether an essay needs to be submitted (no). That's fine, those are legit questions.

Then I also receive emails from students who want an application. Again, this is fine, I'm pleased to help students who have heard of us.

I also receive quite a few emails that claim to not be able to find the scholarship application on our site. This concerns me a bit because it's pretty obvious, and anyone who has spent 15 seconds on our home page should be able to see it. One today was sent to 5-10 other places that offer scholarships, but said "I was recently viewing your web site and encountered problems finding the application section." What?! OK, that's fine that the email is sent to several places, but this clearly isn't true. Something tells me that if this student actually looked at any of these sites that he/she would have found the scholarship page on at least a few.

Now, this does not mean I won't respond to the student. He/she will receive the same email that everyone else does- "Here's the link, thanks for your interest, etc etc etc..." But I can't help at being irked a little bit that the student had to include something about not being able to find the scholarship- why couldn't the email have simply said "I am interested in your scholarship, can you please send me an application." It's a little more truthful and really, simple and direct is the way to go with something like this.

I won't get into the requests that I get for an application that have a poorly written essay attached... actually on second thought I don't know if I can resist saying a little something... I understand trying to get an edge on the competition for a scholarship (never mind that we have a random drawing), but please note: if you are going to send an essay there are three things to remember. #1: Grammar. This includes correct word usage, punctuation and CAPITALIZATION! #2 Spelling. You typed it on a computer which I'm pretty sure has spellcheck. Use it! #3: Sob Story. I'm glad you're good at dealing with adversity, that you're putting yourself through college and that you are bettering yourself. That truly is wonderful. But do I need to get 3 pages of that wonderful? As Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit". Thankfully, I'm not doing the scholarship award based on essays, though I appreciate the literature.

So what's the moral here? Be simple and direct when asking for scholarship applications. It's OK to simply say "I need an application" without telling me that your dog died of a horrible disease and you're traumatized for life which caused you to search for three hours on our website and not find the scholarship application. I'll still give it to you, but you won't be the subject of a blog with a simple request. :)

Have a great weekend!