Signature Community Service Letter of Recommendation Made Easy

Signature community service letter of recommendation

[Music] [Laughter] hi everyone its Evelyn Alexandra's of magellan college counseling back to talk to you about the education section of your common application so you're going to log in it's going to take you to your dashboard do me a favor put a college on your dashboard it doesn't matter which one and you do that here through the college search tab and I'll tell you in a moment why I'm having you do that so I'm going to put hop in back on there because that's Rylan but I'm switching back over to my common app tab right here in the middle and we're just going to focus right now in the education tab so I'm just going to walk you through it so the first thing the first and remember all those sections have a little blue bar at the top right so this is how many sections we have to go through and you can see I've got green checks but I'm just going to walk you through it really quick so you're going to tell it here which school you attend right so you just you can search by color or you could search by name see there we go rail charter high school so here's El Camino so I'll use that one for now and if you are graduating in 2020 started in 2016 16 17 18 19 here we go August of 2016 and that's again for the class of 2020 I'm hoping this video will last for the ages it needs to know if you metroburg in school it need to know if you are graduating from this school so you should enter because it wants your most recent secondary school so this should be the one from which you graduated by the way if you did not do all four years at the high school that you're at make sure that this entry date is after it so for example if you started in tenth grade instead of ninth grade you'll this would be a different number all right it would snow when you're graduating and from purposes of this video this is the class of 2020 and they also need to know if you're graduating early or late or if you took time off or a gap year if you click any of these by the way you get a little box where you can explain why you're graduating early or I'm going to go back to no change in profession profession you do need your counselor named Chloe is my dog by the way you do and your counselors first name last name title and if you don't know your counselors title you can just put counselor or school counselor and you also need to know your counselors phone number and email actually I'm just realizing there's no red asterisks here who's going to lap the choir but it's nice to put them in there just in case a college has a question about your application so they have the ability to reach your password okay so that's excellent the common app now knows what school you are graduating from matter needs to know if you went to any other high schools now if you took a and this is high school not college so if you took a class using them class at another high school you need to enter it here and you need to tell it when you took that class even if it with an online class there are a lot of kids who work with take a summer class at Worlds freeze or they take a summer class at a different high school you want to make sure that you're adding that information here okay and now the common app assumes that you started one high school and then left and then went to the high school that you're currently at which may or may not be true in the example I just gave so if you are if you did just take a summer class somewhere else you just have to tell them I took a summer class at a different school but obviously if you moved you want to tell them that that's why you changed schools okay if you might ask if you've ever taken a college class so this would be if you've taken a class at a local Community College or if you did a summer program for which you received college credit you want to enter that here they're going to give you they're going to give you a choice to tell them exactly what the details are right so you give them this information when were you there did you earn a degree you'll notice there's no red asterisk here so you just leave that blank if you did not earn a degree okay you're going to the grade section which i think is quite funny because it has nothing to do with your grades it wants to know and again look at what's required by this red asterisk here it needs to know how many kids are in your graduating class approximate number is fine it needs to know if your school ranks so if you have an exact rank you know you're number 12 in a class of 241 you put exact right if your school tells you you're in the top decile 10% or middle you know second 10% so you're in the top 20% in fact how they rank or if they do it by quarter then you have to tell them right but if your school does not rank you click none and did you see what happened when I had an answer in here there's a place for class rank which is required if your school ranks but if you tell the common app that your school does not rank obviously it doesn't it doesn't give you a space for ranking okay it does need to know your GPA scale so if you if your school is on a 4.0 scale but but gives extra credit for honors and AP classes that's still a 4.0 scale okay some schools are on kind of wacky scale look we get down to the bottom of some kids have a 96 GPA it is what it is I'm just going to go with the 4.0 it wants to know what your cumulative GPA is that's 9 10 11 cumulative GPA you should include summer courses if they work for credit and you can choose to give either a weighted or an unweighted GPA I will be honest with you I prefer reporting an unweighted GPA I think it's just cleaner because they don't know how many weighted courses you took just by looking at this information so if you tell them your GPA 3.87 weighted that doesn't mean as much as if you tell them it's 3.87 unweighted when everyone can know the best mostly aids in just a handful of bees all right so I'm gonna hit continue so now this section is really important and you should not do it until you have started the school year and I'll tell you why because your classes might change right so right now before school starts I might think that this is going to be my schedule but when school starts what happens if this class isn't offered and instead going to take AP Computer Science so you might as well just service at one time right let's wait until classes start and what you're going to do let's go back to this what you're going to join account how many courses you need to report so I'm going to report one two three four five six seven and you know what I forgot econ which is so like this is a one semester path and this is the one semester class so I'm going to report eight even if it for one semester class you want to report it on a different line so I'm going to tell the common app that I have eight courses to report and it's going to give me eight spots right two to fill out my courses so let me just go through this one my school uses a semester system your school might use quarters or trimesters I'm going to go to the semester so the title of my first course of statistics and I'm going to take AP statistics you don't have to put ap here right because it gives you the opportunity to tell them that it's an AP course here now the reason that I want you to wait until school starts to fill this out is that on this so now I'm going to tell it this is a set this is a full year course if you go back and you change this number I want you to see what happened so let's just say something weird happens with my schedule and now I'm gonna taking seven courses here's what's going to happen it keeps the title it keeps the level but it's going to make me redo the schedule right so now I'm only taking one semester of AP stats because something weird happened so you might like I said you might as well just go through this one time alright so I'm going to leave the rest of these blank although the common app is very cranky with me you can see because I'm leaving all these blank but I'm just going to go through and I'm going to hit and now it only has seven spots before I changed it before I had eight and I guarantee you there were there was one more spot down here all right I'm going to hit continue and what you're going to see is I do not have a green check here because it's unhappy with me right I did not report all my classes okay here's the spot for Honor's and you only have the option to submit five so if you don't have any honors if you were never on another or if you're not in National Honor Society or the Spanish Honor Society or any other you know student-athlete even if student athlete is an academic award right it has to be an academic award so that's what we're going for here academic achievement and it can be within your school or within your region or the near state or national or international so for example if you took the national Spanish exam and you got the bronze medal that's a national honor right so you don't really only want the title but if it's something that they've never heard of you might want to give them just a tiny explanation here okay and you want to tell them what grades you got it in if you have not been awarded this honor for twelfth grade even if you're anticipating it you should not check 12th grade okay and obviously post graduate is if you've already graduated from high school and here's where you tell it this is a national recognition which this is actually a state recognition cause it's California scholarship Federation alright so going to give me three spaces because I told it three but I'm going to go back and switch it to one so that I can get that green check and you should really think that on any honor you've received since ninth grade any award of teacher have given given you most improved it's great community-based organizations is this is the important part it's free assistant so there's also a bunch of community organizations that that helped it apply to college and if you have benefited from one of them you should tell them and once you put a number in here it's going to give you a whole big list right if you went to the Boys and Girls Club if you if you know the name of your counselor or the person who advised you you can enter it here but you can see that that's not required okay so I'm just going to hit continue and future plans they're just they're just trying to see if you know sort of what you're interested in it gives you a nice long list of of career stuff so we'll say I want to be in hospitality management and and it's okay to know what kind of degree you want it's located specific bachelor's degree if you really know I'm going to you know I'm going to go to med school then awesome tone that and when I hit continue I'm just going to tell you right now what's going to happen it's going to take me to the next section right so now we've finished all the pieces of the education section except for here and it's going to take me here to testing I'm going to do a separate video on testing things that we've completed the important part of the education section and the reason that I wanted you to put a college on your dashboard is after completing the education section you have the ability now to leave your FERPA right and what that does is that lets you that gets you all set up to to request teacher recommendations so there's a lot of programs out there different school different types reviews different programs through which you will request recommendations from your teachers but before you do that you're going to have to complete this release authorization and you only get to do it once so I'm going to do it right now on video so if you saw what I did it I went to my dashboard I clicked on a college it does not matter which college and then you're going to scroll down to here where it says recommenders and phurba and what you'll see is again this blue button that says complete release authorization so now we're going to give you a little bit of information about FERPA the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and it's designed to protect your educational records but here they're telling you how flipper relates to your college application and what it really means in the grand scheme of your yeah here's the important part FERPA gives you the right to review confidential letters of recommendation that are part of your application however I will tell you right now that most teachers like 99% of teachers will not write a letter of recommendation for you if they know that you have not waived your right to view them okay so here waiving your right list colleges know that you do not intend to read your nation so it reassures the colleges that the letters are candid and truthful this is really important and literally this is not a joke some recommenders will decline to write a letter for you if you do not waive your rights so you should assume that you are in this 99 percent and your teachers will not write letters of recommendation for you if you do not waive your rights okay so you're going to have to click this box that says I understand and I actually I'll post a blog post about why you should wave your flipper right but here's the reality you should alright so I'm clicking I've read and understood I'm clicking continue I acknowledge that every school I've attended so high school may release all requested records this is the other important part of FERPA so by waving your photo right now you're basically saying to your high school yes you can transfer my records to to any college that I applied to now you saw what just happened when I clicked this acknowledgement button this stuff came up more stuff came up and there's two choices here and this is super important you have this one I waive my right do not click this one skip this then you're going to click I understand that this applies to all colleges do you see this right here and selections on the page cannot be changed once I sign so I'm turning and then we're done and look at that in fact I was thinking a good actually put today's date in here for me but it doesn't okay so I'm gonna hit save and then I'll show you what happens next all right now now I have the ability to invite recommenders so you saw that this was not here before okay but now I have the ability to invite and manage recommenders now I I don't know if you remember but I I told that I was going to El Camino which is a school that uses Nabi ops for transcripts school reports and teacher recommendations so you if you go into a school that uses Naviance or another program there's one called Maya there's one called schooler there's a bunch of programs that high schools use against through which you can request letters of recommendation so what's going to happen I'm going to click on invite recommenders and what you'll see is I only have the ability to invite an other recommender which means a non-academic recommender or a parent and that you would be inviting a parent only if you are applying early decision from there and your parent has to sign a release form so please don't freak out and start thinking that your parents are going to write you their colored letters of recommendation they're not but they are going to have to sign a contract actually if you apply early decision or you can invite an advisor which would be someone like me who have been helping you through the college application process what you'll notice though is there's no opportunity here to invite a teacher because the common app knows that the school I attend I told that I was going to El Camino is a Naviance rule alright so I'm just going to click on invite other recommender so you can see how this works so when you invite an other recommender the comment gives you different categories so for example do you have a dance teacher that you've worked with for many many years do you have a rabbi or a priest for whose congregation you have volunteered or coached if you're an athlete if you're in one of those free college programs here's where your college access counselor would would supply a recommendation if you have a job you should absolutely ask an employer to write a letter of recommendation for you a family member could be useful if you have a family member who went to a particular college and actually I'll click on that and we'll see what happens but I just want you to see the other categories there are some schools that acted that actually require a peer recommendation so that's what this is for and then if you want to invite someone to provide a recommendation and they don't fall into any of the above categories you could click other but I will tell you that colleges that do accept other recommenders sometimes are very specific about what categories of other recommenders they they will accept so what you might find is if you invite your coach that might not be something that a particular college would allow I'm just going to click on family member and see yeah so all it's going to do is now it's going to ask for it or person's first name last name and their email address what used to happen was the email to your recommender will not will not actually get emails until you attach it to the specific college so yeah so here I meant for now it matters where which college you're in right so now I've invited someone to be my recommender but I'm in the Johns Hopkins category and once you scroll down you can see get a green check by your count or because your counselor because I'm using Naviance my counselor knows or as soon as I connect my common app to mine ambience account my counselor will know and will be able to provide a letter of recommendation through Naviance same with my teacher right it's not going to happen through the common app advisor you can see that Upton's does not accept any other recommenders let's figure out if we can find a school that does accept to other recommenders with the city so we're going under recommenders and FERPA counselor teacher other recommender okay so here's a perfect example if I'm on Trinity University which is in San Antonio great place for the sciences and the reason I'm getting a green check for other recommender is that it's not required right so zero required but they'll read run and you can see that Chloe's my dog by the way you can see that they're willing to accept Chloe as as my other recommender again not required but it's optional and you can also see they do accept all categories of other recommenders you will see that some schools do not accept all categories so on day here's what I'm going to do I'm going to assign Chloe to UM to recommend me and now when I have a find her that's when the email was sent ok so even though I clicked invite before I'm going to promise you that the email didn't come until I attached her to a particular college okay in fact I just nervous I've just got the email because that was my email ok so I think I've walked you through the important parts of the education section and leaving your FERPA and again you have to have a college on your dashboard and you do that through an individual college it does not matter which one you could see when you expand each College they all have a recommenders in FERPA section and now you'll see now I'm in Ohio State and you can see I have a green check here by the flipper release authorization and if you want to see what you find that same thing I find is just going to pop up but here it is you can no longer edit your FERPA waiver okay so one and done guys I probably get all right and then and then I also showed you how to invite recommenders if I had a different recommender they would they would all show up here so this is how to manage your recommenders by the way if you invite a recommender and for some reason they don't they don't they didn't get the email from a common application and so they will get an email from common application saying you know everyone alexander has requested a recommendation from you click here to log into the common tab and it will automatically connect them to your common app you won't see the letter of recommendation but you'll know when it's there you can actually resend the invitation right it's only necessary to resend if the recommender indicates it wasn't received so let's just say sure by the way you don't want to bug your recommenders you want to just get in time to do what they need to do ok so I'm going to stop this video now and come back and we've got a whole other section on testing but for now that's all you get [Music] you