Joyful Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 OK. This is our first time going through this process since I've go lots of questions in general 😅 But, one section at a time... So I"ve read Lori's sticky on the College subforums on College Apps. I must have missed it,... I see that I attach the Course Descriptions as a pdf as a second transcript. Where do I submit the School Profile? (I have a feeling that the answer will be very obvious.... except I'm a bit overwhelmed... so thanks for bearing with me 😁) And how long should/can it be? Will 2 pages be too long? Since we homeschool many things about DS's schooling are personal to him. How do you separate what goes in which - school profile vs. counselor letter? I've gathered from other posters that in boxes where the Common App and Coalition App ask for information about our homeschooling, I can answer briefly and then add a note to refer to the School Profile. Is that correct? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewelma Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 I had a million questions 2 years ago! just keep asking because people here love to help. We have kicked around the difference between the counselor letter and school profile last week on this thread 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mom0012 Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 The school profile gets uploaded in the profile/general profile/school profile section — not the student-specific section. Mine was two pages. The first page addressed our geographic location, local demographics, my educational background, our approach to home schooling and our grading guidelines. The second page listed graduation requirements and I also had a section for educational partners, such as Lukeion, CLRC, etc. 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 11, 2019 Author Share Posted October 11, 2019 4 hours ago, lewelma said: I had a million questions 2 years ago! just keep asking because people here love to help. We have kicked around the difference between the counselor letter and school profile last week on this thread I appreciate your encouragement to ask the many questions that I have ! Thanks for referring me to that discussion!... Indeed lots of info there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 11, 2019 Author Share Posted October 11, 2019 2 hours ago, Mom0012 said: The school profile gets uploaded in the profile/general profile/school profile section — not the student-specific section. Mine was two pages. The first page addressed our geographic location, local demographics, my educational background, our approach to home schooling and our grading guidelines. The second page listed graduation requirements and I also had a section for educational partners, such as Lukeion, CLRC, etc. Thanks for showing me where it goes! OK. I have those topics in my outline except for grading guidelines. Thanks for sharing with me! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewelma Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 43 minutes ago, Joyful said: I appreciate your encouragement to ask the many questions that I have ! Thanks for referring me to that discussion!... Indeed lots of info there. 2 years ago, I asked so many questions. Questions upon questions. It was good because I got a lot of really good advice! I posted my school profile on the other thread. I'm about ready to delete it, so have a look if you want. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RootAnn Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 @Joyful Are you prepping for a future year? Will several of your kid's schools use the Common App? If so, I'd encourage you to set up a sample account for both student & counselor. (I think you can do a sample counselor account.) There are instructions somewhere in one of the pinned threads. Everything makes more sense (and brings up more questions) when you see it in front of you. If you are working on all this for this year's applications, has your kid invited you as their counselor yet? Once they do so, you can log into your new Counselor account & the school profile is one of the first things you do. For non-Common App schools (my DD had 2), I snail-mailed the school profile with her transcript and my counselor letter. I don't remember if I sent course descriptions to those two schools or not but I don't think I did. You certainly can. I just think I didn't for those two places because I think it would have required a bigger envelope! 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 11, 2019 Author Share Posted October 11, 2019 7 hours ago, lewelma said: I posted my school profile on the other thread. I'm about ready to delete it, so have a look if you want. Thanks! I was able to read it. 🙂 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 11, 2019 Author Share Posted October 11, 2019 22 minutes ago, RootAnn said: @Joyful Are you prepping for a future year? Will several of your kid's schools use the Common App? If so, I'd encourage you to set up a sample account for both student & counselor. (I think you can do a sample counselor account.) There are instructions somewhere in one of the pinned threads. Everything makes more sense (and brings up more questions) when you see it in front of you. If you are working on all this for this year's applications, has your kid invited you as their counselor yet? Once they do so, you can log into your new Counselor account & the school profile is one of the first things you do. For non-Common App schools (my DD had 2), I snail-mailed the school profile with her transcript and my counselor letter. I don't remember if I sent course descriptions to those two schools or not but I don't think I did. You certainly can. I just think I didn't for those two places because I think it would have required a bigger envelope! Thanks RootAnn for chiming in! DS is applying this year. I intended to start my paperwork in the summer, but life happened. So, I've finished the transcript and maybe half the course descriptions? My other kids will likely use the Common App also. So hopefully the learning curve this year will translate to better efficiency in subsequent application cycles though I cannot guarantee a high rate of retention here. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RootAnn Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 My eldest was a senior last year but my next kid will likely just apply to a couple non-CA schools. That means I won't likely work on the CA again for four more years. It'll be like starting all over again for me. I can't believe how much I've already forgotten! Best of luck with getting everything done. For awhile, I felt like being DD's counselor was another part time job. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 11, 2019 Author Share Posted October 11, 2019 Thanks RootAnn! Whatever you may have forgotten, you still remember enough to help us. 😁 I think I need to squirrel myself for a block of hours to work on this. Right now, I'm working in short spurts, but it takes some time to reorient my brain each time I sit down in front of the computer. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
catz Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 I thought this was a really nice summary of writing a profile. Mine is 2 pages long I think but it's bulleted/sub bulleted so it's more readable. I almost feel like that more personal than my counselor letter because I exposed why we started homeschooling and some things we've done that were out of the box over the years. And I did go a bit wider at the end but this was a great starting point for me. https://simplify4you.com/2018/write-your-school-profile-in-6-steps/ 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 11, 2019 Author Share Posted October 11, 2019 Thanks! That's a very clear outline of what goes in a school profile. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kareni Posted October 11, 2019 Share Posted October 11, 2019 If you'd like to see the school profile I created for my daughter, Joyful and others, simply send me a personal message with your email address. Regards, Kareni 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penelope Posted October 12, 2019 Share Posted October 12, 2019 22 hours ago, Joyful said: I've gathered from other posters that in boxes where the Common App and Coalition App ask for information about our homeschooling, I can answer briefly and then add a note to refer to the School Profile. Is that correct? The Coalition App is a little different. As far as I was able to figure out, it seems that you can only upload one transcript per school. If your student has a transcript for DE or another school, you can add the school and then upload a transcript for it. But since there doesn’t seem to be a way to add a second transcript without entering a different school name with a different College Board number, you can merge the transcript document with the course descriptions before uploading, or include the course descriptions with the school profile in the same document. Apparently they have made improvements for this year and for the most part, it hasn’t been too difficult to use. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 22, 2019 Author Share Posted October 22, 2019 On 10/12/2019 at 7:27 AM, Kareni said: If you'd like to see the school profile I created for my daughter, Joyful and others, simply send me a personal message with your email address. Regards, Kareni Thank you so much! You sent me yours before, and I have it open while working on mine. =) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 22, 2019 Author Share Posted October 22, 2019 On 10/12/2019 at 9:12 AM, Penelope said: The Coalition App is a little different. As far as I was able to figure out, it seems that you can only upload one transcript per school. If your student has a transcript for DE or another school, you can add the school and then upload a transcript for it. But since there doesn’t seem to be a way to add a second transcript without entering a different school name with a different College Board number, you can merge the transcript document with the course descriptions before uploading, or include the course descriptions with the school profile in the same document. Thanks for the heads up that I can only upload one document. Will have DH merge the files for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 22, 2019 Author Share Posted October 22, 2019 So, my school profile is now 2 pages, using 12 pt font. And I still have more to write. Will 3 pages be too long? 4 pages? Should I consider a smaller font size? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewelma Posted October 22, 2019 Share Posted October 22, 2019 I'd stick to 2 pages. 11 point. (Ok, I did a little bit at 10pt). Say less. 🙂 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lilaclady Posted October 22, 2019 Share Posted October 22, 2019 For the common app, I will say stick to 2 pages. There are other places on the app you can elaborate. There is a place to put your grading scale, so you can remove it from the school profile. There is also a place to put dual enrolled courses etc. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
8filltheheart Posted October 22, 2019 Share Posted October 22, 2019 (edited) 7 hours ago, Joyful said: So, my school profile is now 2 pages, using 12 pt font. And I still have more to write. Will 3 pages be too long? 4 pages? Should I consider a smaller font size? I would re-evaluate what you are including. You want them to read it and there is no way they will read that much. Think about the fact that you have about a max of 10mins for them to evaluate the entire application that represents your student. (If they have more time, great. But the point is that you want them to be able to assess quickly and not get bogged down or decide to just skip parts entirely.) For mine I include headings and the very first is a simplified profile which sums up our entire school philosophy in a couple of sentences. Then I have a give a more indepth description which includes the history of our school, why we homeschool, philosophy, etc. Then I have a section on our graduates. The final section gives the simple profile of our zoned school for reference. All of that including 25 yrs of our our school's history and 5 post-graduates' outcomes fit on 1 1/2 pages at 11 or 12 font. (I'd have to look.) Edited October 22, 2019 by 8FillTheHeart 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penelope Posted October 22, 2019 Share Posted October 22, 2019 The only brick and mortar school profiles I have seen that are three or four pages take a huge amount of space for a long list of colleges where previous students have been accepted, long lists of guidance counselors with contact information, graphs comparing SAT scores, that kind of thing. I did include grading scale and test scores. But we had some schools that didn’t use Common or Coalition, and I did not want to have two or three different profiles. I also have short profiles of the places where my teen took classes, but did that as a separate page, so it could just be ignored if admissions doesn’t care. Or that page could have gone with the course descriptions instead. I looked at many profiles online and noticed that the ones that were formatted nicely with a little bit of color, bullet points, insets, charts, columns, are easier to read. You can group certain things together or better highlight what you want to emphasize most, since it may be just glanced over or read very quickly. Examples:https://www.piedmont.k12.ca.us/phs/pdf/about-phs/profile.pdf https://thelatinschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-2016-highlands-latin-school-profile.pdf 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RootAnn Posted October 22, 2019 Share Posted October 22, 2019 The link @FuzzyCatz included has some things that are better in the counselor letter, IMO, unless they are true for all your kids (especially Step 5). Maybe that's why you are struggling to keep it to less pages? Or, maybe you have a lot of outside providers? I have a "less is more" school profile that is maybe a little too colorful & column-y, but I wanted it to be easy to read & I noticed what @Penelope did about brick-and-mortar examples. But our homeschool philosophy isn't deep or complicated either. :) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyful Posted October 23, 2019 Author Share Posted October 23, 2019 Thanks for sharing all of your thoughts! OK, I think I am putting in too much info. And there's a bit of white space. I might try doing a column format and see what happens. RootAnn, you are right. We do have 6 different Outside providers for various reasons. If I have a grading scale on the transcript, can I remove it from my school profile? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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