One evening at our kitchen table, we were thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to share all our childrens’ great high school moments with colleges in the hope of getting them accepted?” And so bragTAG was born. A simple and effective tool to bring your high school child’s college application to life!
We decided to develop bragTAG on the Facebook platform, because that is where the high school children are. You know how much time they spend there – why not coax them into doing something GOOD while they’re there! Read on for an exclusive discount code for Parent’s Countdown to College Coach blog readers…
Using bragTAG, students/parents create multi-media representations of individual high school achievements – we call these bragTAGs. For example, that tremendous touchdown or perfect ballet performance can now be shown to college admissions counselors using videos, photos and journal (text) entries.
Throughout the high school career, bragTAG is absolutely free to use! When the student/parent is ready to apply to colleges, “bragTAGs” are then compiled into customized one page, multi-media resumes and forwarded to college admissions counselors (we suggest users have a relationship established prior to sending).
Individual bragTAG detail example with comment
Because our own very first question in the development process was, “How do we keep this secure?”, we decided to make sure bragSHEETs weren’t published in any way on Facebook. You can share individual bragTAGs on Facebook if you elect to, but bragSHEETs can only be forwarded to others. That bragSHEET is assembled on the fly, using our own secure cloud-based servers – and only assembled when viewed. In other words, bragSHEETS do not exist until college admissions/guidance counselors/teachers/coaches click on the link you’ve sent. Our servers then assemble the requested bragSHEET for viewing.
Complete bragSHEET (Resume) with multi-media photos, pop up videos and journal entries
Only persons with the link can see the personal info, and those that are viewing your bragSHEET do not have to be logged onto Facebook, or even have a Facebook account. Colleges will not see your child’s private Facebook profile! (You didn’t really want them to see those high school dance and party pictures, did you?).
There are several ways to use the bragTAG application. Send a copy of a bragSHEET to high school teachers whom you are asking to write your letters of recommendation – so they know more about you, and write a fantastic well-informed letter. You can send a bragSHEET to your school counselor, who can then recommend colleges based on your interests – or even help you edit bragSHEETs for the colleges you’re applying to. You may want to create customized bragSHEETs for each college you apply to, based on your research (or your independent coach’s research) into what a particular college is looking for!
So – students, parents and counselors unite – and work toward getting accepted at the college of your choice!
As an added bonus, we’ve created a discount code for Parents Countdown to College Coach readers! The first five readers to comment below will receive a code from bragTAG for UNLIMITED bragSHEET submissions (a $24.99 value). We’ll email the code to you as soon as we receive your contact info!
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Thanks to bragTAG for providing us with this guest post about their product. Find out more on the bragTAG Facebook Fan Page, or the bragTAG College Bound Blog and good luck in your college admissions search!
Thanks so much, Suzanne. We’re so excited for the opportunity to connect with you readers!
Thanks so much Suzanne! We’re so excited for the opportunity to connect with your readers. The post looks great, and we’ve featured it on our Facebook Fan Page and Twitter – thanks again!
John, I’m happy to feature your company and product. Parents and students need all the help they can get in the college process. Thanks for creating a product that will allow them to compile all the activities online and share with college admissions or anyone else who might be interested.
There’s a MAJOR flaw in this program, and it was signaled when I saw what was in parenthesis –> (we suggest users have a relationship established prior to sending). Clearly 85% of calls that come into a college admissions office come from parents, 15% from guidance counselors, and 5% from students. That’s just one or two calls, which hardly creates a relationship. Until you have figured out how to develop a relationship, this program is only a wish of the developer. My one-on-one coaching has figured it out, but that’s what parents pay me a lot of money to give them. I can certainly see using this program for my students, and even then, I would prefer to establish a mystery to surround the student by eliminating any direct photos of the student. The element of mystery maintains the focus on the student’s accomplishments (photo of a scholarship award, for example), not on the visual representation of the student. Any hint of a beauty contest torpedoes the objective of the presentation.
Paul,
I think there is MORE value than just creating it for admissions. I think it offers a place to “gather” all the materials online and pass along the info to someone who asks, or create a print out to take along on an interview or include in the application. And some students do build relationships with admissions (my daughter did) so in this case it would help. Since so much is done online, this is an alternative to the paper resume, don’t you think? This might be especially helpful for athletes, musicians, and drama majors to showcase their performances.
Thanks for your support Suzanne – we didn’t expect that folks that bill parents for their services (like Mr. Hemphill) to be huge fans of our application. Our application is easy to use, very inexpensive and should appeal to those who don’t have the desire or funds to hire a paid consultant like Mr. Hemphill. We disagree with what Paul says above. In our experience college admissions counselors are very approachable, especially at college fairs where students/parents can easily obtain email addresses to forward their multi-media bragSHEETs. College admissions counselors emails are almost always published on College Web Sites as well. Hey! Thanks Paul for the new blog post idea – we’re going to get right on this!
Actually John, Paul is a colleague and an expert in college admissions. He’s worth every penny he charges. It’s ok to disagree and sometimes when you look at applications from a different perspective, you can see the value. He’s just working from the framework that most teens don’t make that connection with the admissions officers, and in that case, emailing them a bragSHEET would not be effective or useful. Paul is always open to new ideas and if he feels it’s worthwhile, he passes it along to his parents and students. I don’t think your application or even my toolkit could replace the years of knowledge that Paul has in this field. But I do think that there’s a place for all of us!
I’m glad we can all agree to disagree – we stand behind everything our application can do for our users, and the doors it will open for them in college admissions. There is a place for all of us indeed!
Just wanted to stop by and apologize for some harsh words toward Paul Hemphill. Unfortunately, Paul left a couple of negative blog comments both here and on our own blog, and it sort of hurt our feelings that we’d be followed around like that! Shouldn’t have lashed out at independent college counselors, however, or Paul – that wasn’t right, and we’ve learned from our big mistake! Thanks so much, Suzanne for giving us the opportunity to guest blog here, hope we can make this up to you in the future 🙂 – oh, and by the way – should we get Paul a code for unlimited use of the bragTAG app? He was the single commenter here 🙂 !!