CollegeBound Coaching LLC (collegeboundcoaching.com), a pioneer in the field of student life coaching, which helps middle and high school students throughout the Boston area with college preparation and admissions, has introduced an innovative service called Campus Connections, designed to personalize the college-visit experience through a fast-growing network of college students who are trained to work directly with high school students and their families across the country.

Harvard classmates Phil Sloan and Steve Maislin have launched Campus Connections (campusconnections.us) at the spring conference of the Independent Educational Consultants (www.IECAonline.org) held this week in Boston. IECA is the nations leading professional organization for independent educational consultants working in private practice. For 35 years, IECA has helped its members serve families in educational decisions that include colleges, local day and boarding schools, schools or programs for students with learning or behavioral needs, international placements, summer opportunities, and graduate and professional schools.

As we began helping high school students with the highly competitive college admissions process and started sending families to visit schools under consideration, we became more and more aware of how little they were learning from the traditional process of attending the group campus tours and information sessions conducted by the admissions offices themselves, Sloan explained. After two or three visits, students were complaining that the tour guides sounded the same, and the parents were disappointed that there were few opportunities to ask their more specific questions in a group setting.

He continued, Recognizing that both transfer rates and tuition costs are rising higher than ever and that so many parents are spending even more money for lost credits when their children find themselves unhappy with their college selections, we decided to focus our time and energy upon enhancing the college-visit process as a means of helping families to make better-informed decisions. We quickly realized that college students themselves are the best source of information about life at their own campuses.

Sloan began by leveraging his local contacts in the Marblehead and Swampscott area to interest college students in joining his fast-growing network of Campus Connections. In just several months, Campus Connections has grown to include more than 150 college students at more than 100 campuses across the country.

We expect to be on more than 500 campuses by September, Sloan said. College students are joining Campus Connections because we are providing rich and rewarding, part-time, on-campus jobs.

Campus Connections are trained to work closely with each family to understand what they are most interested in learning about and to then schedule meetings for them during their college visit with other members of their campus community who can answer their specific questions about those areas of particular interest.

We encourage families to attend official college tours and information sessions conducted by the admissions offices, and to personalize their on-campus visits through Campus Connections, Sloan said.

He concluded, For the summer, we are offering high school students and their parents the opportunity to connect with our Campus Connections online and by phone, thereby providing college students with summer jobs and high school juniors the opportunity to begin learning more about schools to which they plan to apply in the fall. We are also offering to provide some college students with summer marketing internships, leveraging their knowledge of social media to help us continue building our network of Campus Connections.

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Campus Connections launched at conference