July 5×5 Night
Voting Closes:
July 22, 2024 11:59 am
Impact
The Coltie app raises a student's chance of being accepted, funded, and successful in graduate school. For faculty and graduate schools, the Coltie app facilitates recruitment of well-matched graduate students to their research programs.
The current process for graduate recruitment, selection and admissions is inefficient and inequitable. Students who have not been mentored or guided into research internships lack access to existing pathways to graduate school. These students experience difficulty in accessing and navigating key information required to make decisions on where to apply, and further, they are either unaware of the importance of connecting with faculty prior to applying or have difficulty establishing contact. Students scour department webpages online, and send e-mails, which often go unopened due to a lack of faculty time and the prevalence of e-mails from poor matches. Among admitted graduate students, depression and dropout rates are both over 40%. From the perspective of faculty, recruitment of qualified students with well-matched interests and skills is difficult. Many faculty rely on a personal network and established "pipelines" to refer students. Faculty seeking to hire students from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups, lack the training and insights needed to connect with and encourage these students to apply. Collectively, these issues lead to wasted time, student stress, poor matches, and missed opportunities, and the current system reinforces established pathways and pipelines that prevent students in underrepresented groups from accessing many positions for which they are qualified.
What I'll do with $5,000
The Coltie app will be ready to launch in late July, which is just in time for the start of graduate recruitment (graduate school applications are due October through February). The biggest challenge is to achieve a critical mass of student and faculty users. Therefore, the best use of this $5,000 is a marketing campaign on social media. Social media will reach the largest cross-section of potential users globally, whereas other marketing strategies (graduate fairs and advertisements through professional societies) will reach only a U.S. domestic audience.