What Will Families See on March 10th?

The height of Mount Everest is 29,029 feet.?Why am I so certain of this number?? For seven wonderful years, I taught fourth grade geography and it was a dedicated number that I ensured that all of my students knew.? It was as set in stone for them as knowing the exact time recess started or the address of the Dursleys on Privet Drive.?As I have become much older, it is still a number I remember with precision and have taught it to my own two children.?Why am I mentioning this today??Because the number is wrong.?I recently learned that the height of Mount Everest is actually 29,031.69 feet. Now 31/100 of a foot may not seem like a lot-especially when staring up at the snow-covered peak, but that .31 is a good reminder that what we know and what we think we know are not always the same thing.

For many of our partner schools, March 10th is a key date on the calendar. While not all decisions are released on that fateful day, it marks a swing from reading files to creating classes.?Here at FindingSchool, we feel this change as well.?At our Boston headquarters, we often refer to March 10th as Mount Everest. Our site is 6x busier on March 10th than any other day of the year.

Here is an example of one school’s 2024 traffic where you can see the March 10 peak:

As March 10th looms ahead for all of us, it is a good time to take a moment and remember the balance between what we know and what we think we know.?

For many admission professionals, they know that “families only care about rankings and matriculation.”?This catchphrase/complaint is shared with me often. But what if that is not all they care about??

What if these were only starting points when families began the process back in the fall and on March 10th they want to know about your community, whether you have air-conditioning in the dorms, and how far away the best Korean restaurants are located. Local families are often able to come to see for themselves on a revisit day.?Below are 7 (okay 10) ways to help bring your Revisit Days to your accepted students in Asia.

Ten Simple Steps to Fortify Your FindingSchool Profiles Before March 10, 2025:

1. Update your data at: https://partner.findingschool.com/?(click login on upper right)
2. We are going to send out email reminders to our partners after March 10th as families will be asking a lot of questions on our QA platform seeking help on selecting schools and looking for new opportunities. So we would highly recommend you check on your FindingSchool email accounts (allowlist emails from @findingschool.org) and respond when necessary.
3. Add Parent and Student Ambassadors.?Similar to PeerPal, FindingSchool allows you to add contacts for your parents, alums, and students for accepted families to contact.?Families will go to WeChat and other locations to ask questions.?Why not insert your community into the conversation?
4. Change your banner image.?What, if for only a few days, viewers did not see a fall drone shot of campus??What if they see what you see every day?
5. Bring a community member to the forefront.?Do you have a Director of International Students??Director of Weekend Activities??March is a wonderful time to introduce a family to individuals their children will interact with on a daily basis.?This can be in a short video or simple bio.
6. Get informal.?As with the height of the tallest mountain on Earth, I spent the first ten years in the admission world convinced that nothing could leave our office if the chorus music wasn’t perfectly synched with the video montage. Those days are long gone.?Students want to see authentic content that captures what life is really like on campus.?A short 30-second clip of what’s for lunch can often say what a $30,000 viewbook cannot.??
7. International student leadership opportunities. Perhaps nothing has changed more since I joined the FindingSchool team 5 years ago than what a school is looking for in an international student.?GPA has been replaced by “How they will contribute to the school community?”. What better way to show this at your school than by sharing examples of international students who have been school leaders, dorm prefects, and athletic captains?
8. Highlight safety. The physical safety of students remains the #1 concern of parents. While we often take this as a given, it is very much what families want to hear about when making a decision.
9. Create a Top 10 List of Reasons to Choose Your School.?
10. You have 6 unique language profiles on FindingSchool. They do not need to all have the same information, videos, and focus.??

These simple steps can help a family know your community in a different light.? It is important to know what you know, but perhaps it is more important to share what you know.? For instance, did you know that if you cut Mount Everest off at its base and dropped it in the Mariana Trench there would still be over one mile of water between its top and the surface?? At least I think that is true. (I just looked it up.?I am indeed correct on that one and the Dursleys live at #4 Privet Drive.)

Xi Zhang

Founder & CEO, FindingSchool

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A Boston-based search platform, FindingSchool is helping to reshape how prospective families and schools connect with each other. With more than 1.5 million annual visits, FindingSchool is the #1 search platform in East Asia.