Harrison College

Scholarships are FREE monies awarded to students for tuition assistance. Many adult education program students think about scholarships but few actually pursue them. At the Harrison College Columbus Indiana college campus we encourage students to look at all types of ways to fund their education—from federal student loans to Indiana scholarships and grants that are based on income to merit-based scholarships.

One of my favorite scholarship sites is www.brokescholar.com. BrokeScholar is a free site that asks questions about you and your educational wants and needs. Based on your answers, BrokeScholar generates many scholarships you may qualify for.

 

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you are thinking of using a lead-generating web site to search for scholarships.
 

• Set up an email that is dedicated for your scholarship search. You will receive many emails with tons of scholarship leads fitting your criteria. Having a dedicated email makes your search more efficient.

• Think about who you are, what you want to do, and what type of college you want to attend when searching for a scholarship. There are scholarships based on ethnicity, career goals, gender, and even the color of your hair. So don’t leave any question unanswered when you are filling out scholarship questionnaires.

• Plan to work your scholarship search like a job. Devote set hours—maybe up to 30 per week—to review the scholarship leads you receive and determine which ones you want to follow through on. Some will require essays and others just an application.

• You should NEVER have to pay an application fee to apply for a scholarship.

• It is NEVER too early to start looking for scholarships.

• You do not have to be at the top of your class or “gifted” in any way to find a scholarship. Many students just like you receive scholarships every day.

So check out BrokeScholar to see what options are available for funding your future. Good luck and happy hunting!

Tip #1—Communication is a key factor—and all it really takes is talking to your admissions adviser to determine the most direct route to finishing your degree! If you are ever unsure about your academic, financial or general status as a student, just ask. As the Director of Admission at Harrison College I know that we can review our students progress at any time. If I see signs that a student is struggling I contact them. After all, if there is something holding you back from doing your best you should speak to your adviser, dean or student services to pinpoint the issue and help you find a solution.

Tip #2--- Attendance. I know you have heard it all before, but attendance is critical to your success as a student. I am serious here! Attending is 90% of the battle. Many students choose to attend schools like Harrison College because of the fast-paced, career-oriented degrees that transition quickly into professional positions. If you miss classes, you are missing out on the building blocks of your future. And let’s face it, how can you prepare for quizzes and exams when you are only getting part of the material. Plan to make attendance a priority and success will soon follow!

Tip #3--- Check your student e-mail! Yes, you heard me right. Keeping up to date with campus information is vital to your success. If you are not checking this you may miss some very important information and maybe even scholarship opportunities.

After 10 years working in admissions I have worked with many students who have had many different rocks in the road to finishing their degree.If you have questions and are not sure who to talk to about the path you need to take to get to your goal of education, please feel free to send me an e-mail at gina.pate@harrison.edu or review your educational options at www.harrison.edu.

Have you ever been a part of a Strategic Planning Session? You may say no now, but read on and your answer may change by the end of this blog.

This past Friday Harrison College employees from Lafayette and Evansville gathered at the Columbus Indiana college campus to discuss our three year strategic plan. It was a day full of visions for growth and reflection on how we, the Harrison College “family,” have remained successful for over 103 years. It was a good and exciting day. I do admit that when I had to participate in my first strategic planning session with the Columbus Indiana college campus I was a little intimidated by even just the name. What I soon found was that I had been holding my own person strategic planning sessions for years!  In fact, my choice to attend Harrison College (formerly known as Indiana Business College) was all part of a strategic plan I had to make myself more independent, more marketable and a stable provider for my family.

Here is a simple way to hold your own Strategic Planning Session…

Pinpoint the PURPOSE or the REASON—What is it that you want to accomplish? It may be enrolling in an adult education program, career advancement or a plan to improve your health. It doesn’t matter WHAT you want to accomplish—a strategic plan will work for anything!

Set aside some time to devote to creating PLAN—Really think about the purpose and the steps you can take to reach your desired outcome. Write your plan down on paper so you can track your progress along the way. Also, having something written down may aid in providing a feeling of self-accountability.

Set GOALS with outcomes that can be measured—The easier it is to measure your progress the easier it will be to tell if you are on track.

Track your PROGRESS—Your strategic plan is something that will change from time to time as circumstances change. Don’t be too hard on yourself if at times it seems like you are not moving fast enough or in the right direction. When you start to feel that way, simply take a moment to refocus to get back on track.

If obtaining an education is part of your personal strategic plan, contact a Harrison College campus near you or our distance learning college and speak with an admission representative. Our admissions team is trained in helping people pinpoint their career and educational goals.

Okay, are you tired of hearing about the EduRG conference yet?  I hope not since I have one more post about it.  Today I want to take a tangent off a workshop I attended-- Is your website hurting your admissions? 

While there was a lot of great content centered around that specifically, it was an aside mention that I'd like to expand upon-- How can the content on our site be symbiotic for both Harrison College and the prospective student? 

It is clear that we need to update content on our website more frequently than we currently do in order to improve natural search results.  So the next logical question is: What content?  This is where we can find a mutually beneficial relationship for us and our prospective students. 

By becoming a resource we can provide would-be students the tools they need to truly evaluate their education options, and to navigate the seemingly-tedious process of applying for school and financial aid.  As we do this we are refreshing content frequently enough to improve our organic search results, and are moving prospects along a path to a decision.  And hopefully we have instilled enough of a sense of trust and authority by providing these resources that the prospect selects Harrison College. 

The possibilities for topics on the website are immense... because the student understanding and confidence in making this type of decision is minimal.  A sampling of topics could include:

• Five things you MUST have in a college
• Ten signs you're attending a credible institution
• List of the jobs in most demand in Indiana, or across the nation
• Step-by-step instructions on Financial Aid
• Ten things to ask your Admissions advisor
• The list of documents to gather before applying for financial aid
• Compare and contrast the benefits of Associate, Bachelor and Master degrees
• Three things to ask a college for working adults

The key to creating the content is to take a que from the research.  What themes have we heard repeated in focus groups?  Where are the concerns and obstacles for prospective students?  The student has actually already told us what they want to know.  Now we need to be good listeners. 
 

When you are looking for employment, you are selling a product — yourself. 

by Joshua Hudson

 Looking for a job is a full-time business. Like business, you need to understand your product, your potential clients and have a strategy to get those clients to buy. So remember the story of “the man and his mule.”

A very poor farmer was forced to sell his five mules for $20 each. An entrepreneurial young man took out a loan and bought all the mules for $100. He then put a sign, “Pack animals – $100 each” outside his barn. He sold all five of them within the week. 

The poor farmer, clearly upset that he hadn’t earned the same profits, asked, “How did you sell those mules for $100 each? They weren’t worth more than the $20 I sold them to you for.” Please click here to continue reading the article

The great thing about Harrison College is that during your last quarter you will take a Career Development course that prepares our graduates how to sell themselves during an interview. With the career development assistance, I believe that they give us military spouses the tools that we need to get the position we are applying for.

As I've already mentioned in my previous posts, The Rule of Reason is about being informed and then making decisions based on that information.  There are myriad ways to find and explore data and I'll talk about many of them in posts to come.  But the one I want to focus on now is one I have not ever used before. 

Remember that conference I went to last week? The EduRG conference in Phoenix?  Well, while I was there I had the pleasure of attending a workshop given by GlobalTel Media Inc on using SMS to communicate with faculty, staff and students.  To date Harrison College has used SMS (texting) for building relationships and staying in touch with prospective students.  And it has been very successful for us, especially for the High School audience.  And with 88% of all phones in the US enabled for SMS, the audience demographic is growing older and our Adult Learner prospect is very adept at texting too. 


During the workshop the CEO, Robert Sanchez, detailed the other ways SMS could be used by a college.  These included:

• functional texts like "Sale in the bookstore"
• or emergency texts like "Classes canceled tonight"
• or reminders such as "Lab exam tomorrow"

• What is one thing you'd change about Harrison College?
• What is one thing you'd never change?
• What could we do to improve your classroom experience?
• How are you liking your textbooks?
• Are you planning on continuing your education to get a Bachelor degree?
• Would you prefer this class in an online format?
• How could career development assistance better meet your needs?
• Do you believe we have a flexible class schedule? If not, how could we improve?

Oh, the possibilities are only limited by the threshold our students would tolerate!

Did you know that March 18th will be the 14th Annual Absolutely Incredible Kid Day! Absolutely Incredible Kid Day is a held across the nation and was started by the organization Campfire USA.  It is a simple campaign designed to recognize all the incredible children in the world. To participate adults are asked to write a letter of support, love and encouragement. It only takes a few minutes to jot a note that will be remembered and appreciated for a lifetime. The positive impact of these letters on kids is what it’s all about.

Positive reinforcement is important for people of all ages.  Just ask Kathy England. Kathy is the Director of Financial Aid at Harrison College. She runs the Columbus Indiana college financial aid department and ensures that our 200+ local students get the federal funding and Indiana scholarships they qualify to receive.  But this was not what Kathy always did.

Kathy worked for Greensburg Community High School for over six years. Not as a teacher in the classroom, but as a custodian. During that time Kathy always felt encouraged by Keith Hipskind, Dean of Students. With this encouragement, Kathy chose to enroll at Harrison College (formerly Indiana Business College) to pursue a degree in Business Administration. Mr. Hipskind believed in Kathy and would offer her words of praise every time he would find her working on her college homework assignments on her lunch break.  In 2001 Kathy graduated with her degree and began working for Harrison College in the financial aid department.

On a recent visit back to Greensburg Community High School to promote the importance of completing the FAFSA; Kathy had the opportunity to catch up with Mr. Hipskind. Below is an excerpt from an email he sent out to all employees of Greensburg Community High School.

“Kathy continued to work and go to school and completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Management and just completed her Master’s Degree in Management and is currently working on her second Master’s Degree in Human Resources (HR) which she will complete in June of this year.  She also is now teaching college courses and working with students on Financial Aid.

Life is good!!  Keep on keepin’ on with our kids…You never know what you might say and do to inspire someone like Kathy.”

The point I guess I am trying to make is that all of us need positive reinforcement—Young and Old alike! So let someone know you support their efforts to continue to improve themselves by participating in the Absolutely Incredible Kid Day or by letting a student of an adult education program know that you admire their dedication to a better future.

In my last post I mentioned the conference I recently attended—EduRG.  I’m not sure how they pulled it off, but at 1:00 on Saturday the 27th, the 500 or so of us that were there got to listen Al Gore speak on the state of the educational system.  Think what you will of Al Gore, good or bad, that’s not what this post is about.  But he drew some interesting parallels between where we are now and where we stood back in 1436 when the printing press was developed. 

Go with me for a minute on this…

In in the 1400s very few people were literate, in large part because books and printed materials were simply just not available.  The process of transcribing literature was laboriously done by monks and the resulting pieces carefully guarded for the elite.  But the advent of the printing press destroyed those barriers and soon the numbers of literate citizens exploded.  And consequently new ideas flourished!  Science came to the forefront, and literature grew both in quantity and in the types of topics covered. 

Now, forward to present day and you can see a parallel with the education system.  What formerly was a privilege reserved for the upper classes is now accessible by people of all walks of life.  And we have the advent of the online classroom to thank for this largely.  In the days of Ivy League, and even inaccessible state universities, a majority of people did not go on to achieve a college degree. Over time that s-lo-w-l-y began to change.  Then via distance learning, in leaps and bounds, post-secondary education has been made available to people of all socio-economic backgrounds and the adult education program sector is among the fastest growing!

In our education system at large, there is a transformative shift occurring.  The fastest growing student population is 25 to 40 years of age and their expectations of a degree program with a flexible class schedule just simply cannot be met by the behemoth state universities.  Rather, the more nimble, quick to adapt career colleges are taking advantage of this sea-change.  And Harrison College is top among them.  With an distance learning program / online division that has grown 50% each year since its launch, new Bachelor degrees being launched, and 12 physical campus locations, Harrison College is prepared to provide what it is that Adult Learners need.  And we will be instrumental in this redefining of what “education” means to the world.

Finals are just a few weeks away at Harrison College so make sure you know how to study for your exams effectively!


Know How to Approach Essay Questions
When given more than one essay, read each one carefully and start with the easiest one.  Not only will this help your brain start to think about the topic and related areas, but this can also build confidence in your ability to write.  Once you have  decided where to start, brainstorm key words and ideas related to the topic. The next step is to begin writing.  Make sure to use clear and complete sentences.  As with any writing assignment, make sure to introduce your topic, present supporting ideas with facts and examples, and finally summarize the main points.

Improve Your Math Test Scores
Write down any formulas and equations on the top of your test.  If you are having a problem, try drawing a picture or diagram.  Show all of your work because even if  you have the wrong answer, you still might get partial credit.

Be Prepared for Open Book Tests
Prepare by doing the following:
Put self-stick notes or bookmarks in your book to help locate specific information
Go through your class notes and highlight  important information
Write down all the information that you know you will need on one sheet of paper

Check Your Answers
Check all of your answers, even the ones you know are correct.  You may have read the question wrong or made a careless mistake.

Go Over All Returned Tests
As soon as you get your test back, go over the questions you missed and write down the correct answer.  You may see the question again on a midterm or final exam. 

Good luck to all the students about to take finals in all of our Adult Education Programs!

References:
How to Get Good Grades in College (2008). Woodburn Press. Dayton, OH
 

Being the co-chair of our Community Service Committee, within Administration - Harrison College, is truly enjoyable. Coming together and giving back is a wonderful thing and one that Harrison College takes great pride in.

Just recently, we held a blanket event to benefit Wishard hospital and their Pediatrics department. These simple fleece, tied blankets will provide love and a sense of security to comfort local chilren who visit the Wishard emerency room.

All of our Harrison locations give back to their communities in different ways.
Check our website for more stories of "how your Harrison gives back."

• Twenty-first Century Scholars Program
• Harrison College
• Indiana Scholarships
• Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)