TOOOOOOOOOO much information...
Today, I set up my facebook profile. I hope to have many friends (and eventually to upload a picture). There were some questions on the set up of my profile I simply didn't feel like sharing the answers to, though. Hmmm... wonder if there ever comes a point where you wind up sharing too much information about yourself.
On that topic, I spent my day today at the IDOC User's Group meeting. As I am sure you remember, IDOC is the process a number of schools use to collect your tax returns (so that you only have to send them in once). The College Board provides the service, and they were the host of the meeting. About 30 of us sat around a table and offered our feedback; there were folks there from Bowdoin, Colgate, Columbia, Yale, Northeastern, Boston University, Stanford, etc. It was an interesting day.
No big changes coming other than the continued interest in moving more and more information online; under development is a plan which MIT piloted this year where student applicants will be notified that they can complete their IDOC with an email message which will point them directly to the IDOC web page, rather than having to wait for a physical form to be sent.
We shared our experience with IDOC this year, how we felt (despite some occasional rough situations for some families) that the process was fairly intuitive. We also shared that for the Freshmen process this year, so many more of our award letters went out as finalized awards (compared to years past) and how moving our deadline to March 1 and using the IDOC service have really assisted in making sure that we could get our newly admitted students accurate awards in time for them to make their admissions decisions.
Tomorrow, I get to see and participate in two more feedback and focus group sessions, the first on the new “Smart Profile” which I believe is under development for 2007-2008, and the second introducing the new “PowerFAIDS”. Again, these are both College Board products, but the meetings are being held in two different parts of town, one in Cambridge and one in Waltham, so if you see me in a blue minivan rushing like mad to get from one meeting to the other, you'll understand why.
As you know, the CSS/Financial Aid Profile is the College Board's financial aid application; in 2005/06 it went completely online (they eliminated paper versions of the form). With the flexibility of being online, there is much more utility that can be added to a “smarter” financial aid application. Tomorrow, a number of colleges will meet to hear how the College Board is looking to take advantage of being online to make the application easier and more robust for you. We'll also offer our suggestions.
As for my second meeting tomorrow, we will be looking at a redesigned version of the software which we use to process your financial aid information -- PowerFAIDS. PowerFAIDS is an excellent product which allows a lot of customization for financial aid administrators (just look at my previous post about PowerFAIDS as an example), but the program was built in 1995/96 on a then state-of-the-art Client/Server model. Well, time moves on, and for the 2006-07 release, the architecture of the system is changing to a .NET framework. Tomorrow, we get a sneak peek at the “new” PowerFAIDS. I can't wait to get my hands on it! I've been working on the PowerFAIDS system since it debuted in 1996, and I know the system pretty well, but there is a lot that can be done within the new framework that couldn't be done before.
An exciting couple of days... for me at least. For you, this post may represent “tooooooo much information.”
Be well -- and add me to your facebook friends list!