PLATFORM HELPS STUDENTS LEVERAGE EXPERIENCE FOR ADVANCEMENT

Susan Newman, an instructor at Columbia College Chicago, has created School2Life Gallery as a way for students from middle school to college to showcase their accomplishments. Photo courtesy of Susan Newman
Susan Newman, an instructor at Columbia College Chicago, has created School2Life Gallery as a way for students from middle school to college to showcase their accomplishments. Photo courtesy of Susan Newman

PLATFORM HELPS STUDENTS LEVERAGE EXPERIENCE FOR ADVANCEMENT

BY TIA CAROL JONES

Susan Newman had been an advertising and marketing professional for 15 years when she decided to become an instructor at Columbia College Chicago. What she found was students needed to learn how to effectively market themselves, so she created the School2Life Gallery as a way for students to have a platform to showcase their accomplishments.

Newman, who is the chief education officer of School2Life, described School2Life Gallery as Pinterest meets LinkedIn. She said she wanted to teach youth and young adults how to market themselves, how to talk about themselves with confidence, with sophistication, relevance and confidence, which she said is the trifecta. “These are skills to making a great first impression, which then turns into interest and then opportunities,” she said.

Newman helped launch a class at Columbia College Chicago called Marketing Yourself. She said skills like self-assessment and self-advocacy are mandatory to get into college and to get a job.

“School2Life was designed to help kids far earlier in their student career, apply all these amazing accomplishments, experiences and accolades they are achieving in and out of the classroom, and have them apply to real life,” she said.

School2Life Gallery, the student-facing platform, costs $20 for the year. It provides a platform that allows students to socialize all of their accomplishments. It takes the user through the experience of being able to do self-assessment and self-advocate.

“At the end of the day, it teaches students how to communicate, with sophistication, relevance and confidence,” she said. “It’s $20 a year. It’s coined as the most valuable school supply because it integrates conversation with parents and peers and professionals.”

Newman said at Gallery, it’s bringing show and tell back. She said when people are applying to college, it is the first-time people have to summarize and leverage and make their capabilities relevant. She said it should be starting much earlier.

“We aren’t acknowledging these amazing accomplishments until later in their education, when we should really be starting to acknowledge far earlier,” she said. “Th e most important thing is that people are recognizing where their hard work is going and the outcome.” Newman added that creates self-worth and makes people feel confident about their capabilities and moving forward in life.

Newman said School2Life focuses on the gateway skills, that many people learned on the run: the value of a first impressions and the ability to draw relevance between your experiences and an opportunity.

“We become more skilled and more successful at telling our story the more practice we have. So, if we can bring back show and tell, and that’s what gallery does,” she said.

There are platforms based on the student’s year in school, one is high school bound, for middle school students, another is college bound for high school students and the other is job bound for

college students. She said it has been effective.

“It’s not about marketing yourself so much as understanding where you’ve been and leverage it and see where it can take you,” she said. “Gallery is a platform that prepares students to understand and speak to their capabilities in order to be considered a competitive candidate for any of their pursuits in education or industry.”

For more information, visit gallery. school2life.com.

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