New Students
Welcome to Our College Planning Cohort Program
College Planning Cohort & Boot Camps
Welcome to our College Planning Cohort or Boot Camp Program. Whether you are participating in our year-long cohort or in one of our College Planning Boot Camps, our goal is to assist you in expanding your college and scholarship options. Since 2007, Mychal and Nina Wynn, together with cohort facilitators through faith- and community-based partners, have successfully assisted hundreds of students in being offered admission to highly selective colleges and millions of dollars in private and institutional scholarships.
Our students have also been profiled in news articles and television interviews:
- Damian Lee, “Lake city senior receives $260,000 scholarship“
- Rebeca Pacheco, “Lake City High student wins big scholarship“
- Mikayla Hanna, “Lake City School School senior wins coveted Gates Millennium Scholar award“
- Otis Burns, “Burns earns $260K scholarship to Northeastern“
- Kristen, Brenna, and Otis, “Guilford County Schools Program Sends First Generation Students to College”
- Sydney Soskin (FL) and Bre’an More (GA), “First Generation Students Land Big Scholarships with Online College Planning Curriculum“
- Samuel Patterson, III, “College Planning Support Program Student, Samuel Patterson, III, Selected as 2021 Rhodes Scholar“
Yet, of all of the many student success stories, Kimberly is the only student beyond our own sons with whom we have worked since elementary school. Kimberly began participating in our program as an elementary school student (3rd grade). She continued in our program throughout middle school and high school. She developed and followed a perfectly executed college-bound plan resulting in her graduating from the Paulding County Academy of Medicine and Science (Dallas, GA) as her Class Salutatorian. While she may have been ranked #2 in her high school, Kimberly was the top student in regard to college admission and earning full college scholarships. Kimberly was offered 6 full college scholarships to some of the most selective colleges and universities in America:
- Princeton
- Duke
- Vanderbilt
- Amherst College
- Washington & Lee University
- Williams College
Kimberly received a free undergraduate education, graduating from Williams College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry and Math. We circled back around to work with Kimberly in preparing graduate school applications resulting her being offered 6 full graduate school scholarships to pursue her PhD in Math. Kimberly is currently attending Iowa State where she has not only received a full scholarship, but receives a $40,000 per year stipend as a Teaching Assistant in the Iowa State Department of Mathematics. You can learn more about Kimberly’s amazing journey on her website: https://www.kimberlyphadaway.com/
While some of the Ivy League schools, like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are familiar to most students, the lessor known top ranked liberal arts colleges, like Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Swarthmore, and Williams have proven to be full scholarship pathways for many students from lower income families and those who will be the first in their family to attend college. For other students, like Caleb (pictured here), full scholarship pathways resulted from being offered such highly competitive scholarships, like the Dowdy Scholarship at North Carolina A&T State University. However, Caleb’s stellar college-bound plan also resulted in full scholarship offers from each of the 19 USDA 1890 National Scholars Program institutions. Students have been offered such widely known scholarships as the Gates Millennium, Coca Cola, and Ron Brown Scholarships, and lessor known, but larger dollar scholarships, such as the Dowdy, Cheatham-White, Meyerhoff, Odyssey, and Torch Scholarships.
Tristyn (pictured here), is a triplet. She and her two sisters joined our Atlanta-area Cohort as high school sophomores with a shared goal—to save their parents as much money as possible and to avoid student loan debt. It would have been a huge burden on their parents to pay for 3 children entering college at the same time. Consequently, Tristyn and her two sisters, Kailer and Sydnee, “Owned the Process.” They set goals, developed their résumés, and matched to the right college and scholarship opportunities. Owning the process resulted in amazing outcomes. Tristyn received a full scholarship to the Claflin University Honors College; Sydnee received a full scholarship to the North Carolina A&T State University Honors College; and Kailer received a full need-based scholarship (covering 90 percent of her college costs) to Wesleyan University. Collectively, the value of the triplets’ scholarships is over $500,000 over 4 years.
However, no matter who you are, where you attend school, or where you want to attend college, there are important actions that you must take before receiving login credentials to our College Planning Cohort Online Classroom. Each action is fully explained after clicking onto the link. Please take care to provide up-to-date and accurate information, as the information contained in your documents can greatly expand your college and scholarship opportunities, and maximize the benefits received from our program. To fully complete these documents, you may need to refer to your middle school report cards; high school transcript; or online access to all classes taken and grades earned throughout middle school or high school; and a current résumé or access to your activities, dates of involvement, honors/awards, and leadership roles.
Step 1: Click here to create a Google Account and to set up your email address in our required format. If you have a Google Account set up to exchange documents with teachers at your school, you may need to set up a separate Google Account to exchange documents in our program as Google has document sharing restrictions across domains, meaning yourschool.org and accessandequity.org. The email address provided will become part of your login credentials and the email signature developed will establish you as a program participant.
Step 2: Click here to create the appropriate ‘My Profile’ document (i.e., boot camp or cohort). When adding classes and grades to your My Profile document, indicate the numeric grade for each class (i.e., 89, 95, 100). The reason this is important is that you should be aware of “leaving points on the table” as you progress throughout high school. College admissions is so competitive that all A’s are not the same. A student earning a final grade of 100 is considered to have a much stronger grade than a student earning a final grade of 90. Additionally, a student earning a final grade of 100 in AP Environmental Science is considered to have a much stronger grade than a student earning a final grade of 100 in PE.
Step 3: Click here to create your Academic Résumé in our format. A student’s academic résumé provides a one-page overview of a student’s body of work in the areas of academics (i.e., grades, test scores, and academic recognition), community service (i.e., length and significance of engagement), leadership (i.e., captains of teams, officers in organizations), and identifiable gifts and talents (e.g., athletics, dance, music, art, theatre). Generally, a student’s résumé reveals if a student is a competitive candidate for being offered admission to selective colleges or for competitive scholarships. In our program, we use students’ résumés to identify weaknesses and to set goals.
Step 4: Send an email to: cpc@collegeplanningcohort.com from the email address that you will be using for our program, with for following information:
- Subject: I have completed the new student activities
- Email Signature: Ensure that your email has the email signature created in Step 1
Once we have received your properly shared documents and email, your registration will be complete. We will reply to your email with your login credentials and instructions for accessing our online classroom.
You or your parents may email any questions about this process to: cpc@collegeplanningcohort.com
Please note that all content on our website, and in our published materials, are under copyright. You may not copy, download, make a screen capture, or transmit via electronic media, any of our content (including videos, forms, or other materials) without our specific written authorization. Your username and password may be shared with your parents. However, you may not share your username or password with other persons (such as friends, relatives, counselors, mentors, etc.). All forms containing your personal information, such as your résumé, your profile, your tables, and your narratives are your property and can be freely shared with parents, teachers, counselors, coaches, mentors, etc.
We look forward to working with you and to becoming part of your college-bound journey.