IAM360 does not decide where you go to school. We do not decide whether you are suitable or not for a particular athletic program, whether you are the right fit or not for an academic community, performing arts program or a visual arts program. Those decisions are in the hands of college coaches, university admissions. It is their program and their school that have their own requirements and standards. They are the ones that are recruiting specific needs for their team in any particular year. They are looking at your information as a potential recruit as well as other students’ information from different parts of the world. It comes down to when that coach is ready to make a decision.
When will you get an offer? If you are an athlete, it will be when a coach decides that they feel that you are suitable to their program. Besides being interested in you, you are also able to qualify for enough scholarship, whether that be academic or normal international scholarship, as well as any athletic scholarship that, that coach may be willing to offer you to recruit you to that program. Not only does the interest in you need to be there, but the interest also comes from that coach and their coaching staff, their evaluation of you and your materials that we have presented to them. They also have to be able to put together enough funding or provide an opportunity in a way that is going to be affordable for the budget that you and your family have available and ready to spend on an annual basis. There are a lot of variables that come into play, that are completely out of your control, as well as in our control.
What we do as an organization is look at what you bring to the table with respect to your academic ambitions. We find schools that offer the things that you are interested in studying. Of the schools that offer what you want to study, which ones do you specifically have the academic grades and marks to gain admission into? If these factors are in place then we share your information with that coach in that program, if you are in a position or participating in a role that they have a need for within their program. Those coaches then have to evaluate you, any other potential recruits, and decide whether or not you are the one that they want to bring in or not. Once they have made that decision, is that opportunity affordable enough through any number of ways to then be able to present you with that offer.
The difficult part is knowing when exactly an offer will come in. There is a stretch of time from September of your year 12 year, or if you are already graduated, September of the year prior to you departing. Approximately 12 months in advance from departure is when offers start to present themselves. Offers will start coming through for our students and student athletes from around September, and will continue to come through all the way to the end of the calendar year, into January through to June for an August start in the United States. Although we cannot pinpoint exactly when your offers are going to come in, it can range from September to June or prior to your August departure. That is the best timeline that we can describe.
What we, as an organization try to always do is have as many offers as possible for our students delivered before Christmas. It is not to say that offers that come in after Christmas are not as good or better than ones that come in before Christmas. Instead of wondering and stressing about when you are going to receive offers, just understand that there are a lot of factors that come into play with respect to offers being provided, and all of that time from September to June, it is a big window of time, and offers can come in at any point during that time. Our students will receive offers before and after Christmas. Some that have received offers before Christmas may make decisions to accept the offer and then they do not receive offers after Christmas because they have already made their decision.
The same way that the offer process works for a student athlete, the same process will apply to general students, performing arts, and visual arts. Firstly, what we do as an organization is find the schools that offer the things that you are interested in studying. We find the schools that you are able to get into with your marks and your grades, and try and locate schools where you can qualify for as much additional scholarship, funding and bursary as possible, to make those opportunities as cheap as possible.
When within that time will you receive your offers? The exact same way that a coach evaluates you for an athletic program, the admissions department and the recruiters from that institution will do the exact same thing based on how they believe that you will fit into their academic and student community. If you are involved in an extracurricular like theatre, drama, dance, performing arts, music, or visual art, and you are hoping to get some additional scholarship money for that, then just like a coach evaluates an athlete, the director of the theatre department, dance department, music department, or the fine arts department will assess your abilities and what they believe that you can add to that community of artists, in addition to what you can add to that academic and student community. Those decisions are sent through to us in the exact same way as it is done with a coach and an athletic program for a student athlete and a very similar timeline with respect to when offers will present themselves.
Primarily for all our students in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Southern hemisphere, we get a lot of students who are nearing the end of year 12, and their friends and peers that are not looking at going overseas for their studies have decided to stay to study at university in your home country. They start receiving their early university offers by the time that they finish year 12, approximately around November, December. Two months later in February, the are already starting university studies.
A lot of students that we work with are looking to head to the United States or to North America, but get anxious and stressed out, and they feel all kinds of different ways about the fact that their friends are getting their offers for university in their home country, but they have not received their offers yet from the schools overseas. The most important thing to understand is that you live in the Southern hemisphere and everything that happens in North America is in the Northern hemisphere. University timelines, the academic year, and when offers present themselves, all operate on a different timeline as well. You are in the Southern hemisphere and you would typically be used to receiving offers in July, August, September, October, to start university in February. University in the United States does not start until late August.
Typically, if you want to use the same timeline, then realistically that is November, December, January, February, March, April even, for an August start. That is the sort of same timeline as far as when students are receiving preliminary university offers for schools and universities in the Southern hemisphere and how that would sort of convert to a North American opportunity in the Northern hemisphere. The fact that we as an organization are delivering offers and opportunities from September, October, November, December, when you compare the timelines, you are actually getting offers earlier than your American counterparts, who won’t even graduate year 12 until May. They graduate in May, and then they start in August just like you would graduate in typically November, December, and start in February. You just need to understand that everything that we do works on a slightly different timeframe, and that timeframe is later than what you are used to in your home country, when it comes to university options and opportunities.
If you are a student athlete on our program or a student, a performing artist, or general student, and your friends are all receiving their university offers to start university in February, great. They should be. When are you going to receive your offer? When are you going to know? What you go and tell them is any time between September and June. It all depends on a lot of different factors, but “I know that I’m going because IAM 360’s got my back and they do not fail”. That’s what you can say.
So, when are you going to get your offers? It can be sometime between September and June. Every single student will receive offers and options that are a part of our program. That is our guarantee. That is what we have always been able to do, and that is what we will continue to do moving forward.
There are different factors associated with overseas study than just your ATAR scores or your year 12 marks, or your matric results. There are a lot of different factors that go into that, a lot of variables that are beyond your control, as well as just a different timeline altogether as to when options and opportunities can present themselves for you to still depart in a timely fashion to go and study and do any extracurricular in North America.