The COVID-19 pandemic might have sent all school kids home in the Commonwealth until next fall but education can still go on unaffected thanks to the plethora of resources online. The time’s specific challenges could even prove an opportunity for the high school rising and graduating seniors with the Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) JumpStart program.
The College’s JumpSTART program will teach eligible students two courses of their choice out of a total of three times as many. And the best part is there will be no tuition.
The subjects range from communications and history to math and computer science. Applications will be open through May 1-15. The program will, then, run for a month and a half from June 1st.
Who Is Eligible?
Besides NOVA’s private school partners, JumpSTART is for students currently enrolled in some Virginia public school systems. The school systems include Alexandria, Arlington County, Falls Church City, Fairfax City, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Manassas City, Manassas Park City and Prince William County.
How to Apply?
The application process will run entirely online. To initiate their applications, students will need to create an account at the College’s electronic platform and enter their basic personal information. Then they will wait for 24 hours to make sure the data they entered are available. At the next step, they should upload documents proving that they meet eligibility requirements for the course they wish to take as well as their current high school transcript. The College will do all the communications via electronic mail.
The six courses JumpSTART will offer are:
- Art 101: History and Appreciation of Art I
- CST 110: Introduction to Communication
- ENG 111: College Composition I
- HIS 112: History of World Civilization II
- ITN 257: Cloud Computing: Infrastructure and Services
- MTH 154: Quantitative Reasoning
Why Should You Care to Apply?
The reason NOVA named the program the way it did is because the participants will be able to transfer the credits they will earn to their actual higher education at the College and elsewhere. Each of those six courses is of three credits. Successful participants, therefore, will have earned six credits as a result of the program.
The course on cloud computing, in particular, could also serve to meet a high demand currently in the tech industry. That the College partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the program is indicative of how valuable those skills could be in the jobs market.
AWS accounts for more than half of Amazon’s overall operating income. The tech giant’s rapidly growing subsidiary controls nearly half of the cloud computing market in the U.S.