This Woman Can Open the Door to Your Future

Debbie Ingoglia wants to do everything she can to help Montville High School students become college students.

Ingoglia, who runs the Career Resource Center in Montville High School, is the school’s primary resource for information on colleges and scholarships.

Do you want to study abroad? Ingoglia can help you figure out the program that works best for you, and can help you with the application.

Want to study a specific area, such as veterinary medicine or culinary arts? Ingoglia can help you find out about the schools that teach those subjects, and help direct you toward the right school for you.

In the Career Resource Center where Ingoglia works, there are books about specific schools, about career, about all four- and two-year colleges in the United States. There are career encyclopedias and books on job opportunities and the job outlook in specific fields.

And through the Naviance Family Connection web-based program, students can take an interest inventory survey to help determine their skills and aptitudes. They can also visit the test preparation section for SAT prep work.

Ingoglia is the Montville High School student’s guide through this jungle of information. And she knows how daunting it can be.

Ingoglia grew up in Queens, NY. She was the first one in her family to graduate from college.

She went to Queensborough Community College, and she worked while she was going to school.

“If it weren’t for three ladies I worked with,” she says, “I wouldn’t have gotten through.”

The three women were secretaries in the computer electronics department where Ingoglia worked. When she confessed, a few times during her college career, that she didn’t think she could make it, the women set her back on track, loading her with a positivity that she radiates today.

Among her other duties, Ingoglia schedules representatives from colleges to visit with students at Montville High School. From September to before Thanksgiving, 33 college representatives were scheduled in the Career Resource Center.

This year UConn, University of Rhode Island and Quinnipiac University drew the most students to their presentations. 

At other times in her 13 years in the career resource center, other schools have topped the list.

“School popularity goes in cycles,” she says.

With the economy the way it is, the state schools make sense, Ingoglia says. And if you aren’t sure about what you want to do or even where you want to go, Three Rivers Community College is a great place to start.

Tuition there is $3,000, as opposed to $7,000 at UConn.

Three Rivers offers a variety of ways to transfer your credits toward a bachelor’s degree.  These include guaranteed admission programs and degree-pathway agreements with many public and private college and universities in Connecticut. 

In addition, some Montville High School students are eligible to earn college credits while they are in high school through UConn’s Early College Experience and Three Rivers’s College and Career Pathway classes. These, too, may be transferred, shortening the student’s college time, and cutting that much money from the cost of his or her education.

Grants and scholarships are another way to cut the cost of a college education, and Ingoglia has all the information on these.

She posts much of the information on the Montville High School website; all of it is available on Naviance Family Connection, in the Career Resource Center and through the Counseling & Career Scholarship Newsletter.

Once a student logs into Naviance, Ingoglia says, he can search for all the scholarships for which he is qualified.

There are many scholarship and grant opportunities, she says, from national ones to local ones.

For instance, through the Montville High School Scholarship, students are selected for an array of local scholarships. There’s a scholarship offered by the Montville Fire Department, two scholarships given annually in memory of Montville Police Officer Dennis Monahan, and one in memory of Montville Police Officer Sachatello III. There is a scholarship in memory of Isaac Emerson Palmer, who built the Palmer School. The Palmer Scholarship is available to Montville residents up to the age of 25.  There are many others, she says, for which specific students might qualify.

Ingoglia is happy to help students through the application and presentation process.

She has some tips:

“An application is a three-person job,” she says. “Parents, students and the third person as a checker.” It is impossible to find your own mistakes, she says, and parents are often so familiar with the material that they can’t see the errors, either.

And, she says, “Presentation is everything.”