Many senior students know the worried feeling that accompanies the college application process. Topics like majors, college selections, letters of recommendation, ACT Scores and finances make applying for college an intimidating project.
The school hopes to make this process easier with the addition of SchooLinks.
The school has purchased a new program called SchooLinks this past school year, to help students plan and guide their future. SchooLinks is a college and career readiness program that manages everything a student might need throughout their high school career and assists with the college application process.
“It has career interest inventories, personality inventories, gives you activities to help you figure out an individual strength, what you might want to do after high school, what career you might want to pursue based on the information you are getting back from these assessments,” counselor Kristen Zurbach said.
This year the main focus for SchooLinks is to help seniors with their college applications, then introduce it to underclassmen as the school year goes on.
“What we did this year is we went into seniors language classes to introduce SchooLinks, get everybody logged in and understanding how to use the college application manager, that was job one,” Zurbuch said.
SchooLinks allows students to add their college applications and track their information, to make the college process easier.
“Right now it’s collecting a lot of graduation tracking, student test scores, and stuff like that,” Zurbuch said.
SchooLinks can collect data to see average GPA, graduation rates and amount of people that enroll in certain colleges, etc. SchooLinks can also collect data that manages career/personality inventory, with activities to help students understand their strengths during and after high school.
When managing students’ personality inventory, the program can give information that they may want for insight into different career paths and colleges that provide for those career paths.
“There are no fewer than probably seven assessments at your fingertips to help you focus in on what your strengths are and how to tie that into a career,” Zurbuch said.
In the future, Zurbuch hopes to see more students use SchooLinks to help them transition from high school to college.
“What the vision would be is that we get everyone on board starting with 9th grade working through these assessments,” Zurbuch said.
Students in the STEM community have already been introduced to SchooLinks. They took a personality inventory that propelled them into a major inventory. These quizzes and inventories make these students feel like they are having a fun time while also learning.
By November, the counselors already had over 734 completed applications and only 224 applications left. All of the statistics are relating to the class of 2025.
