Maggie Owen, Reporter
@mowencourant
Senior Isabella Montgomery logs into her Naviance account for what seems like the ten thousandth time and is greeted by several notifications about upcoming college visits and a reminder to fill out a her goals survey for 2015-16. She scrolls through a list of the colleges she is interested in and registers to meet with a representative of one of them when they visit NCHS in a couple weeks.
For most upperclassmen at NCHS, Naviance has become an integral part of the college process. Naviance describes itself as “comprehensive college and career readiness solution” that offers many services such as an in depth college search program, personality and learning style inventories and electronic communication with colleges.
In the past, students might have felt overwhelmed by the task of individually researching and keeping track of every college they were interested in. Today, students find that Naviance provides relevant information about each college in an easy to use format. “Naviance is really helpful because you can see a lot of statistics that are specific to your school, and colleges that you’re interested in,” Isabella said.
One of Naviance’s main claims to fame is it’s use of GPAs and test scores of past NCHS students and their admission status in comparison to the individual student researching each school. According to Naviance’s blog, “Students’ admissions results, including acceptances, rejections, and wait-lists, are saved and allow students to see how their GPA and standardized test scores compare to their predecessors.”
With so much information at their fingertips, many students find it easy to get lost in comparisons between their GPAs and test grades to those of former NCHS students who applied to each college. “The bad thing about naviance is that it literally drives kids insane. I have heard stories about kids spending hours just looking at the scattergrams,” senior Josh Klapper said.
However, the scattergrams on Naviance only tell part of the college admissions story. “The scattergram, like any graph, is just the depiction of where two numbers meet. It does not tell you the story the student represented by each number,” College and Career Center coordinator Sue Carroll said. “Their backstory, what kind of application they presented to a college will determine why they got in or did not get in as well as the test scores that Naviance shows.”
Throughout the years, Naviance has grown to be more than just an organization tool. “It is a marvelous tool to help you keep track of college applications and test scores, but it also has many other uses that I wish kids would pay more attention to,” Ms. Carroll said.
According to Ms. Carroll, one of the most underused services of Naviance is it’s automatic resume builder. “If a student were to go and put their activities in each semester and any awards that they got, when they are a senior Naviance instantly formats it resume,” she said.
With all of the aspects of Naviance for upperclassmen, NCHS has begun to introduce naviance to underclassmen so that they are comfortable with it once the time for the college search comes. “Over the years we have added in other programs like the learning styles inventory that we use for freshmen, “Do What You Are” which is a personality and career inventory for sophomores, and then for junior and senior year we use it for college searches and college applications,” Ms. Rivera said.
For every student at NCHS, whether they go on Naviance every day or only when required, Naviance stores their data, goals, recommendations, and applications. “Overall Naviance is the keeper the information that shows who the student was for their four years in NCHS,” Mrs. Rivera said.
