On this week’s episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, host Beth Heaton delves into the inner workings of the financial aid office at Babson College and the admissions office at Goucher College and, in between, she gets some great tips on the best way to use resources in your high school counseling office.

In our last blog post, Using Naviance: How to Get Organized, we discussed how to get started with Naviance. This installment focuses on how to best utilize the program.

Naviance is a powerful web-based tool that many high school guidance offices use as a way to organize and inform their students about the college process. The program can help you search for colleges by location, major, size, and so much more. It can show you when deadlines are for every college, and which application type the school prefers. It can also show you if you are academically in the right range for a college. If you are a senior, it may also be the way you request transcripts and recommendation letters from your school and teachers.

In the last post, I covered how I’ve been using Naviance with my junior son to help him develop a long list of colleges to research and (later) a short-list of schools to which he will apply. This week, I want to share some of Naviance’s other great features.

In the Career Module, students can explore different types of careers and discover majors that may be of interest to them. While it’s not necessary for a student to be certain of their major before entering college, it’s always fun to imagine the possibilities. The “Career Cluster Finder” and “Career Interest Profiler” are simple assessments which help a student discover career matches based on activities of interest, personal attributes, and most-enjoyed subjects. The results of the assessment include the student’s strongest fields of interest and those of lesser interest. Students can also view matching careers and career clusters that may be of interest to them based on the results of the assessments.

As a parent of a high school junior, I am happily supporting my son during his college admissions process, standing ready to be his co-pilot during this very exciting journey. Certainly, there is no shortage of college planning resources available to families, however, I want to highlight Naviance as comprehensive college and career planning software used by many public and private high schools. Naviance helps students plan for their futures by connecting their academic interests and achievements to college and career options.  This program really serves as a “one stop shop,” allowing students to identify their potential college options based on established criteria. Naviance also serves as a robust college application management system, helping families to streamline an often overwhelming process. Perhaps most importantly, Naviance has proven to be extremely beneficial to my son thus far during this process – and has proven to be a college search tool we can use together.