Picture this: you’re starting the year as a Junior and your parents are pressuring you about going to a good college in just a couple short years. You know your grades and your SAT score, but that doesn’t tell you anything about how close you are to being accepted to a college whether it’s Harvard University or State College of Florida. You are troubled and worried if any colleges will accept you. Wonder how to figure it out?

Fortunately for you, ODA has Naviance. Naviance is a program that the school has incorporated to the college counseling process. It’s a website that has helped many students. Let me tell you a little bit about what it can do.

To start off, every Junior here has been issued an account and Mr. Runge has helped us learn how to access it. Now, Naviance has many features, but the one that most kids use is the “colleges I’m looking at” section. In this section, students can pick from every college in the US and in other countries. They can make a prospective list.

Although this doesn’t seem very special as anybody can do this on a piece of paper,  Naviance gathers information from the previous years’ students that have gone through the admissions process. Students with Naviance accounts can access a graph for every school. The graph shows the GPAs and SATs of students that have applied without giving out names. The graph shows if the student was accepted, denied or wait-listed.

Both college counselors input every juniors’ GPA and SAT scores into the progrm. On the graph, the student can see where they place compared to students from the past years.

This is the best thing about Naviance according to Max Mann ‘14. He says, “the graph really helped me construct a realistic list of possible colleges.” As students we are really thankful for this program as it is both useful and helpful for us.

Sophomores, get ready to use the best tool you will ever have in your college search experience next year!