Tracking Your Student's Progress Using Milestones

Overview

This guide highlights key goals and Milestones to help you and your student navigate their college and career journey. Milestones empower students to take ownership over their postsecondary planning process. From exploring career options to building and managing college lists, milestones help students stay organized and keep track of key accomplishments along the way. Because of their importance, Milestones serve as the dashboard for all student accounts.

Note: Schools may have made changes or customizations to their specific set of Milestones, so they may differ from what you see in this guide. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Step 1: Building the Foundation
• Step 2: Discovering Passions
• Step 3: Exploring Options
• Step 4: Identifying Preferences
• Step 5: Tracking Progress

Step 1: Building the Foundation

Goal

Complete the student's general profile together: Current GPA, Course Rigor, Ethnicity, Family Income, Activities, Interests, etc.)

Key Milestones

• Complete Overgrad Profile 
• Review and Update Profile Data

Step 2: Discovering Passions

Goal

Encourage them to take the personal interest surveys, including the Career Assessment and Personality Assessment. 

This survey will generate a list of potential careers they might be interested in based on how they answered the questions on the survey. You can review this list and career profiles with them, or to continue on to a larger search - head over to “Careers” on the top right of the page.

Key Milestones

• Take Career Survey

• Take Personality Assessment

Step 3: Exploring Options

Goal

Search for careers and colleges using interest survey results and additional filters as applicable. 

Use the filters available to search for careers in specific clusters, expected job growth, etc. and review any career profiles for careers that prove interesting.

Use the filters available to search for types of colleges, location, current predictors of acceptance (safety, match, and reach schools), etc. If interested in learning more, have your child review the university profiles.

Key Milestones

• Follow # of Colleges
• Follow # of Careers

Step 4: Identifying Preferences

Goal

Rank order careers and colleges following to indicate top preference. Create or edit Pathways, allowing students to create future plans using various combinations of colleges, majors, programs, and careers. 

Key Milestones

• Review and Update Careers
• Review and Update College List

Step 5: Tracking Progress

Goal

Review their progress on the dashboard by identifying upcoming Milestones, deadlines, and more.

If students are applying to colleges or postsecondary programs, students should add those colleges and programs to their application lists.  

The My Future page will allow you to view all of the colleges and careers your student(s) are interested in pursuing on your parent dashboard. It will also give you information regarding how on track they are to meet the expectations (average GPA, ACT/SAT scores, etc.) needed to get there.

Key Milestones

• Add # of College Applications 
• Complete FAFSA/Alternative Application 
• Complete the Senior Survey