Onboarding
A five-step quiz that runs once, immediately after signup. It exists to collect the handful of facts that make everything else in the product specific rather than generic.
The six steps
- You are: applying from high school, or transferring from college. Everything after this branches on the answer, and transfer applicants also give their current college and units completed. See Transfer track.
- Dream: your dream school, searched against the built-in college catalog. Free text is accepted if it isn't listed.
- Why: why that school, in your own words. Minimum ten characters.
- Study: intended major from 18 options, or explicitly undecided.
- Details: country, what's driving you, and the year. First-year applicants give their high school graduation year; transfer applicants give the autumn they intend to enrol, because a graduation year would be meaningless to them.
- Avatar: species and colour for your companion.
What each answer changes
| Answer | Effect |
|---|---|
| Dream school | Auto-added to your college list with its real deadline, and shown on your dashboard as a standing reminder of why you're doing this. |
| Why | Displayed verbatim on the dashboard. Never analysed or sent anywhere. |
| Major | Drives extracurricular recommendations and filters the opportunity library to matching programs. |
| Undecided | Deliberately suppresses major-specific recommendations and substitutes exploration prompts instead. |
| Graduation year | Determines your current grade, which filters opportunities and honors by eligibility. |
Why “undecided” returns nothing: telling an undecided sixteen-year-old to pursue a bit of everything is how you build a scattered activity list. The product gives them four narrowing exercises instead of eighteen majors' worth of suggestions.
Rewards
Signup grants 25 XP and completing onboarding grants 75, so every student reaches Level 2 immediately. This is deliberate, the first level should never feel earned, it should feel given, so the second one feels like progress.
Changing your answers later
Onboarding runs once. Everything it collects can be edited afterwards from Profile & export, which also holds the additional Common App fields (legal name, address, GPA, class rank, citizenship) that onboarding deliberately skips to stay short.