Lochlan Downard
Staff Writer
As the yellow and brown leaves around R.J. Reynolds usher in fall, the year also brings another seasonal movement: college application season. For the few hundred seniors at RJR, the blue and white shades of the Common App website rival autumn hues.
The season of Common App inevitably comes with the stress of justifying an entire educational journey, all the while corralling disparate applications with a myriad of deadlines. Yet this year’s annual cycle has been made only more complicated with the introduction of Naviance. A digital platform designed to supplement Common App with letters of recommendation, it promises to provide other college-oriented resources in the future.
Nicole Beale, the director of Student Services at RJR, admits that the transition has not been seamless, though Naviance promises to improve applications in the future.
“It’s got some limitations I wasn’t expecting,” Beale said.
Above all else, the main drawback for her was the short implementation time for Naviance this year, which took place as students were submitting their college applications.
“That was not ideal from an anxiety-reducing side,” Beale said. “I don’t think we were reducing kids’ anxieties or ours. Now that I’ve figured out how to use it, it’s not so bad. It’s just that it’s November 9th.”
If Beale had the same understanding at the beginning of this year that she has now, the student onboarding would have gone better.
For teachers, too, there was hesitation that slowly gave way to familiarity; the principal challenge, as in the case of students, was onboarding on such a short timescale.
“I think in the beginning there was a lot of trepidation, but I think now that they’ve figured it out,” Beale said. “I don’t think it’s super complicated on their end; it’s just not intuitive.”
Still, the rollout of Naviance this year shows that future seniors may experience less stress than this year, if only as a result of familiarity. That ease of use is not a given, though.
“I just hate it for this year’s seniors,” Beale said. “I think the college admissions process, as a general rule, is stressful. And so [Naviance is] just another stressor. Like, will it get there? Won’t it get there? How do I do this? Just another piece of anxiety that was always going to happen to some class.”
The standardized nature could redound to its benefit, providing a unified hub of information on a student’s college application process. Compared to Common App, the requirement to use Naviance is its greatest strength.
“Common App, for example, is something you kind of have to know about, and kind of have to know to apply, and have to attend a session where we talk about it, and you have to have college on your radar,” Beale said. “At least with Naviance, if we can really get using it, every single student gets it just by nature of being a student.”
To provide such a universal experience, we must continue to support Naviance and build out its capacity. To do so would require attention not just from students, but teachers and parents, too. In this way, RJR has a real opportunity to reduce senior students’ worries about college, despite the inevitable stresses of the season.