What's the Point of a Portal?

Now that you’ve completed most of your applications, you should be checking your portals. If you’re thinking to yourself “what’s a portal?”, chances are you haven’t checked it.

Once your application is received by a college, the college will confirm that they got it and provide you with sign on information for their application portal. (The portal can have other names, like “student account” or “XYZ college account.”) With this information, you set up your portal user name and password and then log on to see the status of your application. If all is in order, then you can rest easy for the moment. If not, there may be messages for you, such as:

We did not get your transcript

We did not get your recommendations

You did not fill out the courses and grades section of the common app, which we require

We did not get your FAFSA…

…just to name a few.

Your job will be to take care of these omissions as quickly as possible. If you’re not clear on what’s wanted, you should call the admissions office to get the specifics.

Even if there appear to be no errors, you should continue to check every few days.

By the way, sometimes the information on the portal can be good news! We’ve had students find out they were accepted to a college by seeing the message on their portal.

Even though you’ve diligently completed your applications, your job is not done. Keeping yourself connected to the schools you want to go to is also part of the process. And that’s the point of the portal.