During my second week here at the Center for College Planning, I have been using some of their free online college planning tools, such as Kuder and Bridges. I have found them to be great tools and very useful in my college search. 

KUDER
• Provides students with a career planning system
• Searches on careers 
• Features skills assessments and work values inventories
  
With Kuder, you can take three different questionnaires where you answer some questions about yourself and what your interests are. At the end, you are given a list of possible career fields to think about or pursue. Because I already know what I want to pursue as a career, I was a little surprised by the results – but I guess these other careers are careers I can always keep in mind going forward.  Kuder is definitely something that you should check out if you are unsure about what you want to do in the future because it does help organize your thoughts around what you might want to study. Another great thing about Kuder is that I could search for colleges that offer the type of major that I am interested in.

BRIDGES
• Explores possible career options
• Customizes a list of colleges fit to my chosen criteria
• Compares the colleges in my list
• Helps prepare for the SATs
   
I found Bridges to be a little more useful than Kuder because it allowed me to map out my three years of high school credits as well as what I plan on taking next year. I then have the ability to see if these credits I plan on taking will be what I need to take based on the major I want to study. I was then able to plug in the requirements I would want my ideal school to have - such as a major in finance or marketing, women’s lacrosse, etc. - into the college search tool. I saw how the number of schools available to me started to decline as my preferences for what I want in a college began to grow. This made it easy to go from a large list of schools, to a smaller more manageable list.

Both Kuder and Bridges are useful tools to start thinking about colleges and careers; I definitely suggest  everyone check them out.  Call the Center for College Planning at (800)525-2577, ext. 119 or e-mail them at collegeplanning@nhheaf.org to get the codes you will need to log-in. 

Have any of you guys started checking out colleges? Have you used any of the other search tools to help you get an idea of where you want to go? What are you thinking about for a major? I would love to hear about any of your experiences or any questions or suggestions you all may have.

Searching Online,
Lauryn