Application Companion for Universities is a Firefox plugin that you can use during college applications. This nifty little addon can be of great help and it can give you advice when you are applying for colleges online on the web pages of the Common Application website.
Applying for college can be tiresome, especially if you are applying to a lot of different college institutions at once, to maximize your chances of getting in somewhere. Common Application is a not-for-profit association which runs the commonapp.org website, a place where you can submit your application online and have it distributed to over 400 different colleges across the USA who are members of the Common Application association.
How can Application Companion for Universities help you with college applications?
As the name of this addon suggests, Application Companion will show up when you open the commonapp.org website and there it will guide you through the registration and the application submission process. The Companion offers several different types of help during the submission process, which should make the college application with the commonapp.org website somewhat easier to handle. Note that Application Companion is still in development, and it still has to be worked on to improve its helpfulness.
Using the Interactive Walkthrough
Companion comes with interactive Walkthrough which will display important information about the necessary steps on a particular page. On the image below we can see how we are being helped to login to the Common Application website.
This type of help, bubble boxes and step by step explanation on the side will be given during every step of the application process, on every input box and text field that you come across.
Other types of help given by Application Companion
Next to the Interactive Walkthrough, another interesting way of providing help is allowing students that used Common Application before to share their comments and experiences about what’s the best way to submit a college application to the website. So far this part of the addon is for the most part empty, there’s not much advice contained there because not many people have discovered Application Companion, college application submission helper.
But don’t despair, there are a lot more sources of information being provided by the application companion. You have the frequently asked question section where you can find some of the more common questions which are being asked by the users. There’s also the Academics, Activities and Writing options where you can find a lot of helpful links, information and documentation.
Conclusions
If you are not completely sure how the Common Application works and you would like some help, then definitely install Application Companion to help you get better acquainted with the application process at the commonapp.org website. Even though the program isn’t as packed with information as it should be, there’s still a lot that you can learn from it, especially if you are new to the concept of Common Application. When you familiarizes yourself with the addon, you can contribute to its documentation by sharing what you’ve went through for future generations to read and not repeat your mistakes.
