College Push App Review

By: JoDee

This next month we are going to push our oldest out the door to the world of opportunity know as college. I can’t believe how fast the time has flow. Particularly the last year when it seems like its been a constant marathon of papers, applications, scholarship essays and deadlines. As we’re in the home stretch I think she’s pretty confident with her decisions and the things she’s been able to accomplish. As a Mom I’m pretty proud of her, but after some really late nights part of me thinks there has got to be an easier way to get it all done and keep it all organized for daughters two and three. This week I found a helpful little app in College Push.

College Push is designed to help manage the tasks and requirements of selecting and applying to colleges during your senior year of high school… we hope that you enjoyed a stress-reduced experience in navigating the process and meeting application deadlines.

I started my review with just the free version of the app, hoping to find that “stress-reduced” experience proclaimed on the cover letter of the vitals that you can share through “Export”.  Here’s what I found:

Free Version:
  • My Vitals – records your high school name and address, GPA and class rank, SAT and ACT scores, Guidance Counselor/Advisor’s name, email and phone number. (All things we found ourselves looking up quite often for applications.)
  • Notes and Reminders – handy place to jot down deadlines and to-do’s
  • My Profile – place to keep personal information, preferences you have in a school, field of interest and athletics.
  • My Colleges – organizes a list of colleges that meet your specifications, for you to select your favorites. Includes links for each institution. (Many of these pages aren’t formatted for iPhone and are best viewed from a larger device.)
  • Helpful Links – large listing of college related sites. (FAFSA, Fast Web, CollegeBoard, SAT and ACT were most helpful for us.)
 
Full Version Additions:
  • My Perfect Fit – ready reference to schools you listed as favorites.
  • Daily Push – daily information for things that match your profile.
  • My Passwords – convenient place to store all the passwords you’ll need for FAFSA, Fast Web, CollegeBoard, SAT, ACT and NCAA. (There is no protected gate to secure this information.)
  • Export – produces a PDF summary for you to share with parents and counselors through email or print.
I really liked the way College Push allowed us to organize all our information. Having school addresses and counselor email right there with SAT and ACT scores was nice. It was also helpful to have the password section. Access to this section was the reason I went ahead with the in-app purchase of the full version, but for sensitive information, like FAFSA, I would have liked a gate. Another favorite was My Perfect Fit, which allowed at a glance access to our preferred institution websites. Some were easy to view from a phone others weren’t. Overall for best use I recommend the full version. I can see that using College Push for our younger children may indeed bring a little stress relief to their enrollment process.

-The iPhone Mom
 

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