From "I Don't Know" to a Direction: Researching Majors and Careers with Soar

Getting started

Swami: Hi everyone, welcome. Thanks for joining us today for this webinar about helping students choose a direction, careers, and majors, going from an "I don't know" mindset, or a too-narrow set of choices, to a path that actually feels right to them. We have a lot to cover, and the whole point of this session is to be as interactive as possible, so if you have questions, please put them in the chat or the Q&A box on your Zoom screen. We'll answer as we go.

I'm going to share a deck, go through a few slides, and then we'll do a live demo of how to use Soar for this. Let's start with introductions. I'm Swami, Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of both LifeLaunchr and Soar. I've been an IEC and run LifeLaunchr for twelve-plus years. My graduate degree was in electrical and computer engineering, and my work back then was in artificial intelligence and computer vision. I was a software engineer and entrepreneur for a long time before this. More recently, I sit on HECA's College Knowledge Committee, and I'm chairperson of HECA's newly formed AI committee. Kelly, do you want to introduce yourself?

Kelly: Hi, I'm an English teacher and writing coach, and now an independent educational consultant. I started my career after graduating with an English degree from UCLA, working in admissions for a year. I went on to teach, raise my daughter, send her to college, and now I've come full circle with my college counseling certificate from UCLA and my own practice. I've been using Soar, and I'm thrilled to be here today.

Swami: Great to have you. Ranna?

Ranna: I'm Ranna Patel, also an independent educational consultant. Before that, I was a teacher for many years, and I've been doing IEC work for the last twenty years now. Both of my own children are grown and working now. I've worked with more than a thousand students, and I'm very proud of that. I adopted Soar quite early, and I'm very happy with it, and my students are too.

Swami: Thanks, Ranna. Claire?

Claire: Hi everyone, I'm Claire Schadler. I'm a coach at LifeLaunchr, and I've worked in college admissions for about ten years. Before that, and still now, I'm an English as a second language teacher. I've been using Soar since it started as a LifeLaunchr coach, so excited to talk about it all with everyone.

Swami: Thank you all for those introductions. If people are joining late and have questions, put them in the chat and we'll try to answer them as we go.

The scale of the choice

Swami: Before we get into the demo, I want to start here, because when we meet with students, people often say, "Well, there's computer science, there's engineering, there's bio, there's business, what else is there?" We live in anxious times, and people aren't sure what to do. So I went through our database of colleges and majors, and this number is checked: there are 641 named majors that are each offered at more than ten colleges in the United States. There are a lot more offered at just one or two colleges, but that's already a lot. A typical high school offers maybe 100 to 150 courses. Of course, majors and courses don't correspond directly, but 641 majors means thousands and thousands of courses that colleges offer. It's important to understand the scale of choice people are actually working with.

And this matters right now specifically. We're recording this around the same time as the UC counselors' conference. Ranna, you were there in person yesterday and mentioned some of the new majors UCs are adding. Can you share a bit about that?

Ranna: Yes. I was very impressed. UCs, who were completely against AI two years ago, are now adding so many majors related to AI. One standout was digital humanities. UCLA added it, UC San Diego has added AI-related majors, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz have added a few as well. It was heartwarming to see colleges adapting and adding new majors for our students.

Swami: Totally. Every day you hear about new majors and new programs, many driven by the fact that AI is transforming the workplace and changing the kinds of skills employers look for.

One word, many majors

Swami: So here's an example of what that looks like in practice. A student or parent might start by saying, "I want to study computer science." But computer science itself covers a huge range of potential majors: computer science proper, the most theoretical, focused on algorithms and information theory; cybersecurity; information technology; software engineering; artificial intelligence, which more and more schools now offer as its own major; human-centered tech design, meaning user interface and product design; computer game programming. These aren't just different choices, they require and build different skills. So when someone says "I want to study computer science," there's actually a huge range of majors within that umbrella.

The same is true if someone says they want to focus on health. There are 134 named majors inside the health field alone. Some are quite obscure. Does anyone know what polysomnography is, or perfusion technology?

Kelly: I do not. I had to look it up.

Ranna: I had to look it up too.

Swami: Lactation consultant, music therapy, art therapy, the list goes on. People think health means nursing, pre-med, or dentistry, but there are more than a hundred different majors you can study within that field, and again, they require different skills, build different skills, and lead to different careers.

And then someone might say, "I want to study business." Business isn't a single thing either. Accounting rewards the kind of person who loves precision, following the rules, doing the same work every day but doing it perfectly, never making a mistake. Marketing is nearly the opposite. I've met many marketers and many accountants over the years, and they're not the same kind of person. A marketer would be frustrated by the routine of accounting, and an accountant would be frustrated by the lack of rules in marketing. They're just different people. Or an entrepreneur, who has a high tolerance for risk and ambiguity. Or human resources work, which is really about interpersonal judgment. Does that land with you all? I'd love your thoughts.

Kelly: Absolutely. I have two daughters, one in accounting, who graduated with a double major in accounting and public policy, and one in human resources, and they're very different people. Different skill sets, different approaches to life. Both are technically under the business umbrella, though at Penn State, where my other daughter is, human resources is actually housed in the humanities, not the business school. So she crosses fields, which is interesting.

Ranna: Kelly, when did you first recognize that difference in your own daughters?

Kelly: That's interesting, because I never would have predicted it. My daughter in HR has always had great interpersonal judgment, so that part fits. But what she loves is workplace safety, and I never would have guessed that. That emerged later, through a class she had to take. She talks about her OSHA classes and the rules constantly. The accounting daughter kind of went for it because it was my husband's field, he studied philosophy and accounting, and she's put her own spin on it with the public policy piece. In both cases, I'd say they kept their minds open to what was available and it developed once they got to school. I wish they'd had a bit more direction and exploration early on, with something like Soar.

Swami: And human resources, as you said, is a lot about compliance: what are the rules, how do we stay compliant, how do we protect the company from liability.

Claire: Someone's asking in the chat if you'll touch on dual-degree programs.

Swami: We definitely will, one of the scenarios we'll show touches on exactly that.

Why this matters more in the age of AI

Swami: So, why does this matter more now than before? This is an editorial opinion, you might disagree, Soar doesn't enforce this, and we have different philosophies here on the panel. But I'll say for myself: in the age of AI, it isn't just about looking up average earnings for a major. The real question is, what can you be excellent at? If you're not really good at what you do, there's a high likelihood AI will simply replace that work. If you are really good, you'll be the one using AI to drive it. The premium on excellence is going to increase a lot in the age of AI, and I don't think parents and students have fully absorbed that yet. The question isn't "if I study this, what job will I get," it's "what could I be really good at," because if you can be really good at it, there will be work for you. Does that make sense? I'd love other perspectives from the panel.

Ranna: Can I say something? There's no room for mediocrity anymore, that's the change I'm seeing. If you're excellent at anything, now is the time to go big, because AI is going to take away the generic work. If parents and students know what they're really good at, they'll excel, because AI will help them excel even more. Knowing yourself has never been more important than it is right now.

Kelly: I agree completely. Students who know themselves do better, they rise to the top of their field more naturally, they're more willing to put in extra effort and take risks when they feel driven in that area.

Ranna: And I think this is where the relationship between parents and students becomes even more important. Parents will need to be more open to who their child actually is and what their natural skills are.

Swami: The way people have traditionally approached this is by asking, "Should I study CS or engineering," and then looking up average earnings for computer scientists versus engineers versus history majors. But those numbers aren't stable, and they depend enormously on how good you are at the work. The question I want to encourage is: which one fits me, and am I the kind of person who'd be good at this? A different question produces better answers.

And here's the other piece: most of us, Claire, Kelly, Ranna, myself, and certainly parents and students watching, know a fairly small number of majors and careers. Maybe as counselors we know a few dozen. Maybe as parents you know ten. As students, three or four. But the real choices out there are hundreds or thousands. None of us can be experts on all of it, and that's where a tool like Soar adds value, it broadens the field and does the research, so we can have nuanced conversations with students based on information none of us had walking in.

I'll say the two things I think Soar gives you that are different from just Googling something or asking Claude directly: first, it's intensely personal, it looks at real information about the student, as we'll show. Second, it's built specifically to have this kind of conversation and to ask follow-up questions that drive the conversation forward. But I think the hardest thing for people to get used to is treating it as a thought partner, not a smarter Google, not asking one question, taking the answer, and walking away if it isn't what you wanted. I'm curious how that's been for you three.

Kelly: I've gone back and forth with it. I have a student who wants to apply to some colleges I think are a reach for her, and I've had a long back-and-forth with Soar about that, "well, what about this, what if this," and it keeps refining. Using it as a thought partner also means it pushes me past what I already knew to think about, suggesting combinations or colleges I hadn't considered. On the personal side, I can't keep every activity every student has ever done in my head, so having Soar remind me, "since this student was president of this organization, that already points in this direction," helps me make connections I might not have made on my own.

Claire: It helps me keep students straight too, honestly. It's hard to keep everyone's details in your head all the time.

Ranna: What I've really loved about Soar goes back to my whole philosophy when I started twenty years ago, which was to bring families together. The four years of high school are often when families are fighting or arguing the most. Because Soar is transparent, parents and students can be in the same conversation, they can see each other's work. I tell my families, do this together, talk about it together. This year, my students have been able to choose paths they never would have chosen before, because I mostly work with immigrant families, and parents often have their own views shaped by where they came from, about which careers are financially stable. Soar has helped them realize this is a different country and a different time, and their children can think for themselves. That's been the most liberating part of using it for me.

Swami: I think it's also helpful to encourage students and parents to do this work on their own between sessions. You might see a student once a week or once every two weeks, but they can do the work continuously, and you see the results when you meet.

Meeting Katheryn: a first look at Soar

Swami: I'm going to switch gears now and show you. Just so everyone watching knows, every student scenario we share today is imaginary, a made-up test student. We're not sharing anything about real students, since that would violate their privacy.

I'll start with a test student named Katheryn Williamson. One of the things I find most helpful is to start with a broad question rather than a narrow one like "what major." So I'll ask something like, "If you look at Katheryn's profile, writing, personality tests, and transcript, what guesses can you make about her personality traits and skills?" This is deliberately open-ended. Soar has the activities list the student created, their transcript, their GPA, their course rigor. It also has the Writing Hub, a structured set of assignments with thousands of possible questions, and when students answer these sometimes random-seeming questions, like "if your life had a theme song, what would it be," they can't help but reveal things about themselves.

So when I ask that broad question about Katheryn, a lot comes back: she has a multidimensional cognitive style, she's an effective delegator and leader, she has a creative identity, she's emotionally intelligent and self-aware, she's driven by making an impact, especially around financial equity, she's community-oriented, and she's quantitative and analytical under the hood. That's already a great starting point for a conversation with a student. What do you all think, how does that land for you?

Kelly: It gives a nice big-picture and focused answer at the same time. Students often try to jump straight to the major, or straight to having the acceptance in hand, without pausing on who they actually are. This is a moment to slow down and think about the student, not just move through the steps of an application.

Ranna: It gives them words. When they read something like this, they feel so good about themselves, and that itself is a great start. They say, "I have so many qualities," and they begin the application process with real positive energy.

Claire: I have students who aren't at the top of their game yet, still figuring things out, especially junior year. When they read something like this, it's genuinely exciting for them and for us, it gives us a sense of who this eighteen-year-old could become at twenty-four.

Ranna: And the students who barely speak a word will write pages in response to these questions, because the questions are so well designed. That's especially been a blessing for the introverts. It also surfaces the tension points. Soar might notice that Katheryn's "why major" exercise points toward business and economics, but her stated interests lean toward UX, cognitive science, computer science, and architecture. Maybe she's still deciding. So you can ask, "well, what majors or careers might she consider that she isn't already thinking of," and it can surface things like human-computer interaction.

Claire: Before you move to that, I have a couple of questions from attendees. Someone asked how well this works for kids who largely take low-rigor classes and play video games.

Swami: Great question, and honestly I'd encourage you to ask Soar that directly and see what comes back. Video games are an interesting skill in their own right, being genuinely good at one takes a lot. Soar will sometimes flag concerns too, it might say a student's activity list is thin, and ask whether that reflects something else going on. That's a conversation to have as a counselor.

Claire: Another one: before you even asked that first prompt, were you uploading the transcript, personality test, and activities list yourself? Is that included in the My Students tab?

Swami: Great question. Soar was built as a shared workspace, students, parents, and counselors are all in it together. So it isn't me uploading a student's transcript or activities list, it's the student's own work. They upload a resume or type in their activities themselves, they do the writing assignments, and Soar reads all of it. Because it's a shared workspace, when you do research, they see it, and when they do research, you see it. It isn't a matter of me updating everything once a month, it's ongoing work that's theirs.

Claire: Someone's also asking how long it takes students to complete all of this.

Swami: I'm curious what your experience has been, Kelly and Ranna. Our process is that we meet regularly, and when you start with a student, you ask them to upload a transcript, import or build a resume into an activities list, and keep it updated at every meeting. Writing assignments happen over time, not all at once. It's meant to be iterative, not a one-and-done process.

Ranna: That's exactly right, and it depends on when you start with a client. Students who've had more time do it gradually, one assignment every week or two, then it ramps up senior year. I've had a couple of students who started with me senior year, and for them I've done some of the initial data entry myself, that part is instantaneous. If a student hasn't used Soar before, they're probably handwriting or typing a resume up from scratch somewhere else anyway, so this is more efficient even done all at once.

Kelly: Same for me. If it's a senior, I have them do most of the work in a concentrated period, about a week if they're given all the questions at once. For younger students, even ninth graders, we do a question or two a week.

Swami: And you can absolutely upload a transcript, just to add a little color. When you upload a transcript on Soar, what you see isn't the transcript itself but an analysis of it, how many years of English, course rigor, and so on. We don't display the transcript directly because it contains sensitive information we don't want on screen. But that analysis feeds into the research, and sometimes Soar will flag something, "I notice you haven't completed your English language requirements," or "your math grades are a concern." One of the things that's different about Soar compared to just using Claude or Gemini directly is that its instructions are very clear: don't just tell people what they want to hear, tell them what they need to hear.

Ranna: That was actually a parent's question to me once, does this give students an inflated sense of themselves? My answer is no. It gives them a very real picture, especially when it comes to the college list, but it's presented in a way that isn't derogatory. It doesn't inflate them, but children at this age need to hear what they're good at, not dwell on what they're not. That's part of why we all became IECs in the first place, to help students see what they're good at.

Swami: I come at this with the view that everyone is exceptional at something, and almost nobody is exceptional at everything. Our job, and parents' job, is to help students figure out what they're actually good at.

Claire: And it's about potential too, this isn't the end, just showing up at college. We're trying to help them see where they can go from there.

Swami: Right, and when you look at potential majors, most people have never heard of things like behavioral economics, decision science, industrial design, social entrepreneurship, urban planning, environmental design. From there you can ask what skills those majors teach, how they translate into careers, and what the earnings and job prospects actually look like. That's where we get into concrete detail.

I'll actually pull up a report here, this is one Soar generated for Katheryn, that I downloaded. This is the kind of detailed report you can share with a family. Ranna, you wanted to point something out?

Ranna: Yes, go back to the previous screen for a second. I want to show parents something, did you see at the bottom, the sourcing, Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation data, and so on? That's the most important thing about Soar to me. When I've looked at other tools, like Perplexity, they were pulling data from Reddit. This is very intentional, and it's the biggest reason I keep coming back to Soar, it has a strong, deliberate bias toward reliable sources, not crowdsourced data.

Kelly: Going off that, the level of detail. I had a student who wanted a professional sales organization, I didn't even know those existed, Baylor has one. She also liked music, for her own enjoyment, not as a major. Soar helped me do that same level of deep-dive research, not even about a major, but about a specific organization, which schools had it, which schools had practice rooms available so she could keep playing guitar and piano without taking a class for credit. It put it all into a ranked chart for me, including likely admits. It's useful even for that kind of niche question.

Theo: majors that lead to law school

Swami: I'm going to switch to a second test student, Theo, again completely imaginary. Theo's profile says he wants to go to law school. Of course, law school isn't an undergraduate major, so you might ask, "based on this student's writing and activities, what undergraduate majors would set him up well for law school?" Soar will go through everything he's written, his activities, his transcript, and surface things like a demonstrated interest in the gap between rules and reality, in jurisprudence and legal philosophy, in reasoning adversarially but honestly, and a substantive policy interest. From there it can point to majors like political science, political theory and philosophy, the politics-philosophy-economics major some colleges like Oxford offer, environmental studies and policy, history, rhetoric, sociology. It's just as useful for it to flag majors that may not be a great fit, and explain why. Criminal justice, for instance, is often a more vocational major, designed to prepare people for work in a police department or a coroner's office rather than legal work. Perfectly good choices, just not the strongest path to law school. Business or finance, unless the interest is specifically in corporate or transactional law. Pre-law itself is offered at very few schools and isn't the most academically rigorous option, even though it sounds like the obvious answer if you don't know better.

Then I expanded the question, the way we talked about in our prep call, what if the student says he's an introvert? Students don't always know that about themselves clearly, but within law there are many different paths, so I asked what kinds of law might be a good fit for an introvert. It walked through what that might mean and the paths most students don't know exist: litigation, administrative and regulatory law, environmental law, constitutional law, policy law, transactional law, legal academia, and how each connects to different kinds of work. From there you can ask what style of practice appeals to him, does he want to stand in a courtroom, does he want to shape policy, does he want to draft contracts, and which majors connect to each.

I also asked, especially given the rise of AI, which of these paths are least vulnerable to replacement, and what the earnings look like. I want people to notice I'm not asking Google-style questions, I'm having a conversation to learn more. It produced a color-coded table, red, yellow, and green, showing which kinds of legal work are most vulnerable. Transactional and corporate law were flagged as most vulnerable, since drafting a contract is exactly the kind of task AI can help with.

Someone also asked about dual-degree programs, so let's try that live, I don't know what the answer will be, we're doing this together. Many colleges offer three-plus-three or similar programs where you get an undergraduate degree and a law degree together. UC Irvine has one within the UC system, and many other colleges have strong versions of this too.

Claire: A related question came in: how does Soar work for students exploring majors who don't feel pressure to have a five-year plan?

Swami: I think it works just as well for them, you start with the same kind of general questions. What do my activities so far demonstrate? What would give me the most choices going forward? I actually did a research session with Soar recently on undeclared programs myself, while touring colleges with my daughter. Some schools have really interesting programs for students who genuinely want to explore, and I looked into what those look like, how they affect admissions, and what career paths they lead to. Colorado has a great exploratory program, for instance, and that's really helpful for the student who says, "I'm going to college, I just don't know exactly what yet."

That reminds me, has anyone heard of Deep Springs College? It's an extremely unusual place. Twenty-six students total, one of the hardest colleges in the country to get into, entirely free if you're admitted, a two-year program where students basically live on an isolated ranch in the California desert, working the land and studying philosophy and other subjects, then going on to places like Stanford and Harvard. I had a great conversation with Soar once about whether Deep Springs was a good fit for a particular student, and it knew an enormous amount about it, helping the student think through whether it was really right for them. It's a place that's a wonderful fit for a very small number of people and a poor fit for almost everyone else, which is true of a lot of great things.

Ranna: And it's co-ed now, finally, though still mostly male.

Swami: Yes, it was men-only for a long time. If you've never heard of it, look it up, it's a fascinating place.

Priya: "But what would I do with a history degree?"

Swami: Let's look at one more scenario. Claire, we talked about this the other day, a student who loves her AP U.S. History class, and when you suggested she consider history as a major, she seemed surprised.

Claire: It was funny, the transition seemed obvious to me, and the student said, "Wait, study it as my major?"

Swami: So this isn't that actual student, but here's a pretend one built the same way. I typed something like, "Priya loves her AP U.S. History class but is reluctant to consider it as a major." I'm literally just having the same conversation I might have with Claire. It works best when you treat it like a conversation, the same way you'd treat any AI tool as a thought partner rather than a smarter Google.

It came back with a range of where a history major actually leads: law, journalism, museum and archival work, public history, many people at institutions like the Smithsonian studied history. Business and consulting, which surprises people, firms like McKinsey and Bain hire a lot of history majors. Policy and government, academia and teaching, and other adjacent majors worth considering too: anthropology, journalism, English, literary studies, philosophy, all quite different from each other.

And it won't sugarcoat the real concern either. History majors on average earn less at twenty-five than engineering or computer science majors, but that earnings gap narrows significantly by mid-career. I think that's important to say plainly: you're probably not going to out-earn a computer science major right out of school, but you can build a very good career, and by mid-career the gap may be much smaller.

Kelly: I love what Ranna said in our prep call, asking students what they imagine their life looking like. What does your day actually look like, your enjoyment, your interest level, doing something day after day, whether that's computer science for the money or history for the love of it. Kids often don't put those two things together.

Swami: Ranna, can you say more about that question you ask students?

Ranna: Most students don't know what they want to become, but they have a very clear idea of what they want their life to look like. I had one student say she didn't want to work five days a week like her parents, she wanted to work three days, drop her kids at school because that was the best part of her own childhood, not rush through traffic in the morning. She also wanted to be quite comfortable financially. So we explored dentistry, which can support that kind of schedule and specialization. She was only a tenth grader, so we had plenty of time to explore, and she's doing summer programs now based on what came out of that conversation. I always ask students what their future life looks like, where they want to live, whether they want to stay close to family or go explore the world first and come back later. Those are real, concrete questions.

Swami: I love that, and I think it connects to how we think about our work generally. Our job was never really to get kids into college, it's to help them find a path that works for them. Getting in isn't some magic gate where all your decisions are made for you afterward. So encouraging students to think about passion and purpose, but also practical things, how much money do you want to make, how much financial anxiety are you willing to tolerate, matters.

Given that we live in the age of AI, it's also worth asking directly: recent research shows humanities majors are actually doing better in this environment, how does that change the picture? Soar can walk through what's driving that, what skills are actually in demand. And it won't pretend the structural earnings gap at graduation doesn't exist, if you study history, you're likely to earn less right out of school than a computer science or engineering graduate. As long as you're willing to live with that trade-off, you can absolutely build a great career.

Ranna: And it's worth remembering, when someone says a history major won't earn enough right after graduation, so do doctors. Medical residents earn very little. They're fully licensed physicians working seventy-two-hour shifts for a fraction of what they'll eventually make.

Swami: Right, and that's years after they finish high school, still broke in some sense, even after finishing medical school. If a student is still concerned about earnings, you can ask Soar directly how to combine humanities or social science interests with a more career-focused education. It'll point to pre-professional tracks, dual-degree programs combining history with economics, colleges structured around integrated career pipelines, places like Middlebury, Colby, and Hamilton, which invest heavily in that kind of thing, or Georgetown, which has one of the deepest pipelines from history into the foreign service if diplomacy interests a student, or American University, Northeastern, George Washington. Or a student could add a quantitative certificate alongside the major. The point is to help people see the full range of possibilities and make a good choice from real information, not a narrow guess.

Closing thoughts

Swami: We're coming up on time, and we won't get through every scenario we prepared, but I think we've covered a lot of ground. Any final questions from the chat?

Claire: Nothing outstanding right now, I think they've been answered as we went.

Swami: I want to note that we focused narrowly today on one part of Soar, major and career exploration. There's more to it, building a college list, calculating admission likelihood, essay support, that we've covered in other webinars. But this session was about helping students choose a direction. I'm grateful to my co-panelists for being here. Any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

Ranna: I loved this, it felt like a real lesson, and it's core to our practice. Soar is such a useful partner in that work. Swami, you explain all of this really clearly, you were the one who first taught me how to use AI well, and that conversational, relaxed approach makes this program genuinely unique.

Swami: Thank you, Ranna. I got into AI very early, and even when a lot of the world was afraid of it, I saw real positive potential in it.

Ranna: People worried students would cheat, and some do, but I don't see it that way. It brings a lot of positive energy into counseling and into students' lives. They feel liberated. We just have to teach them to use it properly, and that's what Soar does, students don't feel guilty about using it, and counselors don't need to feel guilty either. There's no reason to feel guilty about using new technology. It's here, and we have to accept that.

Swami: The idea behind all of it has always been to teach students, families, and parents how to use AI ethically, wisely, and effectively, with real guardrails built in so it produces high-quality information and connects to the rest of the work they're doing.

Ranna: I'll add one more thing, it's also made students better writers, because now they know who they are. A lot of students struggle to start their essays because they've genuinely never been told what their good qualities are. Once they know, they write so much faster. I'm genuinely grateful for Soar, and I should say, I'm not affiliated with Swami's company, I'm just a user, so families watching know I'm not promoting this because I work for him.

Swami: I appreciate that, Ranna. And the Writing Hub in particular is interesting, it was built on the idea that human beings teach human beings how to write, so all the feedback comes from your coach, not the AI. But learning to write about yourself is so valuable, and answering all those seemingly random questions ends up teaching students a lot about themselves, which produces stronger applications overall. Claire, any final thoughts?

Claire: I just hope the takeaway for parents, counselors, and students is that thinking about majors can be so much more expansive than it feels at first. It doesn't have to be computer science, business, or something health-related. There's so much detail and so much about fit to explore, to find a genuinely nuanced major for each individual student, rather than assuming "you took STEM classes, go be a computer science major." I hope today showed how wide the field of choices really is, and that choosing should feel exciting, not overwhelming.

Ranna: I'll add, this also increases admission chances. Once students know themselves and can write a strong essay connected to the right major, their chances go up too.

Swami: Very true. I always come back to the idea that the key to a strong application is self-knowledge, not some clever writing trick. It's the most obvious advice, and also the hardest to actually act on, the same way "eat better and exercise more" is obvious but hard. What I've tried to build is a tool that encourages that self-knowledge, and everything else in the application follows from it. The application itself isn't some separate magic trick, it's just putting together the best true story about yourself that you can.

Ranna: I'll give a very practical example. I don't have diabetes, but I started using a continuous glucose monitor a few years ago, and now I know exactly what to eat. That's exactly what this does, it tells you who you are, what your strengths are, and which majors fit. When you know that, your chances go up, because you're not following the crowd, you have a real understanding of yourself that leads you toward a major a particular college values, and sometimes a scholarship along with it, because you know yourself and they get to know you too.

Swami: Thank you so much, Claire, Kelly, Ranna, for being here today, and thank you to everyone who joined us. We really appreciate your time, and we'll see you at the next webinar.

Resources mentioned

Soar https://withsoar.ai

Deep Springs College https://www.deepsprings.edu

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook https://www.bls.gov/ooh/

HECA (Higher Education Consultants Association) https://www.hecalive.org

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