User Guide
Welcome to Pathwise. This guide walks you through the site, section by section. You'll be signed out after 15 minutes of inactivity for security.
1. Getting started
Sign up with your email or Google. Confirm your email when prompted. New accounts may be placed on a short waitlist — once approved you'll land on the Dashboard.
2. Profile
Open Profile to fill in your bio, home location, school or college, academics, interests, and intended majors. Add your school/college website and iCal URL so holidays and key dates flow into your Calendar automatically. Comma-separated fields commit when you click out — spaces and punctuation are preserved.
3. Dashboard
Your home base. A red banner flags items due in the next 7 days. Use Add deadline to drop a scholarship, appointment, class, or task. Linked parents see a read-only version with the same critical alerts.
4. Calendar
Day, week, month, and list views. Click any day to see its events and add a new reminder right on that date. Synced school holidays appear automatically once you've added a calendar URL on the Profile page.
5. Tasks & Checklists
Tasks are quick to-dos with due date, priority, category, and notes. Click the pencil to edit. Checklists are templated playbooks split into School & College and Career. Items unlock based on your grade; use Sneak peek to preview what's coming.
6. Scholarships, Colleges, Careers, Opportunities
Browse the catalog, bookmark items, and click Auto-fill with AI on any item you add manually to enrich it. Bookmarking the same item twice now shows a friendly note instead of an error.
7. Essays & AI Writing Lab
Use the AI Writing Lab to brainstorm and draft. Click Save to Essays to keep the full AI draft. Reopen anything from Essays — you can edit, re-run the AI for a revision, and bump the version on save.
8. Vault
Private storage for transcripts, awards, certificates, and recommendation drafts. Each file has Open (signed URL) and Download actions. Files stay private to you.
9. Clubs & Achievements
Track every club, role, and meeting cadence under Clubs. Log awards and milestones under Achievements. Both feed your résumé, essays, and applications later.
10. Academic Plan & Senior Action Plan
Academic Plan maps your courses, rigor, and (in college) major requirements. Senior Action Plan is a guided, self-paced action plan for the senior application year — work through it one lesson at a time.
11. Parent linking
From Family, invite a parent (or, as a parent, invite your student). Once active the parent dashboard shows tabs for each linked child with the same critical alerts the student sees.
12. Support
Email support@liferetrieve.com any time, or visit the Support hub for FAQ, privacy, and feedback links.