Getting started

By the end of this chapter you'll have an account, a filled-in applicant profile, and a sense of where everything lives.

1.1 Create your account#

1. Open the app and click Create your workspace (or go straight to the sign-up page).
2. Enter your email address. Use one you'll still read in a year — offers arrive late.
3. Pick a password. It has to be at least 8 characters and contain a letter and a number; the two checks under the field tick green as you satisfy them.
4. Click Create account.
5. Check your inbox for the confirmation email and open the link inside it.

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Then sign in with the same email and password.

The sign-in page says "That email and password don't match an account". Either the password is wrong, or you haven't created the account yet. If you're sure the account exists, try the password once more before creating a second one — duplicate accounts mean two empty workspaces.

1.2 Fill in your profile with the guided setup#

The first time you sign in, you land in guided setup. This is the single highest-value twenty minutes you'll spend in the app: everything the app later says about fit is measured against what you enter here.

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There are eight steps. Only your name is genuinely required — everything else can be skipped and filled in later, at the cost of weaker matches in the meantime.

Use Continue to move forward. Your answers save on every step, so if you close the tab halfway through, nothing you already typed is lost. Skip setup at the top right takes you to the dashboard immediately, keeping whatever you'd entered.

Why the CV upload is worth doing now#

Your CV gives the app the background you didn't type out — earlier projects, coursework, a publication, an internship. Matching reads it for connections you'd never have thought to list, and drafts quote from it rather than guessing. You can always add it later from Assets.

Editing the profile directly#

Guided setup covers the essentials; Profile holds everything, split across tabs — Identity, Education, Research interests, Experience, Publications, Projects, Skills, Awards, Tests, Preferences and Private notes.

Three things worth knowing about it:

• Each section saves separately. Identity, Research interests and Preferences each have their own Save. A form with changes says Unsaved changes next to its button, and the browser warns if you try to leave the page with any outstanding. Switching between tabs is safe — your typing is kept.
• The long text boxes understand markdown. Anything with a Write / Preview toggle accepts **bold**, *italic*, - lists and links. It matters more than it looks: these fields are quoted into outreach drafts, so what you write here is close to what a professor reads.
• Skills group by category. Whatever you type in a skill's Category becomes its heading, so a long list stays readable. Skills with no category collect under Uncategorised at the bottom.

Coming back to setup#

Guided setup isn't a one-time gate. Profile → Guided setup reopens it with everything you already entered, which is the easiest way to update your interests after a semester of new work.

1.2a Things you'd never put in an application#

Your profile is the material an application is built from, so everything in it is fair game for a draft. But you know things that must never appear anywhere: that you left a programme and would rather not explain it, that a department rejected you last cycle, that you'd prefer nobody raised your GPA, that you met a professor at a conference and they were cool with you.

That's what private notes are for. Your profile has a Private notes tab, and the same card appears on every university, department, program, lab, professor and match.

The rule is absolute and worth stating plainly: notes are input, never output. They change what gets researched, what a draft argues, and what an email avoids. They are never quoted, paraphrased, or alluded to in anything a professor reads — not in an email, not in a statement of purpose, not in a "why this university" paragraph.

Write them the way you'd brief a friend who is helping you apply, including the parts that would be awkward to say out loud. That is the whole point.

1.2a-2 Importing your CV instead of typing it#

Filling in the profile by hand is the most tedious thing this platform asks of anyone, and your CV already contains most of it.

Upload it under Assets, tick Use this file when drafting, then ask your assistant to import my CV. It reads the file and adds what it finds as education, experience, publications, projects, awards, skills and test scores.

Three things worth knowing about how it behaves, because they are deliberate:

• It only ever adds. There is no way for an assistant to change or delete a profile entry — that stays with you, in the app. If it misreads something you get a wrong row you can see and delete; you never get a right row silently overwritten.
• Running it twice is safe. Entries you already have are skipped, so re-importing after you update your CV adds only what's new.
• It won't guess. If a line doesn't say which year, the year is left blank rather than estimated. You should get a report of what it left out and why — that list is the useful part, because it's the bit you can't see by looking at the profile.

Read the result before relying on it. It's a good first pass, not a finished profile.

1.2b Two things that change how you're written about#

Most of the profile is facts. These two are not, and both are worth a minute.

Where this is going#

On the Identity tab, under Where this is going: what the degree is for, plus your short- and long-term goals.

This isn't a formality. A professor deciding whether to reply is asking whether you want the thing their lab produces, and someone heading for a faculty post and someone heading for industry research should not be written to the same way. Left blank, every draft splits the difference and reads like it was written for nobody in particular.

"Still deciding" is one of the options and you should pick it if it's true. It's the honest answer a year out, and a draft written from "still deciding, leaning toward research" is better than one written from a commitment you invented for the form.

How should this be described?#

Every education, experience, publication, project and award entry has this field at the bottom of its editor. It's optional and it's the difference between a description that's accurate and one that's yours.

The record holds what a project was. This holds how you want it characterised — "lead with the deployment, not the model", "call this systems work, not ML", "the interesting part is the dataset, not the architecture". The same eighteen months reads completely differently depending on which framing you choose, and you're the only one who knows which is honest for a given audience. Without it, whatever writes about you picks — and picks the same way every time.

This is the opposite of a private note: a note must never appear in anything a professor reads, and this is meant to show up.

1.3 The layout#

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The sidebar is grouped by what you're trying to do:

Overview

• Dashboard — what needs you today. Start here every session.
• Analytics — every number, filterable, with the records behind each one.

Research

• Universities — your institutions and how far research has got at each.
• Professors — every professor, with their fit score and outreach state.
• Batches — what research runs next, and what it has already covered.

Pipeline

• Tracking — outreach threads, applications, and everything with a date attached.
• Review — records the app wasn't confident about, waiting on your decision.

Workspace

• Profile — who you are and what you're looking for. Matching and drafting both read it.
• Import — bring in a list you already have.
• Assets — your CV, transcripts, and other documents.
• Settings — sign-in security, email rules, and how research runs.
• User guide — this guide.

Three things worth learning on day one:

• Search — ⌘K (macOS) or Ctrl+K (Windows/Linux). Type a professor or university name and press Enter. Faster than navigating, always.
• The collapse button at the top of the sidebar buys you screen width on a laptop. It remembers your choice.
• Light and dark mode live in the top bar, next to your account menu.

1.4 How to read the dashboard#

The dashboard is ordered by urgency, not by what's easiest to count.

Work top to bottom and you'll be doing the most pressing thing first. The cards under Needs you are colour-coded: amber for anything time-bound (a follow-up due today, a deadline inside two weeks), blue for work waiting on you (drafts to review, a strong match you haven't written to), plain for upkeep (research that's gone stale). If nothing needs you, the section says so rather than inventing busywork.

The twelve metrics in the strip near the bottom are clickable, and clicking one opens the actual records behind it without leaving the page. Not every figure on the page works that way — the pipeline bars and the batch counts are read-only — so 7.2 Clicking a number is worth a look before you go hunting.

What's next#

Your account exists and the app knows who you are. Now it needs a list to work on: building your list →