Chapter 11 · Every screen, part by part
Tracking
Three lists of things in motion: conversations, applications, and anything with a date on it. Nothing here is created by research — it all starts from something you did.
1 — The three tabs.
| Tab | What it holds | What starts one |
|---|---|---|
| Outreach | One thread per professor you have written to | Drafting and recording an email |
| Applications | One row per application you are pursuing | The form on this tab |
| Upcoming | Everything dated in the next fortnight, across both | Any deadline, interview or follow-up |
The tab you are on is in the URL, so a link to Tracking → Applications lands where it says it will.
2 — New application. Pick a university and press Create. That is the whole form: an application starts as a stub and grows as you fill it in, rather than demanding a program, a deadline and a document list before it will let you begin.
3 — The list. Empty here, because nothing has been started yet. Every empty state in this app says what would fill it, and this one is accurate: applications come from the form above, not from research.
What a row shows once there are rows#
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
| University | Where you are applying. Opens the application |
| Program | The specific program, once chosen. — until then |
| Professors | The people attached to this application, as links. This is the join between an application and your research |
| Stage | A dropdown, changed in place — this one is safe inline, because there is one row per university rather than eleven thousand near-identical ones |
| Deadline | The date, in red once it has passed |
The stages run: considering, planning, preparing documents, ready to submit, submitted, under review, interview, waitlisted, and then one of accepted, rejected, withdrawn, offer declined, offer accepted.
Inside an application#
Clicking a row opens it, and that page holds what a list cannot: the document checklist, the professors attached, interviews scheduled, notes, and the offer if one arrives. Chapter 6 walks through using it.
The Outreach tab#
One thread per professor, holding every message in both directions and what state the conversation is in. A thread is created the first time you record contact with somebody — you cannot start one here, because a thread with no message in it is not a conversation.
The state of a thread is what the dashboard's Replied — your move and Waiting on a reply lists read from, which is why keeping it current is worth the small effort: those two lists are only as good as what is recorded here.
The Upcoming tab#
Everything with a date, soonest first, across applications and outreach both. Deadlines, interviews, and follow-ups you said you would do. It is deliberately a flat list rather than a calendar — the question it answers is what is next, not what does my month look like.