Getting started as a student

Welcome to Draftl! This guide walks you through everything you need to go from a brand-new account to your first essay draft. It takes most students less than ten minutes.

Create your account

Head to the signup page and choose how you'd like to sign up:

• Email and password — enter your name, email, and a password (use the eye icon to show or hide it), then click Sign Up.
• Google or Microsoft — sign in with your existing school or personal account in one click.

If you sign up with email and password, you'll see a confirmation toast and a Check your email page. Open the verification email we send you and click the link to activate your account. A few things to know:

• The verification link expires in 24 hours. If it lapses, request a new one.
• Don't see the email? Check your spam folder.
• You won't be signed in automatically after signing up — verify your email first, then use Back to sign in to log in.

Once you're signed in, your session stays active for seven days, so you won't need to log in every time.

Tell us how you'll use Draftl

The first time you sign in, Draftl asks a single onboarding question: "How will you use Draftl?"

Choose I'm a student — "Writing my own college essays and applications." This unlocks the student experience: drafting and organizing essays, AI feedback, grading, and brainstorms, plus tracking schools and activities. Click Continue to land on your dashboard.

If you're an independent counselor or run a consulting business, choose I'm a consultant instead — see Getting started as a consultant.

A quick tour of your dashboard

Your dashboard is built for desktop — if you're on a phone, you'll be asked to switch to a larger screen. The sidebar is organized into four groups:

• Application — Essays (your home page), Folders for organizing drafts, and Extracurriculars for writing and grading activity descriptions.
• Resources — Example Essays and Example Extracurriculars that show real work scored across every dimension, plus the Admissions Calculator.
• Advising — Book a Session with an advisor, Find a Reviewer in the marketplace, and My Reviews to track your review requests.
• Account — Context (your profile background), Usage (what you've used this billing cycle), and Settings.

The home page is titled Essays — "Write, organize, and collaborate on your college essays." You'll see a template grid up top, followed by Your Essays and Essays Shared With You sections. Each essay card shows the essay's title, status, word count, and when it was last modified, with quick actions to open, share, duplicate, or delete it. If you're part of an advising organization, an Advising section also appears with your upcoming sessions.

Fill out your Profile Context

Before you start writing, spend two minutes on Context in the sidebar. The Profile Context page helps Draftl understand your background to personalize your essay assistance, and every AI tool works better when it knows who you are. You can fill in:

• Academics — intended major and minor, class rank, percentile, GPA, SAT and ACT scores, and number of honors classes.
• Background — location, first-generation and low-income status, gender, ethnicity, and any legacy schools.
• Activities & Awards — up to 50 extracurriculars and 50 awards.
• Application status — schools you've applied to, been accepted to, been rejected from, or been waitlisted from.

In a hurry? Upload a PDF of an existing application (up to 10MB) and Draftl will extract your academics, background, and activities into your context automatically.

Create your first essay

Back on the Essays home page, pick a template from the grid:

1. Choose the template that matches your task — Common App for your personal statement, UC Essay for personal insight questions, Supplemental for school-specific prompts, or Blank Essay to start from scratch.
2. Follow the short step-by-step form — you'll give the essay a working title and pick or paste your prompt.
3. You'll land in the editor, ready to write.

For a full walkthrough of every template and the editor itself, see Writing your first essay.

Explore the AI tools

Inside the editor, the tools panel on the right holds Draftl's AI features: the Writing Agent, Essay Grader, Grammar Check, Cliché Detector, and Hook Generator. To learn how to read the feedback they give you, start with Understanding AI feedback, and if you're staring at a blank page, try Brainstorming topics with AI.

Essays aren't the only thing Draftl helps with. The Extracurriculars page lets you generate and grade compelling activity descriptions, and the Example Essays library is a great way to calibrate — you can browse real essays that worked, see how they score across six dimensions, save your favorites, and filter by essay type or school.

Where to go next

Once you've written a draft or two, these guides will help you get the most out of Draftl:

• Organizing essays with folders — group drafts by school or deadline.
• Using the admissions calculator — estimate your chances at a specific school.
• Getting a professional essay review — buy one-off feedback from a vetted consultant.
• Working with your consultant — if your counselor invited you to an advising organization.

You can check what you've used anytime under Usage, and manage your plan in Managing your subscription. Happy writing!