Most high school students figure out career readiness on their own, piecing things together from whatever surfaces — a teacher mentioning something, a friend sharing a link, an email that arrived too late. There’s rarely a central place to track what they’ve done, see what’s available, or understand where they actually stand. So they do what anyone would do: they guess, they wait, and they miss deadlines they didn’t know were coming.
TomorrowToday is a career-readiness operating system built to change that. Students get access to a centralized directory of opportunities matched to their interests, tools to track their experiences, and a portfolio that documents their progress over time. Educators get visibility into where each student actually is — who’s applied for what, who’s falling behind, who might need a nudge. It’s not a replacement for a counselor. It fills the gaps between counselor meetings, which, in most public schools, can stretch on for weeks.
A School Built for This
Principal Heather DeFlorio, now in her fifth year leading HSES, has built the school’s culture around three core commitments: knowing every student well, equity and rigor, and environmental and climate justice. Career readiness sits naturally at the intersection of all three — and the gap between a student’s potential and the opportunities they can actually access is one she takes seriously.
“Our students are exceptionally talented, and our counselors are deeply committed to them. But the reality is that no one person can be the sole bridge between a student and every opportunity that’s right for them. When students have a tool that helps them explore on their own terms — and show up to a counselor conversation already knowing what they want — that’s when the real work can happen. TomorrowToday gave our students that kind of agency, and we saw the difference it made.”
— Heather DeFlorio, Principal, High School for Environmental Studies
At the High School for Environmental Studies in Hell’s Kitchen, two recent graduates showed what that looks like in practice.
Bryhanny Marc
Before TomorrowToday, Bryhanny’s experience of finding opportunities was basically chaos. Everything arrived in fragments from different directions, and there was no way to organize it. “I was being thrown so many different career choices at my face, and I was kind of like, ‘Whoa! What do I choose? How do I go from here?’ It just seemed like I was dipping my hand in a raffle hat, choosing something to do.”
The timing made it worse. Programs would finally surface — but after the deadline had already passed. “Certain programs would be introduced to us, and the deadline had already passed. But it would be something that I could have probably done and fit my schedule.”
When she started using TomorrowToday, she had a unified place to look. Opportunities matched to her interests. Notifications before deadlines. She found Med Docs — a medical documentary program she’d been trying to access since freshman year — and for the first time, she didn’t miss it. “Ever since my freshman year, I’ve been trying to apply, but I’ve always missed a deadline. But with the constant notifications, I was able to use it.”
Bryhanny was already the president of her school’s medical club, already someone her peers came to. Now she had something concrete to offer them. She started pulling from her own curated feed — filtering for medicine, comparing notes with friends whose feeds looked different — and sharing lists of opportunities directly in the club’s Google Classroom.
“Based on what I was getting — because my feedback was based on medicine — and what my other friends were getting, we were able to kind of curate different opportunities and announce them on our Google Classroom, and then it would hopefully direct students to the TomorrowToday link or just to the program itself.”
Nobody asked her to do this. She just had the tools, and leadership followed.
Jake Hernandez
Jake, now a student at Brown University, traces things back to when he first set up his account. TomorrowToday started him off with a series of surveys — questions about interests, skills, what he liked and didn’t like — and that process of stopping to actually reflect on himself turned out to be more useful than he expected. “When we first made the account and had to take the surveys, it was really nice — actually reflecting on myself and seeing what I liked, what I didn’t like. Even if it’s an art internship and I’m a STEM person, looking at it and thinking, ‘Okay, this isn’t for me, but there are some aspects I like. Let me try to find that in a STEM context’ — I really liked that.”
He started building a record from there. Opportunities he found, internships he completed, experiences he logged. By the time classmates started coming to him — as club president, as someone who’d figured out how to navigate the platform — he had something real to show them. His advice was pretty consistent: look at the platform first, figure out what you actually like, and then go talk to your counselor.
“Because a lot of times people meet counselors and they’re like, ‘I want an internship,’ and the counselor asks, ‘What do you like?’ and they say, ‘I don’t know.’ Using the platform, you get to have that experience with yourself first. And then one meeting with the counselor is a lot more helpful than if you hadn’t had the website.”
He watched it play out with his friends. “I can see them working together and talking to each other about what they like or what they don’t like — just the idea of thinking, ‘Oh, I want to do this for myself,’ and having the ability to talk to your friends about it without waiting weeks to find a counselor.” One friend found a journalism internship at NYU through the platform. She applied late, pulled it together in about a week, and got in. Jake noticed that if she’d found it earlier, she would have had a lot more room to breathe.
When college applications came around, something clicked for Jake that he hadn’t fully anticipated. Everything he’d logged was already there — two years of tracked experiences, internship descriptions, reflections. “When I did have to fill out my extracurriculars, I had already done it on your website and I had already thought about it. So it was easier to remember and recall what I did. And when I had to write descriptions for internships, I could look at the website, reread the description, and pick and choose what I wanted to add.”
He’d been building a record the whole time, without necessarily thinking of it that way. When he needed it, it was ready.
Why It Matters
Paulina, who teaches 10th grade career readiness at HSES, sees it from the inside.
“Between teaching, finding opportunities, and making sure the students who need it most get support, it’s the students who don’t raise their hand who get left behind. TomorrowToday changes that equation. When a student walks out of my class equipped with this tool, they don’t just use it — they share it. That one conversation becomes five, then ten. Suddenly the reach isn’t limited by how many hours I have in a day.”
— Paulina, Career Readiness Teacher, High School for Environmental Studies
That constraint is real and measurable. The national student-to-school-counselor ratio is 372:1 — nearly 50% higher than what the American School Counselor Association recommends. That number matters because it’s the context in which everything else happens. In a school where one counselor is responsible for hundreds of students, there’s simply no way to surface the right opportunity for the right student at the right moment, every time. Deadlines pass. Programs go unannounced. Students who would have been great candidates never find out something existed.
TomorrowToday doesn’t solve the counselor shortage. What it does is fill in some of the gap — centralizing opportunities so students aren’t relying on word of mouth or luck, and giving counselors visibility into student portfolios so that when they do have time with a student, they’re not starting from zero. They can see where that student is, what they’ve done, what they’ve applied for. That changes what’s possible in even a short meeting.
What Bryhanny and Jake both describe, in different ways, is what happens when students aren’t working blind. Bryhanny stopped missing deadlines. Jake walked into college applications with two years of documentation already built. And both of them, without being asked, started helping the students around them do the same thing.
What Happened Organically
Neither Bryhanny nor Jake was assigned a leadership role. They didn’t go looking for a way to become the person their classmates turned to. They just got access to something that worked, they used it, and eventually other students followed. That’s a pretty ordinary thing, when you think about it. People share what helps them. Students are no different — they just need something worth sharing.
Want to bring this to your school? Learn more about how TomorrowToday can support your students and educators.
