Students and families in Chicago are increasingly taking up school choice options offered by the school district. Prospective high school students and their families have 160 high schools to choose from. These options include a broad variety of schools in governance, size, academic approach, and programs offered. To streamline the school application process, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) launched GoCPS, an online application platform for high schools, in the fall of 2017. In 2018 and 2019, the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) released two studies that described the GoCPS process in detail, and showed patterns in applications, offers, and resulting enrollments in high schools. Those studies found the GoCPS system worked as intended, in terms of its technical specifications, and that almost all students received an offer to one of their top school choices. But the GoCPS system did not improve equity in the types of schools in which students enrolled, even though this was one of the goals of district leaders. The UChicago Consortium also conducted an evaluation of the North Lawndale Cluster Initiative (NLCI)--a strategy to improve outcomes in neighborhood schools in the North Lawndale area, run for CPS by the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL). This study included focus groups with eighth-grade students about their experiences in the high school search and application process. This brief offers key insights from that qualitative study and illuminates how eighth-grade students in three CPS elementary/middle schools experienced the school choice process in Chicago, shortly after GoCPS was implemented. Specifically, this brief addresses how students navigated the school choice process, including their experiences researching, applying to, and selecting a school, and addresses the following research questions: (1) Choice Factors: What factors did students consider when choosing which high schools to apply to?; (2) School Exploration: How and from what sources did students learn about potential high schools?; and (3) Application Process: How did students experience the application process using GoCPS?