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Why work with a college counselor?

In theory, you should be receiving guidance from your school counselor when it comes to admissions. And you should take advantage of the resources and wisdom that your school’s counseling department has to offer.

But if you’re like the vast majority of students in the U.S., you may see your counselor 1-2 times per year. Here in California, counselors are responsible for working with on average 622 students. School counselors do incredible work and have tremendous responsibilities for ensuring that all students are learning in a safe, productive environment. But there’s simply no way for counselors to know enough about each student to provide effective, tailored advice given the sheer number of colleges as well as the complexity of how the holistic admissions process works.

How Does It Work?

We see our students every week – sometimes more often as we get closer to college deadlines. Our counselors work with very small groups of students to ensure that we fully understand your student’s strengths as well as any challenges we’ll need to address. We tailor the work we do to ensure that we’re addressing your interests and goals, creating a narrative that will showcase every significant dynamic of your story. We’ll also go through our program in detail and see if it is a good fit for what you will need to find success. 

Students fall into one of three different packages. If you’re primarily considering the University of California schools, you’ll likely be placed in a smaller package since you’ll be tackling just one application for all of the campuses that you choose to apply for. If you’re applying to very selective direct med programs or anything else that might require significantly more writing/earlier deadlines, we’ll likely need a larger package to ensure that we’re able to devote sufficient attention to everything you’ll need to complete. You don’t have to decide on this package until after your initial consultation, and we’ll offer our recommendation based on the conversation we have.

Online & Remote Services

We hold regular video conferences over programs like Zoom and Skype. When crafting essays, google docs makes it easy to track our progress, save earlier drafts, make revisions between appointments, and leave frequent feedback. For local students, we can always convert any in-person appointment to a remote session if it is more convenient. We know that schedules can get busy, and you may need to chat about something that came up last minute.

As we continue to expand our remote offerings during this unusual time, we will be well situated to help students from anywhere in the world reach their goals when it comes to college admissions.