Educational Consulting Services for High School Seniors

Homecoming, senior prom, graduation…seniors often feel on top of the world. There is well-deserved excitement associated with the last year in high school and the college years ahead. But seniors also must navigate the complex world of college admissions. Seniors may be uncertain of their goals, they may question if their college list is truly balanced by probability of admission, or want some guidance writing their college essays. If parents have been helping their student, it may be time for them to step back and give their child the benefit of an objective assessment.

Doing College offers just the right kind and amount of support for your high school senior to make steady progress toward their educational goals with confidence.

Courtesy Session

This complimentary phone or Zoom consultation is to get acquainted with students and parents. Doing College will discuss our services and how they apply to your current level of need.

Next, we will proceed with a Contractual Review Session to the better understand services we think are appropriate for your teen. This session helps parents understand what Doing College does, what we don’t do, and what is expected of parents and students. This session also provides a timeline of what needs to be completed and when during the senior year that will help to ensure you discover your best fit colleges, get in to one or more of them and gain the advantage of being successful once there.

All sessions are currently held online.

The Initial Working Session

Should you decide to work with Doing College, and the contractual agreement is fully executed, we will continue with the Senior Initial Working Session. Parents and students complete intake forms and provide Doing College with current school transcripts, testing information, and student activity and experiences information (these materials are completed and sent to Doing College prior to the session). This session accomplishes the following objectives:

• Explain how colleges make admission decisions with a focus on your student’s goals and priorities
• Provide an overview of the admission process and senior timeline with a focus on your student’s goals and priorities
• Identify any gaps that can still be addressed to strengthen the application, as well as showcase your teen’s unique talents, abilities and experiences
• Provide guidance for senior year course selection—if high schools will not permit a student to alter their schedule, we can consider online or other options
• Review standardized test scores to date; if needed recommend additional testing to reach score goals in a realistic timeframe with proven strategies to maximize success
• Review student activities and experiences and make specific recommendations for making your ordinary experiences extraordinary.
• Provide an overview of financial aid, including need-based and merit-based aid
• Provide up to 8 family selected college profiles to help you understand and interpret college statistics in ways that are most meaningful to your student both in terms of fit and probability of admission
• Offer resources to support college-bound athletes, arts focused students, students who learn differently and those with other unique circumstances

Following the senior session, you are ready to select between Comprehensive Services and Customized Clusters.

Comprehensive Services is the perfect choice for families that want expert and personalized guidance through every step of the college admissions process. This premier level of service provides families with unlimited access to expert guidance and resources. Although each step is compressed into a shorter timeline, the same strong results can be obtained with good organization and focus.

Seniors who are well on their way in the admission process can select from Customized Clusters of Services that are hours-based, the most common being 15 hours. At the Initial Working Session we can identify the set of services that precisely fit your needs. Partial guidance works best when your teen already has a balanced, best fit college list, and needs help with selecting a major or area of interest and essay guidance.

Special Circumstances: What happened and what should we do? Doing College also offers guidance for special circumstances like students getting rejected from nearly all or every school they applied to, waitlisted, offered spring admission, offered alternate campus admission, etc. Find Out More >>

COMPREHENSIVE SERVICES

Doing College’s Comprehensive Services are divided into phases:
THE ASSESSMENT
THE COLLEGE LIST
COLLEGE ESSAYS
APPLICATIONS
THE FINAL DECISION

THE ASSESSMENT

Students and their families are excited to have a college list as soon as possible. But good things take time.

The assessment phase begins with a Parent-Advisor Session which is a private, parents-only interview that gives you the opportunity to discuss your goals, expectations and priorities, and identify the college factors that are most important, including college affordability. This interview helps me to better understand your teen by offering essential insights that only a parent can provide.

Subsequent Student-Advisor Sessions are a series of private meetings with your student that lead up to the college list. These sessions accomplish the following:

• Using a variety of assessment approaches, evaluate your student’s natural talents (aptitudes) and interests which provide insights into college majors and linked career paths
• Build upon the earlier student activities and experiences worksheet to develop a student resume useful for college applications, fairs and interviews
• Using a diverse set of tools and strategies, help the student identify what college factors are most important to them and why
• Additional sessions for college-bound athletes, arts focused students and others with special needs or unique circumstances to identify those factors that will lead to college success

Now that all the assessment information is gathered, Doing College takes one last step to ensure we are all on the same page.

A concise summary of the collected assessment information is presented in the Consensus Session with parents, student and advisor. The goal of this session is to ensure that that there is agreement on the factors that will guide our college search and development of a preliminary college list that is well-matched to your teen’s needs and interests and abilities.

THE COLLEGE LIST

What happened 5 years ago or even one year ago is not what we can count on happening when your student applies to schools this admission cycle. A complete assessment lays foundation for Doing College to research best fit colleges for your teen and produce a preliminary list of schools.

In order to provide the most optimal college list for each client, Doing College makes a significant time investment in interviewing admissions representatives, researching and touring hundreds of colleges and universities to find the best matches for our clients. This extensive effort ensures that ever changing college trends are taken into account in the development of your teen’s college list.

We provide you with a well matched preliminary list of schools along with links to the most important academic, social, cost and environmental criteria that is already balanced by the probability of admission. We call the college list a preliminary list because it is a launching pad for further research. Further research and focused college visits will help your teen decide which subset of colleges will receive an application. Families are encouraged to add their own school picks to the preliminary list. It is a work in progress! After you have completed your research and selected schools to send an application, we call your final list, the application list.

Some students do not need much help to prepare an application list, while others may need more advising support. Students can schedule follow up sessions to review their research efforts and make progress on their lists. Doing College can recommend sequenced assignments to help your student make steady progress.

It is important for your teen to reflect upon and prepare reasons for their selections. This is a critical step and one often missed by families going it alone. It is important for students to not only say, but actually know and demonstrate that a school is a great fit for them. Your teen must take the primary initiative and do the work, not just parents. It is your teen who is going to college! Student research is the only way a student can hope to convince a college, especially a selective college that they are a good match and secure an offer of admission.

COLLEGE ESSAYS

Starting with essay workshops in the summer through the last application submission in the fall, Doing College offers guidance with each prompt. From brainstorming, through development and final edits and word counts, your teen will learn how to find and project their own voice and ideas. The chance to write genuine essays without hint of packaging or tampering by well-intentioned parents or other adults is one of the most important ingredients for success in college admissions.
To learn more about College Essays, click here.

APPLICATIONS

Ideally scheduled just prior to the start of the senior year or during the early weeks after school is in session, this phase of work includes the sessions below.

Organizing Session: Sets up a timeline for submission of applications.

Essay Development Session: Begun in the summer months, this session is a collaborative effort between the student and advisor. Most student prefer working online, but essay work can be scheduled in person for those who prefer to work face-to-face.

Application Review and Guidance: Doing College takes the time to review each unique application prior to submission, responding to unique circumstances, problem-solving, and addressing student questions. It is important to be sure that each part of the application is used to the student’s advantage.

Interview Preparation: Many schools offer students the opportunity to schedule an interview with an admissions representative. Doing College recommends students take advantage of this chance to let the college know them more personally, beyond the application they submit. A mock interview session with Doing College will help your teen feel more confident about how to weave talking about their strengths into the most common questions interviewers ask and prepare some questions for the interviewer.

THE FINAL DECISION

Many families want assistance sorting out offers of admission, so Doing College offers a one-time review of options to help ensure your teen attends a good college. A good college can be defined as one that offers your student a degree path that can be realistically completed in 4 years, even if the student changes majors. A good college offers a strong career center to help the student set career direction and test it early on enough to know if it is right for them. A good college should also have a reputation for helping a student graduate with little to no debt. (Ask us about additional services, which may include a value analysis and student debt forecast, and/or a two year college coursework plan which is especially valuable for dual majors or those that may switch their major.)

Doing College is committed to supporting families through this last, important step until a final decision is reached about your teen’s college home!