Ninety minutes. Every admission secret on the table.

The diagnostic is the conversation families wish they could have privately with a highly selective admissions officer.

Breaks (bio, bread-breaking, bell-rings) before we begin. For both of us. A minute will not be wasted.

How will my kid’s transcript actually be read? How about among thousand and thousands of valedictorians from 50 states? What does race still mean in the process? Which colleges evaluate the same student differently? Is test-optional helping or hurting? I know its authentic to him, but will they see it as authentic? Do you need a full-service counselor, a specialist, or nobody at all? Is my sister Dianne who went to Berkeley sufficient for the essays (no.)?

I have worked across three admission offices, four private college-advising firms, graduate admission, and counseling in public and independent schools. Colleges are discernibly different. Counseling firms are discernibly different. Their goals, methods, incentives, and definitions of a successful outcome are not interchangeable.

The diagnostic gives your family an independent, profoundly biased look at your student’s profile.

How It Works

1. You send the record.

Before our meeting, you will submit the materials that currently exist: transcript, testing, school information, activities, writing samples, and the questions keeping your household awake.

2. I read it as a candidacy.

I examine not only whether the student is accomplished, but how the pieces are likely to be interpreted together: rigor, trajectory, context, distinction, coherence, institutional fit, and fit in the context of gender, race, your high school, your city and state. I’ll share, and with joy, the omissions that may invite an admissions reader to invent the wrong explanation.

3. We meet for 90 minutes.

No canned webinar. No prolonged sales appointment dressed as counseling. We address the student’s actual record, your hard questions, and the decisions presently in front of you. I’m hilarious and your kid will love me.

4. You receive the diagnosis.

Afterward, you receive a focused written assessment of the student’s strengths, vulnerabilities, next moves, and at least two plausible routes forward.

What We Can Cover

The Academic Record

Testing

Activities, Distinction, and the Student’s Actual Life

Writing and Voice, AI and Noise

Recommendations and the School’s Side of the File

College List and Institutional Behavior

Race, Class, Gender, Context, and a Changed Legal Landscape

Cost, Outcomes, and the Decision After Admission

Choosing Counseling Firms, Test Firms, College Lists

What You’ll Send Me

Submit what you have. The purpose is diagnosis, not administrative perfection.

Core materials

  • Unofficial high-school transcript

  • Current senior-year or proposed future course schedule

  • SAT, ACT, AP, IB, or other available testing

  • High-school profile, when available

  • Current activities list or résumé

  • Preliminary college list

  • Intended majors or academic interests

  • Existing personal statement or other writing samples, even if unfinished

Helpful context

  • Basic school and family context

  • Any academic disruption, accommodation, disciplinary matter, or significant circumstance relevant to the record

  • Financial parameters that should shape the list

  • Athletic, artistic, research, or other specialized ambitions

  • Services or counselors already under consideration

Your questions

You will also complete a short intake identifying the questions you most want answered.

Bring the unvarnished ones:

Is this student genuinely competitive?
Are we aiming too high, or interpreting selectivity too timidly?
Does this activity matter?
Should this score be submitted?
How will race enter the reading?
Is the essay memorable or merely competent?
Do we need expensive help?
What are we not seeing?

What You’ll Receive

A three-page written diagnostic

Page One: The Read

A concise assessment of how the student’s candidacy currently presents:

  • principal strengths;

  • intellectual and personal throughlines;

  • likely points of distinction;

  • contradictions or missing context;

  • vulnerabilities in a highly selective review;

  • what an admissions reader may understand immediately;

  • what the reader may misunderstand, discount, or never notice.

Page Two: Plan A

The strongest available strategy based on the student’s present ambitions and level of selectivity:

  • academic priorities;

  • testing recommendation;

  • activity and summer priorities;

  • application positioning;

  • school-list direction;

  • recommendation strategy;

  • suggested essay modes, styles, and potential subject areas;

  • immediate next steps in sequence.

Page Three: Plan B

One of my favorite parts. A second intelligent route (NOTE: not to be confused with an emergency exit:

  • a revised band of institutions, timeline, or application strategy;

  • alternate methods of developing distinction;

  • lower-cost or lower-friction interventions;

  • options if testing, grades, essays, or the original college list do not move as hoped;

  • referrals when another professional, service, or resource is genuinely warranted.

You may leave with a recommendation for a full counselor. You may leave with a testing specialist, essay adviser, athletic-recruiting resource, school-based conversation, or a few months of deliberate independent work.

You may also leave with the good news that you do not need to buy anything else.

You may not always leave our talk happy, but you will always leave equipped and way smarter.

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