Consulting & Training
A busy calendar is not the same thing as a healthy program
I work with school leadership on the place college counseling occupies in the larger life of a school.
A college program does more than help students get somewhere next. Its structures, language, incentives, and relationship with families teach students something about what matters, what success looks like, and who is responsible for getting them there.
The question I usually start with is:
What is this program teaching—not just about college, but about what matters?
A school may have excellent counselors, a full calendar, strong outcomes, and families who attend every presentation—and still have no shared answer. The college program may reinforce the culture a school is trying to build. It may also, inadvertently, work against it.
That is where my consulting work begins.
My background spans admission and college counseling: admission at Richmond and Skidmore, and college counseling at Lawrenceville, Peddie, Shanghai American School, and Marin Academy. Today I oversee college counseling strategy across partner schools in China through Dipont Education.
Program Strategy
I work with school leadership to look beneath the visible college program: its assumptions, incentives, communication, how counselor time is used, its relationship with families, and the messages students receive about what success requires of them.
Sometimes the work leads to something new.
Sometimes it identifies what a school can stop doing.
Counseling Practice
A program’s purpose eventually has to hold up in family life.
I work with counseling teams where that purpose gets tested: parental anxiety, competing expectations, unclear boundaries, institutional pressure, and the temptation to do for students what the program says students should learn to do themselves.
Sample Speaking & WorkshopsLooking for other options? Let me know!
Learning to Choose Well
How young people learn what is theirs to decide, where to put their effort, and how to make choices when there is no right answer.
When Responsibility Changes Hands
What happens between young people and adults as more of life becomes the young person’s to manage—and why they often disagree about what still belongs to whom.
What are we Preparing Them For
What changes when schools ask not only where students are going next, but what they should be able to do without us when they get there.
Talks and workshops are customized to address the specific needs of parent groups, counseling teams, conference talks, boards of trustees, heads, and school leadership teams.
xo, Mindy
Essays on parenting, culture, and the transition to adulthood.
Follow Mindy on Substack
The Bridge
Field notes on Chinese student mobility and international admissions.