A university guidance counselor isn’t someone who gets your child into a university. I want to be clear about that from the start.
What I do is help students understand their options, plan their subjects, build a realistic list of universities, and meet every deadline.
I ask questions. I give honest feedback. I monitor progress against deadlines.
The student does the work, because the student is the one who has to live with the results.
The process ideally starts in Grade 9 with subject choices and exploration of career interests, and it grows from there. Starting early means fewer rushed decisions later.
In Grade 10 I’ll examine careers in more depth with a student and discuss their extracurricular activities. I want the child to develop a sense of the narrative they’ll tell about themselves in a couple of years.
Grade 11 is when we shift from long-term life plans to more immediate needs, like drafting essays and building a long list of universities that might interest the student. I ask targeted questions about lifestyle preferences: how social is the child? do they prefer big cities or small-town rural settings? do they like to party with a lot of people or prefer smaller gatherings of close friends?
By the start of Grade 12, I want each student I advise to have a shortlist of a dozen or so institutions where they will almost certainly apply. I’ll help them revise their story so that it’s memorable to the admissions officers at each place they’ve applied. I also do a lot of hand-holding and reassuring and double- and triple-checking.
Baobabs (scientific name Adansonia digitata) are so large and strongly rooted in the ground that they serve as signposts to help people navigate across the landscape. Baobabs are reference points. That’s what university guidance counselors do. I serve as a point of reference along your college application journey. That’s why my company is called Adansonia.
If you need a guide to help you select and apply to universities that fit your needs and your life path, give me a call – it’s free!
Image by Sergey Guk, via Pexels.
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