why stress less

A 2021 survey by Deloitte found that 46% of Generation Z feels stressed or anxious most of the time. Young people don't just need more mental healthcare to deal with this stress. They also need less stress!  My commitment to making college applications, transitions, and beginnings less stressful is grounded by the following analysis and solutions.

Major reasons for college application and transition anxiety:

1. Confusion. High school classes don't teach students how to apply for college before they have to apply for college. They learn as they go. Students face a tidal wave of unfamiliar terms, processes, policies, and strategies that they have only a few months to master before they make some of the biggest decisions of their lives. 
2. Volume of Work. The amount of work awaiting a senior applying to even a modest number of colleges is daunting: forms, college visits, essays, letter of recommendation requests, and interviews on top of their senior year academics and activities. Again, high schools generally don't teach students how to manage all of this work inside the classroom, and many high schools don't have college counselors proactively pushing into classrooms to teach students how to do this. 
3. High Stakes. Heightening students' anxiety about the prior two issues is their underlying sense of just how important every decision they make is. They've been told again and again since elementary or middle school that everything they do in school is to prepare them for college, the most important goal in their lives. This sense of importance extends to every micro-decision they make within their application and transition process, often clouding their ability to make any decision at all. ("Oh my god if I choose PIQ #3 instead of PIQ #4, what does that say about me as a person?")
4. Sense of Immaturity. During their application process, but especially during their spring semester and summer transition to college, students can feel overwhelmed by the sense that they are not yet ready for college. Students' lives change more drastically between May of their senior year and September of their college freshman year than any other period in their lives thus far. As they head into the unknown, sometimes traveling across the country to live in states they've barely visited, they can be overwhelmed by the sense that they are not ready and that everyone else is, also known as imposter syndrome. 

My services are designed to directly target these sources of anxiety. 

1. Confusion/Education. A significant portion of my admissions support consists of teaching students about the terminology, processes, and strategies they need to understand in order to intelligently approach their college applications and transitions. Having this knowledge is not only useful; it is comforting. Using my background as a classroom teacher, I do my best to make this learning process interesting and critical. For example, anyone can look up the definition of a student loan, but my curriculum helps students understand the amortization schedule of their loan so they understand how much interest they could accumulate and how much they will actually end up paying. 
2. Volume of Work/Research Relief & Time Management. Typically, a significant portion of the time spent doing college applications is time spent learning how to do college applications. With my services, that time burden disappears. We jump straight into the process without needing to get our bearings. I also conduct independent research into your possible universities to augment and complement your own. For the work that the student must do, we backward plan our task timeline from final deadlines to today, breaking the process into daily and weekly chunks that students can balance against their academics. 
3. High Stakes/Building Confidence. The stakes are high; it's true. But my job is to remind you that you or your student the most important components of their college applications are already completed: their sophomore and junior grades. My job is to help you paint a picture that celebrates the good work you've already done for the universities that deserve to have you. 
4. Sense of Immaturity/Shifting Mindset, Priorities, and Habits. Students aren't wrong to feel unready for college because their high school environment was likely not structured to equip them with the mindset, priorities, and habits they need for college. My program explicitly teaches students to describe their current mindset, priorities, and habits in school so I can teach them the shifts they need to make to be ready for next year. This includes instruction in basic adult life skills like personal finance, hygiene, self-care, substance abuse education, and anything else students feel like they need. I teach students how "to do" college, such as how to email a professor, how to approach office hours, how to find and seek out additional help, how to ask for an extension, and more. As previously mentioned, I believe that knowledge itself is one of the greatest comforts a senior or rising college freshman can have, and that's what I plan to provide.