Over four years, craft a highly competitive college profile, attractive to top schools across size, location and discipline.
Pursue a program that increases selective college choice and differentiates the student from their classmates.
Create a rich high school experience that sets the student up for success on whatever path they choose.
Students can move between routes as high school unfolds.
The trail
The focus
There are a couple of tests which can have meaningful impact on school opportunities and scholarships. You want to build familiarity and be relaxed.
Step Two in your extracurricular strategy is to narrow down your list of activities to those you enjoy and where you think you can make an impact.
You built your initial course schedule to pursue a harder course path. There are ways to accelerate or amplify that course plan.
The first college talk that didn’t turn into a fight. We finally knew the two things to focus on.
I stopped lying awake wondering if we were behind. It just tells us the next right step.
The Brag Sheet alone was worth it — four years we’d have forgotten, in one clean PDF.
One flat price did what a $200-an-hour counselor kept trying to sell us.
My daughter opened it herself. That never happens with anything school-related.
Calm, not scary. Every other college thing made me anxious; this one made me exhale.
We started junior year already knowing the plan. No cram, no panic.
The car-ride questions changed our conversations. Less nagging, more actual talking.
Are you a school counselor or student advisor?
More info
My firstborn was about to be a freshman.
I knew that the rules for getting into college had changed. I just didn’t really know how.
I must have watched five hundred TikToks and YouTube videos, read dozens of newsletters, listened to too many podcasts and sat through a pack of those “1 hour introduction” Zoom calls that every advisor offers. Everybody had advice. Everybody sounded sure of themselves. Everybody had a slightly different list of “number one priorities”.
A lot of the advice felt like “you should have started this 2 years ago”, and it rarely came with “and here’s how you do it”.
I spent the summer I was twelve wiring new homes with my grandpa. George preached “what gets planned, gets done well. Be deliberate. Follow through.”
So, I made this playbook.
For whatever “must haves” advisors told me would be evaluated by colleges, I rolled back a plan to the summer before high school. Then I rolled it forward semester by semester. The playbook wasn’t for me, it was for my son. It wasn’t a todo list, it was a guide for where to put his energy each semester. He would be the climber and I would be the Sherpa.
Maybe your student is about to start freshman year. Maybe junior year is right around the corner. Either way, there is a deliberate path from where they are now to increasing their college choices as they roll into senior year.
I hope this playbook can help. All great climbs begin with a plan. Be the Sherpa your student needs.
Are you ready to sherpa?
