College – Counseling FAQ


As soon as possible, if you are currently in 10th grade. The bulk of our work together will occur in grades 11 and 12. However, ninth and tenth grade students can benefit from early planning—in the areas of high school academic advising, extracurricular planning, and major/career exploration, for instance.

We encourage prospective college transfers to contact us at least six months before their applications are due, but we can and do take on students throughout the transfer admission cycle.


College Transitions counselors are available weekdays, weeknights, and weekends. We work according to your schedule, and are fully committed to providing you with responsive and convenient support.


We work with our families primarily on a remote basis, delivering services through email, phone, and, most often, video chat using Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, WeChat, WhatsApp, or any other video chat platform that proves most convenient for the student and their parent(s).  We moved to a remote model several years ago, as more families became open to such an arrangement and because working in a remote capacity enabled us to be more responsive. For example, many students have academic and extracurricular commitments that prevent them from traveling to a counseling center and/or meeting with a counselor during “normal” hours. However, in a remote-based setting, this doesn’t prove as problematic because we’re just one (phone or video) call away. Instead of making our families adhere to a particular time or location, we meet our families where they are and whenever they need us.  Whether it’s developing a list of prospective colleges, editing an essay, or engaging in any other college-related task, our team is able to rely on remote technology to meet the needs of our student (and their parents). Any college-related task that can be accomplished in person can also be accomplished remotely—more efficiently and effectively in many cases.


No, we do not write essays. Besides being unethical, a “ghost-written” essay can arouse suspicion, cloud the authenticity of your application, and negatively impact your prospects for admission. We do, however, provide guidance on essay topic selection, content, grammar, syntax, tone and much more. Altogether, we devote as much time as necessary to ensuring that your essays are authentic, compelling, and crafted in a way that will improve your admission prospects.


No. We work with students of all abilities and academic backgrounds. At College Transitions, we believe that we should be evaluated on our ability to guide all students to – and through – “good-fit” colleges, and not on our ability to get a few select students into a few select institutions. Do we take pride in guiding past clients into every Ivy League institution as well as other elite colleges? Absolutely. However, we take equal pride in guiding others to a wide range of excellent yet less competitive public universities and private institutions. Please review our results for a sampling of colleges into which our past students have been admitted.


No. Maintaining your privacy and safeguarding your confidentiality is of the utmost importance to us. We do not release any identifying information about our families unless our families explicitly instruct us to do so.