Making Time for Latecoming Seniors

The calls and emails start coming in every year at about this time: frantic seniors and their parents who realize in the 11th hour that they need help, beyond what their counselors at school can provide. I tried saying no once, offering to refer elsewhere, but the mother pleaded with me and I relented. I have never again turned someone away because of a full schedule. Keeping my schedule open enough to add new students at my busiest time, though, requires strategic and logistical planning, coupled with personal discipline and flexibility. Here are some tips on how you can do it, too.

Some of my approach exemplifies the values that I bring to the work. For example, I offer packages of time rather than packages of services, to give families more control over how they use me as a resource. This approach makes it possible for me to serve students across the socioeconomic spectrum, something I value deeply. I am working with a student this year whose father is a bricklayer and whose mother manages their five-person household. They cannot extend beyond the 15 hours that they purchased from me, so both the student and I work hard to make the most of the time we do have. Like this family, about 25% of my clients can only stay with me for a limited amount of time, which means that, in addition to serving their needs in a highly targeted way, I also have a 25% turnover rate that enables me to make time for late arrivals without taking away from the service I offer long-standing clients.

For those long-standing clients, the 75% who work with me consistently for at least a year, we get started on a schedule and routine from day one. After an initial family consultation, regularly scheduled 30-minute check-ins begin: quarterly for first-years and sophomores, monthly for first-semester juniors, and semi-monthly for second-semester juniors. The day after junior year ends, we begin twice-weekly 30-minute meetings that focus on the personal statement, supplements, and other components of the application. The frequencies can increase at any point – if a student is applying to a specialized enrichment or summer program and needs help on essays or interview prep or if a junior is doing college visits and wants to spend extra time discussing the college list. But I generally ask families to stick to these guidelines as a minimum, to keep us moving and to avoid pile-ups of work along the way.

About two-thirds of my students succeed at maintaining this schedule. Those that do finish all of their applications around the first or second week after Thanksgiving, which opens up time for me to take on last-minute seniors for the regular decision timetable. That said, this strategy does not help when it comes to creating additional time during those crunch months of September through November. During those first three months of fall, I rely heavily on the logistical systems I have set up for myself.

In August, my seniors book their twice weekly standing appointments before school even begins. A few may have to make changes once they get practice, game, or rehearsal schedules, but the vast majority can keep the appointments that we set up over the summer. This advance booking helps me know exactly what remains available for latecomers. I rely heavily on a scheduling app (I prefer Acuity, but I know other colleagues use Calendly). The app gives me the ability to control how I want my calendar to appear to the user. I prefer to have back-to-back appointments, with a scheduled 60-minute lunch break and a 30-minute evening break. It also gives students the ability to cancel or reschedule appointments, with a required 48-hour notice.

When the latecomers start rolling in, I may still have a few late afternoon and evening appointments open, but we often have to get creative, looking at time before school, at lunch, or during their free periods or study halls. On a recent morning, that meant meeting with one student from 7:15-7:45, another from 7:45-8:15, and then a prospective new family for a complimentary 20-minute conversation from 8:15-8:35. Because I am also continually on-boarding new families with younger students – meetings that require larger chunks of time in one sitting – in mid-September, I had to open up some weekend hours that I had been setting aside, off my published calendar, for just such an eventuality. This approach, supported with the scheduling app as a tool, makes it possible for me to avoid days with awkward gaps of time and keep appointments as consolidated and streamlined as possible.

Finally, I have to rely on a fair amount of personal discipline, combined with flexibility. Sundays are my longest, most grueling day. Virtually every student I start the school year with, it seems, wants a Sunday appointment – and I accommodate them, but if I am giving up my Sunday to work, I want to make the time count. The 48-hour cancellation/reschedule policy that I stick to with fidelity makes last-minute changes uncommon. When somebody does use the app to make a change to their scheduled appointments, another student will just as quickly swoop in with the scheduling app to scoop up the time.

Working with teenagers at this pivotal point in their lives fulfills me both personally and professionally. Seniors who contact me late in the process often do so because a challenge in their lives made it difficult to engage with the college process earlier. I know they need me and I don’t have the heart to turn them away, which means that I need to put tightly structured systems into place so that I can accommodate them. In the best of all possible worlds, I would have no churn rate and my client roster would remain constant beginning far earlier than senior year. The structures that I have put into place, though, enable me to work with families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and give me the bandwidth to make room for those who arrive a little late to the party. I am happy to welcome them and am glad that they have made their way to me.

Eva Ostrum, Founder of evaostrum.school

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An award-winning educator, Eva has worked in college admissions on both sides of the desk: as an undergraduate admissions officer at Yale University – her alma mater – and as a teacher, school administrator, and private college admissions coach supporting students and families through the process. She is the author of The Thinking Parent’s Guide to College Admissions: The Step-by-Step Program to Get Kids into the Schools of Their Dreams (Penguin Books, 2006) and the executive producer of Turusma: A Young Man’s Journey to College, a documentary short that screened at juried film festivals both in the U.S. and abroad and won an award for excellence at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival (2002).