Welcome to Global Studies, College Admissions Partners style! For the next four weeks I’ve decided to focus on questions that we often hear from the different global communities we work with. The following weeks will be dedicated to the needs of traditional international students, Canadians, and Third Culture Kids/Americans living abroad.
But before we get to that, one question we hear a lot is about how we work with students who aren’t local. Todd and I are based in Minnesota but only a small amount of the students we work with hail from the land of 10,000 lakes (more like 14,000 but who’s counting?).
California, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, and Michigan all play home to countless numbers of the students we work with, but we also work with students as far away as India or Hong Kong. This isn’t too surprising considering California, Minnesota, and Michigan all top the list of having the largest high school counselor to student ratios. The average public high school guidance counselor in these states is assigned to anywhere between 700 and 800 students to oversee. The national public school average is 418:1.
Students need help and individualized attention and thankfully we are able to fill that nitch, committed to working with only 40 students per graduating year between Todd and myself.
But back to the point of how we work with distance students. Much of it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise 1. Email 2. Skype 3. Phone. It all depends on a student’s preference and what we are working on. We are committed to a student driven process so if our students have a preference or a platform of communication in mind we are happy to accommodate. But no carrier pigeons please, we do have our limits.
One of the aspects that we pride ourselves on most is this accessibility and flexibility in communication. We know that we have incredibly busy, hard-working students which is why we make ourselves available on evenings and weekends to accommodate those schedules. Of course sometimes this means a 10 PM Skype call to Bangalore but for us it is worth it to be able to reach our students across time zones.
I’ll see you for part 2 of our global series next week dedicated to international applicants looking at American colleges and BS/MD programs.
Leave a Comment