What Does a College Counselor Actually Do All Day? A Behind-the-Scenes Look
7:58 a.m., I’m unlocking my office door, and there’s Milo, a senior, leaning against the cinder block wall, holding a crumpled printout, his hoodie pulled up, knuckles white. My half-empty cold coffee from last night’s PTA meeting is still on my desk, and the stack of transcript requests towers over my stapler, but I wave him in before I even turn on the light. He tells me his laptop crashed last night, and he lost the final draft of his early action essay, deadline 11:59 p.m. I pull up the rough draft he shared for feedback a week prior, send it back, and we spend 10 minutes tweaking the last paragraph he rewrote. By 8:15, he’s breathing again, heading off to first period with a USB drive with the final copy. That’s how most days start: small fire, put it out.
My next scheduled meeting is with Maria, a sophomore, and her mom. Maria’s mom pulls out a handwritten spreadsheet of extracurriculars she found in a parent Facebook group, and gets right to the point: Maria works 20 hours a week at the neighborhood grocery store, helping pay for their car insurance and groceries. She keeps telling Maria to quit to join NHS and debate, but they can’t afford to lose the income, and she’s terrified the job will ruin Maria’s chances of getting into college.
I pull up my notes from last year’s graduating class, and tell her about Javi, who worked 25 hours a week at his uncle’s auto shop, got into the in-state engineering program with a partial scholarship. His essay wasn’t about a soccer championship or a school volunteer trip—it was about troubleshooting engine problems and learning to talk to upset customers when his uncle had to leave early for chemo. I tell her admissions officers don’t expect kids from working families to have tons of free time for clubs. A 20-hour a week job tells them you can show up on time, manage responsibilities, and contribute to your household. That’s way more impressive than a year of debate you show up to once a month just to check a box. I write down a quick note for Maria: list the specific things she does at the store—managing the cash register, training new high school hires, restocking produce—right in her activities section. No need to hide it, no need to make excuses for it.
Most parents don’t know that after meetings like that, I’ll spend the next 45 minutes processing transcript requests. Each one needs me to cross-check the GPA calculation, confirm all graduation requirements are marked correctly, and upload the file to the correct application portal. One wrong number, and a kid’s application can get kicked out automatically before anyone even reads it. That’s 30% of my job, the boring admin work no one talks about. I’ve had parents ask why it takes three days to send a transcript, and that’s why: one mistake can cost a kid an application, so I check each one twice.
By 11:30, I have a quick check-in with another Javier—this one a first-gen senior who’s been coming to see me once a week for a month. He got accepted to the local community college’s welding program, but he hasn’t told his dad, who keeps telling everyone Javier will be the first in the family to go to a four-year university. He’s scared he’ll let his dad down. We practice what he wants to say: he can start with “I know you want me to go to a big four-year, and I still can later if I want, but this program has 90% job placement right out, starting at $50,000 a year, and I like working with my hands.” I offer to sit in on a family call after school if he wants, he says he’ll think about it and texts me later if he needs me. That’s how most of these conversations go: we don’t fix it in one meeting, we just prepare a little at a time.
A lot of parents have this image of my job: I spend all day writing recommendation letters for Ivy League applicants, schmoozing with admissions officers to get their kid a leg up. That’s maybe 5% of the work I do. Most days, I’m just cutting through the noise that parents and kids pick up from social media and gossipy parent groups. The number one question I get is “what does my kid need to do to stand out?” The answer I always give, simple and concrete: don’t pack their schedule with five activities they don’t care about just to check boxes. Pick one or two things that actually matter to them, and put their energy there. Admissions officers can spot a resume padded with random clubs faster than I can spot a wrong GPA on a transcript.
After lunch, I lead a 50-minute workshop for juniors on personal statements. Half the class is half-paying attention, scrolling TikTok under the table, when a kid raises his hand and asks if it’s okay to write about his rescue dog—everyone told him that’s cliché. I tell him it’s only cliché if all you talk about is how cute the dog is. If you write about how you got up at 5 a.m. every day to walk him when your mom was working double shifts after your parents split, and that’s when you learned how to show up for something even when you’re tired, that’s not cliché. That’s your story. No one else has that story. That’s exactly what admissions officers want to read.
I’m packing up my bag at 5:25 when my phone pings. First, a text from Milo: “Submitted. Thank you.” I text back “You got this.” Then an email from Maria’s mom: “We talked it over. We’re keeping the job. Maria wants to write her essay about how she started walking an elderly customer’s dog for her after work every week, and that’s what made her want to study nursing. Thank you for telling us we didn’t have to change anything.”
I close my laptop, tuck the stack of unprocessed transcript requests into my bag to look at tomorrow, and head for the door. Javier still hasn’t texted me about the call with his dad. There’s another email in my inbox from a parent panicking that their kid’s 3.7 GPA isn’t good enough for the state university. Some days we get small wins, some days we just lay the groundwork for later. This isn’t the glamorous job people see in movies, where every kid gets into their dream school and we all cry together at graduation. Most days, it’s just putting out small fires, answering questions, and reminding people that the goal isn’t to get into the best school on some national ranking—it’s to get into the best school for your kid. That’s a day in the life.
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