The Confident Senior
Jenn Curtis is an independent College Counselor and co-author of the The Parent Compass. She hopes her new virtual college counseling service, The Confident Senior, will provide guidance to high school students who cannot afford an in-person private college counselor. Photo credit Jenn Curtis
The college admissions process is more intense than ever. The number of spots for students at four year post secondary institutions has not changed and enrollment levels are similar now to what they were in 2010. But the number of students applying for each of those spots has ramped up considerably.
In light of the added pressure on Irvine’s high school seniors, we spoke with independent college counselor and best selling co-author of The Parent Compass, Jenn Curtis. As the owner of FutureWise Consulting, a college counseling business Curtis has run for over a decade, she has a front row seat to the new challenges today’s students are facing.
“Admission changed in the wake of COVID,” says Curtis. “It’s not what it was when I started this almost fifteen years ago. You’re seeing application numbers skyrocket because everyone wants to cover their bases.”
Many parents and students opt for a private college counselor to guide them through the process, but many cannot afford the thousands of dollars charged for the service. Curtis wants to change that.
With her newly launched asynchronous college counseling program, The Confident Senior, Curtis aims to help families who have historically not been able to afford her guidance. She also wants to help families who, for whatever reason, do not wish to hire a private counselor but likely need some help to get through the process. Between parents who did not go to college or parents who went to college in other countries, Curtis says there is a large popultion of people who don’t understand our admissions system.
The idea for The Confident Senior is one Curtis and her husband were contemplating for a while when they were overheard discussing it at a restaurant. Their server was from North Carolina and shared that she needed a service like the one they were discussing when she was applying to college. She did not have the resources to get help and her high school counselor had too many students to provide her with support.
“The server told us she was writing her essays but had no idea what the colleges were looking for and didn’t know where to look to find out,” Curtis recalls. “In my head this whole time I’ve pictured that student from North Carolina who didn’t know where to go, didn’t have the resources, was just trying to figure it out and needed a little bit of extra guidance and support so she didn’t feel so lost.”
The Confident Senior guides students like these through four modules that participants can access for one year. The best time to enroll, Curtis says, is in March or April of a student’s junior year, or a fall of a student’s senior year.
“It isn't too late for current seniors to enroll,” Curtis says. “In fact it's a perfect time for them. Because it is on-demand and instant access, they can get the help they need if they are just now realizing the process is more confusing or involves much more than they'd expected.”
Demystifying the confusion surrounding college admissions is exactly what Curtis hopes The Confident Senior will do for overwhelmed high school juniors and seniors.
“I wanted to break it down for students but also give them the option to do things at their own pace, in their own time, when they’re ready to do it,” says Curtis. “But students shouldn’t sign up if it will be more than a year before they apply to college.”
There are two tracks for The Confident Senior participants. The regular track includes The Confident Senior’s four modules as well as a lesson for parents on how to support their students in the process and an aptitude assessment. The VIP track includes all of those modules plus individualized sessions with Curtis to review one draft of the student’s personal statement and one draft of a supplemental essay. A crucial part of The Confident Senior, available in both tracks, is to create a plan.
The Confident Senior leads each participant through the process of creating a very detailed timeline for application due dates. She sees these timelines make a huge difference in each applicant’s organization and stress level. Curtis also walks students through creating what she calls the requirements grid: a way for students to organize tasks required for applying to each school. This also makes an enormous difference for her students, both in their organization and also in their mental health.
“I have found over the years that the best way to decrease anxiety and stress during the process is to come up with a requirements grid,” Curtis says. “When students try to keep it all in their head and they’re trying to figure out when is this due date and when is that one, what does this school want and what does that school want, that’s when they start to get really overwhelmed.”
Through the timeline, the requirements grid and many other lessons, Curtis is able to share solutions for stressed out students who might otherwise not know how to approach the process.
Seeing the reactions of her in-person students, many of whom have a great deal of resources at their disposal, was part of the impetus for Curtis to launch The Confident Senior.
“It never ceases to amaze me how many students will be sitting next to me as I’m looking over how they’ve filled out their common app and making corrections,” says Curtis. “Without fail, students look at me and say, ‘How do people do this? How do they know how to answer these questions if they don’t have someone walking through it with them?’
“That was a big part of this. Everybody needs to know this. This doesn’t need to be a secret.”
Get more information on The Confident Senior online.