Flourish works with a small number of students each year — those who are ready to think carefully about who they are, what they value, and where they want to go.
Apply for a ConsultationMost admissions advice treats the application as a product to optimize. I think of it as a portrait — one that requires stillness, honesty, and time to get right.
The students I work with are not broken. They are capable, often accomplished, and increasingly uncertain about how to translate who they are into something a stranger will understand. That translation is the work. It requires excavation before expression, and clarity before strategy.
Flourish does not offer hourly sessions or à la carte services. The work unfolds over a sustained period — typically beginning in the spring or summer before senior year — and continues through submission in the winter.
We begin with a series of conversations designed to clarify what matters most to you — academically, personally, and in terms of the life you want to build. From there, we develop a school list rooted in genuine fit, work through essays and supplements with close attention to voice and precision, and navigate the decisions that arise throughout the process.
Everything is done together, directly. There are no junior consultants, no worksheets, no templates.
The program is offered to a limited number of students each cycle. Learn more about the work.
Essays on admissions, identity, and the practice of thinking clearly under pressure.
Students advised by Flourish have been admitted to Yale, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Barnard, and other selective institutions. Results are shared not as a promise, but as evidence of the quality of the work.
I came to admissions work slowly, and through an unusual door.
My undergraduate education at Columbia was in American Studies and Art History, with a sustained focus on Shakespeare — not the most direct path to college consulting, perhaps, but one that shaped how I think about narrative, character, and the particular difficulty of saying something true. Those years taught me that the most interesting questions are rarely the obvious ones, and that the best writing emerges from genuine inquiry rather than performance.
After Columbia, I spent years designing college preparation programs in New York and Los Angeles — working within institutions, shaping curricula, and sitting across from students who were bright and capable and deeply confused about how to present themselves to a world that seemed to want a version of them they hadn't quite become yet. That tension — between who a student is and who an application asks them to be — became the central problem I wanted to work on.
I also served as education director for a Shakespeare educational tour, a role that required me to think about how young people encounter difficult material — how they resist it, how they open to it, and what conditions make genuine engagement possible. That experience deepened my conviction that intellectual growth is not a product of instruction alone. It requires relationship, patience, and a particular quality of attention.
Flourish began because I wanted to offer something I hadn't found elsewhere: guidance that takes students seriously as thinkers, that moves at the pace of actual reflection rather than the calendar, and that treats the application process as a genuine opportunity for self-understanding rather than a gauntlet to survive.
I work with a small number of students each year, always directly. I am not building a firm. I am practicing a craft — and I take that distinction seriously.
If this approach sounds like what you've been looking for, I'd welcome a conversation. You can apply for a consultation here.
The application process is not a series of tasks. It is an extended act of reflection — one that benefits from a consistent, thoughtful partner who knows your work from the beginning.
Flourish offers one engagement: a sustained, full-cycle partnership beginning in the spring or summer before senior year and continuing through the final decisions of winter. The shape of the work is different for every student, because every student arrives differently — with different strengths, different gaps in self-understanding, different relationships to writing and ambition and fear.
What remains constant is the quality of attention.
Narrative development. Before any application is touched, we spend time in conversation — about your academic interests, your intellectual history, your formative experiences, and the questions you find yourself returning to. This is not intake. It is inquiry. The goal is to identify the throughlines of your story: what is genuinely yours, what is worth developing, and what the application can honestly hold.
School selection. A thoughtful school list is not a ranking exercise. It requires understanding what you actually want from four years — academically, socially, geographically, and in terms of the kind of person you hope to become. We build a list that is both ambitious and honest, and I will tell you plainly when I think a school is wrong for you, not just whether it is reachable.
Essays and supplements. The Common App essay is the center of gravity for most applications — a document that asks for something both personal and carefully shaped. I work with students through many drafts, not because the first drafts are bad, but because good writing requires time, and students almost always know more than they initially put on the page. Supplements receive the same care: each one considered on its own terms, with attention to what each school is actually asking.
Strategic decision-making. Throughout the cycle — early decision, regular decision, waitlists, deferral — there are choices that carry real weight. I help students and their families think through those choices clearly, without urgency and without false certainty about outcomes.
The full program represents a significant commitment. The investment is in the mid five figures, commensurate with the depth and duration of the engagement. I am transparent about this at the outset, because the families I work best with are those who understand what they are paying for — not a service, but a relationship — and who are prepared to bring that same seriousness to the work.
Enrollment for each cycle is limited. If you are considering beginning this year, I would encourage you to reach out sooner rather than later — not as a matter of urgency, but of practicality. You may apply for a consultation here.
These essays are written for students and families navigating selective admissions — not as a guide, but as an invitation to think more carefully about what the process actually asks of you.
There is a persistent myth in selective admissions that the students who get in are the most impressive. By most measures — grades, scores, extracurriculars, awards — this is not quite true. The students who get into highly selective schools are often the most legible. Their applications tell a coherent story. A reader can finish them and say, with some confidence: I understand who this person is, and I believe them.
Legibility is not simplicity. It is not the reduction of a complicated person into a neat package. It is the harder work of finding the right frame — the perspective or theme or way of seeing that allows complexity to cohere rather than scatter.
Most students spend their high school years doing a great deal. Clubs, teams, research, jobs, art, travel, leadership positions accumulated across four years of effort and ambition. By the time they reach the application, they have a long list of things they have done and very little practice thinking about what those things mean — to them, to others, or in aggregate.
The application does not ask for a comprehensive accounting of your activities. It asks for a self-portrait. Those are entirely different assignments, and most students have been preparing, without knowing it, for the wrong one.
Admissions officers at selective institutions read many thousands of applications in a season. They are experienced readers, which means they are very good at recognizing incoherence — the application that seems to be describing three different people, or the essay that is technically accomplished but says nothing particular about the person who wrote it. These applications are not rejected because they are bad. They are passed over because they are unclear.
Clarity in an application requires something most students resist: genuine reflection on what actually matters to them. Not what they think should matter, not what they believe a particular school wants to hear, but what is actually true — about how they think, what they find difficult, what they return to when they have a choice.
This reflection is not introspection for its own sake. It has a practical purpose. Once a student understands what they are actually trying to say about themselves, every subsequent decision — which essay prompt to choose, how to frame an activity, which schools to apply to — becomes easier and more coherent. The application stops being a collection of individual tasks and becomes a single, coordinated effort to convey something true.
This is why the most important work in admissions coaching happens before anyone opens the Common App. The conversations, the drafts that get discarded, the slow articulation of what is actually worth saying — this is where clarity is built. The writing is almost always the easier part.
Every family I work with has heard the word fit — usually from a school counselor, occasionally from a college website, sometimes with a slight air of consolation, as if fit were something you settle for when reach schools don't work out. I want to argue the opposite: that genuine fit is harder to achieve than high rankings, rarer than admission to elite schools, and more consequential than either.
The school that is right for you will change you in ways you cannot predict and probably cannot imagine. The school that is merely prestigious will give you a credential and an alumni network and a set of experiences that may or may not have much to do with who you actually are.
College rankings measure things that are measurable: student-faculty ratio, graduation rate, endowment, average SAT score, percentage of alumni who donate. These are real data points, and they are not meaningless. A well-funded institution with a low student-faculty ratio and a high graduation rate is likely to be a better-resourced place to spend four years than one that scores poorly on these metrics.
But rankings cannot measure what it feels like to be a particular kind of student at a particular institution. They cannot capture whether the culture of a place will challenge you in the ways you need to be challenged, or whether the student body will include the kinds of people who will become genuinely important to you, or whether the specific shape of a school's curriculum will serve the specific shape of your mind.
These are not romantic abstractions. They are practical questions — about pedagogy, about culture, about the texture of daily life — and they require real investigation to answer.
Finding schools that are genuinely right for you requires that you first develop some clarity about yourself — not as a future professional or a list of accomplishments, but as a learner. What conditions allow you to do your best thinking? Do you thrive in large lectures or small seminars? Do you want a school where intellectual life spills outside the classroom, or one where the campus experience is separable from the academic one? How much structure do you need, and how much freedom can you use well?
These questions have answers, and your answers are particular to you. A school that is perfect for someone very much like you might be entirely wrong for you, for reasons that only become apparent when you sit with the questions honestly.
This is why I spend so much time at the beginning of our work together not talking about schools at all. The school list is a conclusion, not a starting point. It emerges from a prior understanding of the student — one that cannot be rushed and should not be assumed.
"Be authentic," admissions officers say — on panels, in videos, in the guidance documents that circulate every fall. It is advice that is almost universally given and almost never explained. What does it mean to be authentic in a document that is, by definition, a presentation? And if everyone is trying to be authentic, is authenticity even possible anymore?
I think it is. But it requires understanding what authenticity actually asks of you, which is considerably more demanding than simply "writing in your own voice."
Authenticity is not informality. A casual tone, the use of slang, the absence of elevated vocabulary — these are stylistic choices, and they may or may not reflect who you actually are. Some students express themselves most naturally in careful, formal prose. Others think through fragments and loops. The style that is authentic for you is the one that is genuinely yours, not the one that sounds least like an essay.
Authenticity is not vulnerability. There is a particular genre of admissions essay — confessional, emotionally disclosing, structured around a moment of difficulty or transformation — that has become so common it has almost ceased to be authentic in any meaningful sense. Revealing something painful or private does not, by itself, make an essay honest. It is possible to write a very personal essay that reveals nothing real at all.
Authenticity is not the absence of revision. Some students believe that editing is a form of inauthenticity — that the truest version of themselves is the first draft, unmediated. This confuses spontaneity with sincerity. A poem that has been revised fifty times can be more authentic than a journal entry written in twenty minutes, because the revision is itself a form of attention — a commitment to getting something right.
To write authentically, you need to know what you actually think — not what you believe you're supposed to think, not what sounds good, but what is actually true when you sit with a question long enough to stop performing an answer.
This is harder than it sounds. We are all, to some degree, performing for others — including ourselves. We have a version of our story that we tell at dinner parties and on college applications, and it is not always the same version we'd tell a close friend at two in the morning. The application does not need your two-in-the-morning honesty. But it does need the version of you that exists after you've stopped trying to impress and started trying to understand.
The essays I find most compelling — and I have read many — are almost always the ones in which a student has discovered something through the process of writing, rather than simply illustrated a conclusion they arrived at before they began. The discovery may be small. It is almost always specific. And it is always, unmistakably, theirs.
Most students begin thinking about college essays in August of their senior year, when the Common App opens and the prompts appear, and they realize they are supposed to say something meaningful about themselves in 650 words, starting now. This is too late — not in the logistical sense, but in the developmental one. By August, the decisions that will determine whether the essays are good or merely acceptable have already been made.
The quality of your college essays is determined by the quality of your thinking before you write them. This is a simple observation with significant implications for how students should spend the months before applications are due.
The Common App asks: tell us your story. The question before the question is: what is your story, actually? Not the version you've told so many times it's stopped meaning anything. Not the version your parents would tell. The version that is most honestly yours — with its complications and its uncertainties and its genuine commitments intact.
Most students have not thought about this carefully. They have lived it, certainly — have moved through the experiences and relationships and decisions that constitute a high school life — but they have not stood back from those years and asked what they add up to. What do I actually care about? What have I changed my mind about? What are the questions I keep returning to? What do I want that I've been embarrassed to say I want?
These are not easy questions. They are not supposed to be. But sitting with them — genuinely, without rushing to a presentable answer — is the most important preparation a student can do.
One of the most useful exercises I do with students early in our work is to have them write toward several possible essay topics, without any intention of using any of them. These drafts are not meant to be good. They are meant to be revealing — to surface what a student has to say when they're not yet worried about whether it's the right thing to say.
Almost always, the drafts that get discarded contain something important. A phrase, an image, a moment of unguarded honesty that the student initially dismissed as too small or too strange. The essay that eventually works is often one that developed from something the student almost didn't write.
This is why the timeline matters. The process of excavation — of finding out what is worth saying before you try to say it well — takes time. It cannot be compressed into a single productive weekend in August. It requires the kind of slow, accumulated attention that only becomes possible when you begin early enough to afford the detours.
Read widely and pay attention to what moves you and why. Keep a notebook — not for college application purposes, but for the purpose of noticing what you think. Have conversations with people who know you well and ask them what they notice about how you engage with things. Spend time with your transcript and your activity list and ask not what looks impressive but what is actually meaningful, and whether you know the difference.
The students who arrive at essay season with something to say are the ones who have been thinking, even informally, about what they want to say. The preparation is invisible in the final product, but it is present in every sentence.
Flourish works with a limited number of students each year. The initial consultation is not a sales call — it is a conversation to determine whether there is genuine alignment between what I offer and what a student and their family are looking for.
I ask that families come to this conversation having read enough about the practice to understand its approach. The students I work with are self-aware, willing to do the reflective work the process requires, and prepared to engage seriously over a period of months. The investment — in time, attention, and financially — is substantial, and I want to be certain from the outset that it is the right one for both of us.
If, after our conversation, I don't think I'm the right fit for your student, I will say so directly and, where I can, point you toward something that may serve you better.
Please complete the following. I review applications personally and respond within a week.