The Work You Don’t See
A colleague asked me recently what a "slow week" looks like for me. I had to laugh a little, because there isn't really such a thing. There are weeks when I'm on the phone or on Zoom meetings with families, and weeks when I'm not, but the work itself never really stops. Even in the quiet stretches, I'm usually somewhere on a campus, in an email thread with an admissions director, or updating my notes on a school I visited months ago because something about their program has changed.
Families see the part of this work that's about them: the conversations, the school list, the strategy session. What they don't always see is everything happening in the background, on the weeks when no one is calling me at all.
I visit schools whether or not I have a client interested in them.
This is the part people are sometimes surprised by. I don't wait until a family asks about a specific school before I go learn about it. I'm on campuses year round, in session and out, because a school's website is only a snapshot from whenever it was last updated, and a school's actual culture is something you can only really understand in person. New leadership can change a school's tone within a year. A strong athletic program can quietly decline. A school that used to be a reach for a student with a learning difference might now have one of the best support programs in the region. A school that used to only take students with scores in the 90th percentiles might now be open to viewing students more holistically, beyond just entrance testing scores. I want to know these things before a family needs me to.
I stay close to the details that never make it into a brochure.
Program offerings shift constantly: a new STEM initiative, a revamped learning support model, a coaching or Athletic Director change that reshapes an entire athletic culture. None of this usually comes with a press release. It comes from staying close to the people actually doing the work: admissions directors, department heads, coaches, and the occasional current student who tells you more in five minutes than any tour guide script ever could.
"Hall Education makes such an effort to continually stay up to date on schools and engage in the field. Because of the continued communication and collaboration, students are referred to great schools that are the right fit."
Director of Enrollment Management, 9th-12th grade boarding and day school
I do the homework before I ever pick up the phone on a family's behalf.
When I call an admissions office about a student, I'm not calling cold, and I'm not calling with a generic pitch. I already know the office, the program, and often the person I'm speaking with. That groundwork changes the entire conversation. It's the difference between an introduction and an inquiry.
None of this is billable to any one family. It's just the job.
I don't visit a school because a client happens to be interested in it that season. I visit because staying current is the only way I can be honest with a family about what a school is really like right now, not five years ago when I last looked into it. Most weeks, it's non-stop and unglamorous work. There is always something to be done. No one sees the schools I toured this year that never came up in a single conversation with a client. But they're exactly why the schools that do come up are the right ones.
If you're working with me, or thinking about it, this is what's happening even in the weeks we're not talking. I'm still doing the work, quietly, so that when we do talk, I already know what I'm talking about.