When I started my independent educational consulting practice in 2011, I knew it would be a professional challenge on a variety of fronts. Making the transition from being an admission counselor and athletic recruitment coordinator for a single campus (and my alma mater to boot!) was sure to present an altered perspective and require a new set of skills. In particular, working directly for families and their interests as opposed to the interests of an entire institution would completely alter the type of relationship I was used to having with students and parents. No longer a salesperson, I was about to become a mentor.
What’s more, due to the highly specialized nature of my practice and the remote location of my home office, I was about to become a remote mentor.
Admittedly, that was the biggest fear I had when it came to striking out on my own. Certainly the idea of running my own business, finding solid financial footing while doing so, and marketing my services to prospective families – all while finding time and the means to support my continued professional development – were all imposing issues I needed to address. However, I quickly found support from colleagues and my professional organizations—to say nothing of the wealth of articles available online—to assuage any trepidation related to those particular areas. I had a pretty good sense right from the start that much of the knowledge required to actually run my practice from day to day would have to spring from the experience of actually doing it.
But meeting with families remotely? Forging relationships that required deep trust and respect if they were going to breed successful outcomes?
Via Skype?!
Picture it, readers: There I sit in my home office in Michigan while my client sits at her kitchen table in California or Colorado or New Jersey. I’m trying to talk about colleges while the Internet buffers slowly and we sometimes talk over one another,and in the meantime, her little brother makes faces in the background. That’s not the ideal situation for the crucial moments when emotions run high because we’re trying to determine what a student’s future will look like!
Even though videoconferencing has become standard practice for a lot of industries, the whole thing still seemed like a recipe for disaster to me. But what choice did I have? Remember, my practice fits into a highly specialized niche, my home is somewhat remote, and the old adage tells us that beggars don’t get to choose, so I embarked on my online counseling journey with the determination to make it work in whatever way necessary.
And work it has.
Perhaps this has happened because today’s high school students simply accept Skype, Google Hangout, and FaceTime as part of their natural communication patterns. Perhaps it’s because so many parents telecommute, and the harried pace of modern life makes college counseling sessions over the Internet far more convenient than in-person meetings (and cuts the commute and traffic substantially). Perhaps I’m a better counselor than I gave myself credit for in the early days. (Nah. Scratch that third one.)
Regardless of what the contributing factors are, what I have learned as I’ve gained experience as a practicing educational consultant is the one thing I thought I never might: I can do my job effectively via videoconference. In academic terms, I’ve learned how to break free of Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement that “the medium is the message” and focus solely on the message I have for my students and they have for me, regardless of how it’s delivered.
Do I miss face to face meetings with students? Sure! (Skype doesn’t yet have a feature that allows you to hug the kid that just got into her first-choice college after months of breathless anticipation.) And there are also the inevitable awkward moments where I have been virtually “kidnapped” by parents—for example, the father who took me (via iPad) out of his daughter’s possession and walked into a different room in their home so we could chat about some of his concerns for her college search.
That sort of thing isn’t really heard of in face-to-face counseling situations—or at least I hope it isn’t!
But you know what? Other than those few technical challenges and glitches (and one very demanding parent), the process of advising students is otherwise essentially the same for me. After all, the one thing I know about counseling college-bound students that is true no matter how or where you meet with them is that they all start from the same place:
They typically don’t know what it is they don’t know.
Thus, with every new client I take into my practice, I need to set a baseline for our initial conversations to determine exactly what it is they don’t know (and what they do), what they’re confident about and what scares them, and begin to introduce the ideas and terminology that will be a big part of our work together in the months to come. I need to gather information about them and allow them to gather information about themselves so we can map out a plan—and as long as these conversations happen, it isn’t important if we have them in a Starbucks, a home office, or over a video interface. The crucial part is the content, not the delivery system.
What’s more, as time has gone on and I’ve tweaked and refined these introductory meetings to get the most out of the initial conversations so I can establish trust with new students, I’ve learned how to use the remote nature of our communication to my (and my students’) advantage. We can use a Google Hangout to connect with a parent who’s stuck at the office during our meeting but needs to be part of a segment of the conversation. I can ask a student to carry her phone or iPad over to the family fridge to show me the list of essay and resume topics the family is keeping there so they can add to it easily over the course of the application process.
The possibilities presented by remote client meetings have proven greater than the disadvantages—I just had to be open to finding them.
Discovering other tools along the way has also helped; the College Choice 101 cards, now Corsava Cards, in particular were a wonderful surprise I wasn’t expecting when I got my first set last year. Though initially dubious that handling the card deck myself while going through the topics with my students online, I soon discovered that—much like the communication medium we connected through—the tangible presence (or not) of the cards didn’t affect my students’ experience or conversation. Instead, they latched onto the ideas, the concepts, and terms. They asked insightful questions and engaged with various topics in a way I hadn’t seen previously.
Meanwhile, none of them ever laid a hand on the physical card deck—just as they never sat opposite me in the same room.
The message has carried through; the medium hasn’t been nearly as important as I thought it would be in those early days.
So now that’s my focus. I’m six years into my independent educational consulting practice and still worry about running the business side of my business, marketing my services, and carving out time for professional development—the same things all small business owners concern themselves with on an ongoing and daily basis and the same things I’ll worry about in the years and decades to come. But I’m no longer concerned about meeting with students remotely, because as long as the message is delivered and the student receives it and uses it to enhance and guide her college search, the medium is irrelevant.
(I still wish Skype had a hug feature, though. Those college admission milestones just aren’t the same without it!)