Four ways to work with The College Application Specialist.

A Discovery Session is free, runs thirty minutes, and exists to work out which option fits your family. An intake form comes first, so the time goes to strategy instead of background. A Strategy Session is a paid sixty-minute session built around the specific question your family is sitting with, and you leave with a written summary. If you enroll in Comprehensive College Advising within thirty days, the Strategy Session fee applies toward it.

Ninth grade gives the most room, because course selection compounds. Tenth and eleventh are both common starting points. Senior year is still worth doing and is the most expensive way to do it, because a year of runway has to be compressed into a few months. There is no grade where the answer is that it is too late, only grades where the work gets denser, the options to position for merit aid diminish rapidly, and your student's timeline is compressed.

Our primary areas are the DMV, Atlanta, Charlotte and the Carolinas, Nashville, and Philadelphia. Every engagement is virtual and one-on-one with Tamara, so families work with her nationwide and the regional knowledge comes in where it is relevant to your student's list. Due to time differences, Tamara does not work with students on the West Coast at this time.

No, and no one should. Essays are brainstormed, reviewed, and edited. The student writes them. An essay written by an adult reads like one, admissions readers have seen thousands of them, and a student who did not write their own essay cannot speak to it in an interview.

That is who this practice is built for. Families earning roughly $150,000 to $400,000 sit in the financial aid donut hole: too much income to qualify for need-based aid, not enough to write a full-tuition check without a plan. Merit strategy is what closes that gap, and it is decided by which schools a student applies to and how, not by filling out more forms later.

Tamara Baptiste is the founder of The College Application Specialist and holds two Cornell Engineering degrees, a Certificate with Distinction in College Counseling from UCLA, and the PMP. She spent twenty-five years in technical industries, including a decade as a hiring manager, which is where the question of what employers actually want from a graduate comes from. Families she has guided have secured over $25 million in merit aid since 2015, with a 100% college acceptance rate and 98% graduating on time.

Every session is with Tamara. There are no associate counselors and nothing is handed off. That is the reason the practice serves dozens of families at a time rather than hundreds.