Jessie's Blog

Hello Friend,

Driving our old GMC dually pick-up down a dark stretch of Highway 160, I was listening to 96.5, KSLV—the classic rock station of the San Luis Valley, CO (and the only available FM channel). On this frigid January Friday evening, the Del Norte High School Tigers were playing the Ignacio Bobcats. I only had a 20-minute drive, and I wasn’t sure where my aux cord was, so my options were simple: radio or silence. I leaned into the background noise of the game and let my mind go alon…

Jessie and the Elevated Admissions team provided expert, personalized guidance for both of my children—Ryan (Class of 2021) and Hailey (Class of 2024). What initially drew me to Jessie was her down-to-earth personality. She is incredibly knowledgeable, yet always realistic and relatable.

Jessie connected easily with both of my kids, despite their very different personalities, and immediately put them at ease. She empowered them to write authentic essays and make thoughtful, well-informed colleg…

With great excitement, we’re celebrating this year’s Elevated Admissions seniors and the paths they’ve carved out for themselves. This year’s list of colleges looks a bit shorter on paper—and that’s actually good news. Many of our students secured their spots early through early decision and early action, which meant more clarity (and a lot less nail-biting) well before regular decisions rolled out. 

Behind every single one of these acceptances are hours of reflection, drafts and re-drafts, and…

AP Exam Season: How to Study With Your Teen’s Brain, Not Against It

If you have a teen taking AP exams this spring, you’ve probably seen at least one of the following:

• Color‑coded binders that have not been opened since October.
• “Studying” that looks suspiciously like scrolling.
• A dramatic declaration: “It’ll be fine. I’ve got everything completely under control.”

Deep breath.

The goal of AP season is not to turn your home into a test‑prep boot camp. It’s to help your teen use just eno…

Many elements of the admissions process are unpredictable; the decision to apply Early Decision I (EDI) or Restrictive Early Decision (REA) is a strategy that can help increase a student’s chances of admission, thereby, hopefully, making an acceptance much more predictable. Oftentimes, though—especially for institutions posting less than 20% admission rates, and even more so for those with single-digit rates—when a student receives a deferral, the next step becomes clouded. 

The conundrum of be…

Picking up where we left off: the courage to engage the "other" points to the humanities as our starting point.

A college degree has become largely transactional in the pursuit of a first-job guarantee. This leads large swaths of our young potential into fields that don't align with fulfilling lives, where they can discover who they are and what they came here to do.

In Excellent Sheep, the 2014 book by former Yale professor and now full-time writer, William Deresiewicz, he wrote pointedly a…

I recently started reading the novel March, by Geraldine Brooks, on a three-legged flight back from Denver to Burlington. I came to a particularly graphic scene at Clement’s Mine, a fictitious Virginia plantation set in the 1840s, and realized this was not the first time I had read this very passage.

A few years back, this scene curdled my stomach. I had put the book down, telling myself I'd pick it back up another time. Each time I saw the spine on one of my next-to-read piles, my eyes jumped …

How and When? 

Acronyms are confusing when you are unfamiliar with them. Families today are already busy with work and life. Handling the college application process alone is akin to taking on a “part-time job.”  Considering there are dozens of application platforms, variations on demonstrated interest, and choices of application types (Rolling, EA, ED1, ED2, Regular Decision, etc.), the process is understandably overwhelming. 

Click the PDF below to download the guide.

PDF - Infographic - Ho…

Why limit thanksgivings to November? 

Yes, you are correct: this November newsletter is landing in your inbox in December. Of course, I had every intention of sending this out on Thanksgiving, then on Black Friday, and then over the weekend. But life, as it does, intervened: a delightful Thanksgiving proper at my sister-in-law’s in Pennsylvania with three out of four of our children in attendance, followed by a swift drive up the NY Thruway to visit with our daughter, son-in-law, and three-mont…

What new couples don’t realize (how could they?) is that you’ll end up having the same argument—about the same core thing—for years, sometimes decades.

For Dave and me, that argument is usually about whether I’ve told him something. Just last week, I mentioned that I was going to book club Tuesday evening. He insisted I hadn’t told him. I was 98% certain that yes, I had told him. (I could even picture where we were standing in the kitchen, me scrubbing the broiler pan.) This verbal volley went …