In April, I announced that we’d hired a great counselor to run our new office in Plano, Texas opening this summer (the fact that she was also a former Collegewise student just made it that much cooler). But before she was due to start, her employers made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, and she decided to accept a promotion with them instead. I was disappointed she wouldn’t be joining us, but there were parts of the unexpected change that I viewed as good things.
It’s a good thing that she’s doing important work with kids. It’s a good thing that her employers appreciate her. And most importantly, it’s a good thing that someone smart and talented has career options. That’s exactly the way the work world should operate.
We’re lucky enough to be a company that a lot of people want to work for. I can’t say yes to all of them (in fact, so many have applied this year that I can’t even email all of them back). But those who won’t be joining us, whether that’s their choice or ours, will almost always have other options. That’s the way it should be. Options are almost always a good thing.
A sure way to inject stress into your college admissions process is to eliminate options. If you compose a college list full of schools that reject almost all of their applicants, if you decide there are only three colleges in the world that you could ever be happy attending, if you make the choice that an admission from a highly-selective college is the only acceptable outcome for your hard work, you’re eliminating options rather than celebrating them.
This week, I’ll be announcing the new director of college counseling for our Plano office. We’re really excited she’s joining us and we know we’re going to do some great work together. She had plenty of options. We had plenty of options. And both parties are now ready to celebrate that we’ve found such a good professional fit.