Yesterday, I completed my ninth year of consecutive daily blog posts here. And I’ve decided that this 10th year will be my last. I’ve still got 364 days of daily blogging left to go, so I won’t do a long preemptive goodbye today. But I did want to give readers the heads up that one year from today, the daily streak will come to an end.
Next to starting Collegewise, this blog is the most valuable endeavor I’ve ever taken on at work. Daily blogging has delivered more personal and professional benefit than I ever could have predicted when I wrote that first post nine years ago. In fact, I expect that I’ll keep blogging in some capacity even when this streak ends one year from now. But I’m ready to let go of the pressure to post every day. And more than ever before, I’m ready to write about topics other than college admissions.
Since I founded Collegewise in 1999, we’ve grown into the largest college counseling company in the world, with offices and families all over the globe. I love what we’ve become and the role that I’m currently playing—finding and recruiting the right people to join us, preserving the culture we’ve worked so hard to build, and making our company an even better place to work for everyone here. But I don’t work directly with families today. I don’t write our counseling materials. I don’t even do the majority of training for our new counselors. There are plenty of people in the college advising universe who know more about helping kids get into college today than I do, many of whom I’m proud to call colleagues here. I’ve always said that I’d keep blogging as long as I still had something to say. And on these topics for this audience, it feels like the right time for me to start winding down, and for other bloggers to start stepping up.
I’ll enjoy my final year penning daily posts and promise to do my best to keep writing something worth sharing. Thank you for reading, especially to those of you who’ve been readers for years. It’s a privilege to do this, one I’m looking forward to saying I appreciated every consecutive day for a decade.