MEET OUR NEW DIRECTOR OF COLLEGE COUNSELING

F or many high school students, finding the right college—and getting accepted—can seem like a daunting, life-defining task. Spoiler alert: it isn’t—and Holderness School’s new Director of College Counseling Kelsey Berry is here to put things into perspective for us.

If anyone is qualified to guide Holderness students in their college search, it’s Kelsey. An integral member of the Holderness community since 2012, she has served as a history teacher, history department chair, varsity head coach, dorm parent, advisor, and most recently the school’s Director of Teaching and Learning. When Kelsey steps into her new role in the fall of 2023, she will replace outgoing Director of College Counseling Bruce Barton, who has led the College Counseling office for more than 20 years.

Here, Kelsey tells us about her plans for the College Counseling office, why college fit is so important, and what she tells students who face disappointment in their college search.

Congratulations on becoming Director of College Counseling!

You were named to the position in January, and you’ve spent much of the winter and spring working with longtime Director of College Counseling Bruce Barton. What are your goals for the future of the office?

I have a lot of ideas but I think this year is about listening and figuring out how the office functions and how to support it continuing at a really high level, as Bruce has managed. It’s such a gift to be able to work with someone who has been doing the work for so long at Holderness. Bruce will just be down the hall and will continue to work with a cohort of students for this year. He and I are meeting once a week in this transition to talk about the rhythms of the office and different challenges.

Getting into college seems like it’s more competitive than ever. How can the College Counseling office help students navigate that process?

I think that the college process is an increasingly difficult thing for our students and families to go through. Maybe it’s always been that way—but how do we help students focus on fit and help them in the essay writing process articulate who they are for these places? I’m excited to do that. I’ve worked with students on their writing for many, many years and I feel excited about that challenge— of helping them find their voice and very clearly and succinctly present themselves to the world…I think the college office’s role is to help students articulate that to schools and to build a list that has a lot of balance in accessibility—both financial and acceptance rate—and to help them love every college on their list, or be able to see themselves at every college on their list. I think we’re at a really healthy place. Students now, when they’re asked about the college process by a peer or adult, say “I have a bunch of schools I’m excited about.”

As a longtime teacher, what are some of the changes you’ve seen in the college admissions process?

The college process is a different process than it was five years ago or three years ago. It’s really a fastchanging situation. There are two things sort of on the horizon that might change it again in different ways: the affirmative action decision by the Supreme Court [a case currently pending before the Supreme Court that could effectively end affirmative action] and Chat AI [artificial intelligence chatbots, like Chat GPT]. So, what’s going to happen to the college essay? What are colleges going to think about those prompts if there is artificial intelligence to write them? So those two things could really shift the college landscape.

This spring and summer, you plan to visit more than two dozen of the colleges and universities where Holderness students have submitted the largest number of applications over the last 10 years. Tell us about that.

I think sometimes going to see schools, for counselors, is to understand them and be able to help the students imagine themselves there. I want to work through the known schools in the first few months but also in travel going forward try to find some of those schools that might be a really good fit for Holderness students that are not part of our normal list. I think of Macalester College and Carleton College in Minnesota, and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington where we’ve had some students really thrive, but it’s not top in our number of applications.

So it seems like there are plenty of colleges out there where our students could thrive. What do you say to students who don’t get into the college of their dreams? How do you put things into perspective for them?

Any assessment of you as a person is hard. Even small tests and quizzes, people have anxiety about. It’s one way that people measure their self-worth. And I think I really try to break that down and say ‘You aren’t where you go to college. That isn’t the person that you are.’ College can be a really great place for you to develop, and there are lots of places where you can be happy. |