A “Slice” of Woolf College Consulting
Betsy has been featured in The Slice, a newsletter about college admissions and standardized testing. Read on to find out what led Betsy to the profession of college consulting and what she loves the most about her job:
“I think my entire academic and professional life led me to this business – and a little encouragement from some key people: my husband and children, of course; Phyllis Steinbrecher, one of the pioneers in independent consulting and a great lady; Barbara Hall, the then Admissions Director at NYU who is now the Associate Provost for Enrollment Services at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering; and my friend Allison Leopold, currently a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, whose son immediately became my first client when I told her that I was contemplating a career change.
I guess I should thank my parents, too, who asked their daughter, a political science and history double major at NYU who graduated magna cum laude, to study secondary education, as well, so that I would have a fallback career! I did that and still think fondly of a few of the students I taught as a student-teacher, but I also went on to receive a J.D. from the Maurice A Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and then to a career as an attorney and later as a journalist, especially as an editor of a trio of parenting magazines for New York and Connecticut.
So it has all come together: the best parts of my background culminating in a career that is already 10 years old. What do I like most about college consulting? Well, there are many but a few stand out: working with the students, especially brainstorming ideas with them; making so many great friends in the industry; presenting the free annual Inside the Admissions Office program to the Westchester County community each fall; and relieving so much of the anxiety about the college search and application process for families.”