Navigating College Admissions with a True Guide
Museums are often intimidating places, especially if they’re new to you. They can be big, imposing, and overwhelming. It can seem like everyone else knows what they’re doing, but you’re lost and unsure of where to go—what’s worth pursuing, what can be saved for later. And this is why a good docent or guide can be so helpful. They know their way around, they understand things at a depth that few others do, and—if they’re really good—they can find out what interests you, and steer you accordingly. Something potentially scary becomes something delightful.
In the big, imposing, overwhelming museum of college admissions, Sandy Pelz is an expert tour guide.
Sandy certainly knows his way around the place. He has served as college counselor at Browning since 1988, and his familiarity with the seeming entirety of the higher education landscape is genuine, hard-won, and remarkable. An obscure liberal arts college in the upper Midwest? Sandy has visited. The dean of admissions at a flagship state university? Sandy has known her for three decades. The best food/engineering school/study abroad program in New England? Sandy, informed by dozens of conversations and relationships, can tell you. To chat with him is to realize, through a litany of humble anecdotes and real insights and unexpected revelations, that Browning’s college counselor sits at the nexus of practical wisdom, deep experience, and boundless fellowship.
But that familiarity has not bred complacency; indeed, Sandy’s is a mind that simply won’t settle for stasis. College admissions is a different enterprise than when Sandy began his counseling career, a difference marked by, among other factors, an explosion of early decision applications, the rise of standardized test prep, profound shifts in school selectivity, and skyrocketing college costs. Yet Sandy doesn’t get caught behind such phenomena, and most often shows remarkable prescience in anticipating what everyone will need to understand in the uncertain admissions world. A former physics teacher and an inveterate puzzle-solver, Sandy has a fascination with tinkering, with finding better ways to meet goals in changing systems. This inclination has assisted decades of Browning students, who have been introduced to new financial aid programs, cutting-edge diagnostic tests, emerging academic programs, and healthy application strategies by dint of Sandy’s discoveries and creativity.
As skilled as Sandy is as an analyst, researcher, and innovator, however, his truest genius resides in his relational understanding. If you walk by his office when he’s not there, you’ll notice that his screensaver is a loop of school portraits of the boys in Grade 12, which symbolically captures the nature of his devotion. He is driven to truly see the boys in his care—their aspirations and apprehensions, their hopes and their joys—in order to give them the most authentic, most generous guidance that he can. Like the excellent tour guide, Sandy appreciates that the real job at hand is one of connection, a connection which enables boys to find schools that genuinely speak to them, schools which help boys envision their future selves as happy, healthy, and engaged. Like every Browning teacher, Sandy deeply commits to knowing our boys, and does so in myriad ways: One-on-one meetings, official college prep classes, conferences with families, the annual college trip, and specialized feedback mechanisms honed over nearly 40 years of guidance. When a boy applies to a college or university, he has been encouraged by a counselor who has looked out for his best interests, because that counselor deeply knows his best interests.
As we enter into the early admissions season for college aspirants, and as he makes his way through his 50th year of Browning employment, it feels right and proper to tip the cap to Sandy Pelz. He epitomizes the best of what our school can be: A gentleman of compassion and courage, an alum of intelligence and integrity, and a director of college counseling par excellence, whose skilled, creative, caring guidance makes the potentially scary into something delightful.