About Admissions

This blog is my attempt to write honestly about college admissions from the perspective of a private college counselor. .

My Background

For the past 15 years, I have been working to help students with all aspects of college admissions, but my background is as a journalist. After graduating from Harvard College with a degree in Government, I spent 10 years in Asia. I spent a couple of years working as an analyst at a British-French stockbroking firm in South Korea and Malaysia. Then, I spent the rest of my time there as a journalist, reporting from South and Southeast Asia. I was the Southeast Asian correspondent for the South China Morning Post and an Asia bureau chief for a small financial magazine, but most of the time I worked independently. I wrote several cover stories for Institutional Investor magazine and contributed to publications including BusinessWeek, The Economist, The Financial Times, and Forbes. 

After returning to the United States, I worked in public relations for a couple of years, an eye-opening experience that taught me about the length companies go to burnish their reputations. Then, I went back to graduate school, first at the American University in Cairo and then at Columbia University, where I pursued but did not finish two separate degrees, one in International Affairs and the other in Islamic Studies. As someone who is always looking to learn something new, I took classes all over Columbia in subjects ranging from finance to anthropology, Arabic to methodologies in intellectual history. I have since taken graduate classes in artificial intelligence, statistics, and algorithms and in psychology. That breadth of study has been enormously helpful to me in advising students on their majors and future careers.

I can be reached at christine.elizabeth.hill2@gmail.com