Arun has personally reviewed the college applications of over 8,000 high school seniors and read approximately 20,000 college essays. If that sounds mathematically impossible (it did to us the first time he said it), here’s how it worked. Before he became a partner and college counselor at Collegewise, Arun was an assistant director of admissions for five years at the University of Chicago (his beloved alma mater). He then held the same post for two years at Caltech and spent two final years as an admissions reader for UCLA. If you’re still with us and doing the math, that’s nine admissions cycles for three highly selective colleges in two states. But Arun doesn’t believe that the most prestigious colleges are necessarily the best. In fact, he was raised in Ohio where it is apparently a state law that residents not only fanatically love Ohio State, but also treat anyone who loves the University of Michigan with great contempt (it’s a college football rivalry thing, for the uninitiated).

Katie started working at Colgate University’s admissions office while she was still a student (and a collegiate softball pitcher who could throw a softball scarily hard). After graduating in 2004, she got her college counseling certification from UCLA and started counseling students at Collegewise. Fast forward a few years and Katie has now helped over 200 students get accepted to, well, we can’t even count how many hundreds of colleges. Let’s just say they range from all of the Ivy League schools, to tiny schools most people have never heard of, to pretty much every school in between. Today, Katie runs the Collegewise office in Bellevue, Washington (just a short drive over a nice bridge from Seattle), and is also a certified Collegewise “Master Counselor.” We know that might sound like some sort of martial arts award, but it means that Katie is certified to train new Collegewise counselors. To us, that’s just about as impressive as a black belt in Kung Fu. She’s kind of a big deal here.