Counselor Profile
Kim is a former Associate Director of Admissions at the University of Pennsylvania.
At UPenn, Kim was an integral of the admissions team, planning recruitment events – both large and small – as well as regional and international travel for UPenn admissions in conjunction with other admissions offices. Kim has read thousands of applications from all over the US and the world, but her main territories included Texas, Maryland, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Jamaica, and other parts of the Caribbean. She also served as the Associate Director of Equity and Access and Assistant Director of Recruitment Management.
As an admissions officer, Kim read applications and made admissions decisions on applicants for all the undergraduate colleges at Penn, covering business, engineering, nursing, and arts and sciences, as well as applicants to dual majors. This experience makes her a great fit for students with a specialty or those who want to take an interdisciplinary approach to their education.
Kim graduated from Cornell University where she studied Industrial and Labor Relations. Discovering this small niche college in the Ivy League during her own college search process changed Kim’s educational trajectory and eventually led to earning her master’s in Social Policy from UPenn where she pursued her passion of learning about education issues. Now Kim works with school districts and colleges to make education more accessible and equitable.
After working in admissions at UPenn, Kim worked at a small non-profit assisting students in their journey to top colleges. In this role, she worked directly with students and families and continued to expand her knowledge about amazing, top-notch liberal arts colleges. This work reminded her of her own journey to Cornell, and how she enjoys working with students to help them find unique and specialized schools and programs that will inspire them and change how they think about their educational and career goals.
Kim’s extensive experience with admissions, college counseling, and education drives everything that she does. She has a collaborative approach when working with her students – getting to know them and their families so that the process can be fun and engaging. Kim enjoys working with students that are self-starters, are open minded, and have tons of questions. Her main priority is to build confidence in her students by ensuring that they feel in control of the process and comfortable asking any questions they need to have a successful college admissions journey.
Kim thinks that “understanding your why” is extremely important in this process, and her advice to students is to be open-minded and to ask yourself tons of questions. Students and families sometimes don’t realize that there are so many more options out there than they initially consider, so Kim encourages her students to be open to new suggestions and works with them to think outside of the box. So many students have their hearts set on one particular college or major, but Kim loves working with students to really dig in and find unexpected “best fit” college options or majors that they didn’t even know existed!
Kim is an avid reader and loves spending time with her family. When she’s not working with students you can also find her catching up on popular Netflix series (usually far behind everyone else!)
Counselor Features
Webinars
- Where to Start? How to Build Your Balanced College List
- Decisions, Decisions: Early vs. Regular College Application Rounds