Portfolio College Counseling Services

What we Do

Portfolio College Counseling’s guiding core belief is that each student is unique. Your individual counseling plan is developed around your needs, abilities and educational objectives. We help you tell a unique story to art and design programs around the world. To accommodate students all over the globe, meetings are scheduled via Skype, FaceTime or Zoom. At PCC we listen carefully to your ideas and objectives, then offer review, discussion and advisement. Our counseling offers a two-prong approach: we will work on both academic and art and design application requirements.

Academic College Counseling

  • Academics: transcripts and course planning
  • Assessments: formal and informal interests and abilities
  • Degree programs and majors
  • Targeted best-fit college list development
  • Standardized testing: planning and analysis
  • Standard applications: Common App, Coalition, UC, UCAS and others
  • Extra- and co-curricular activities, internships
  • Transfer, gap year, pre-college and summer programs
  • Time management strategies
  • Essays, artist statements, and resumes
  • Social media strategies
  • Interviews and college visits
  • FAFSA and Profile applications
  • Scholarship search
  • Admissions decisions and award packages

Art + Design Counseling

  • Exploration of student interests, skills and abilities
  • Degree programs and majors
  • Review and evaluation of current portfolio/artwork
  • Structured process and portfolio development and content editing
  • Assignment and critiques of projects to enhance and build portfolio content
  • College-specific requirements (including supplemental visual assignments)
  • Strategies for showcasing strengths to exceed requirements
  • Maximizing portfolio for multiple applications
  • Preparation of artist’s statements and creative resume
  • Labeling, identification and inventory of artwork
  • Technical considerations: photography, digitization
  • Recommendations for attending National Portfolio Day events
  • Best practices for prospective professional artists
  • Extra- or co-curricular arts education
  • Pre-College summer art programs
  • SlideRoom and Common Application supplement submission

Let's Connect

Finding the right college counselor is the key step in a successful college planning process. To help decide whether our services are the best path forward for students, we offer a 20-minute, complimentary phone meeting to introduce ourselves, get to know you and explain our process. Afterward, we’ll prepare a written proposal to outline our plan for working with you, that includes a suggested sequence and associated fees. Each plan for counseling is customized, based on the student’s abilities, skills and educational objectives.