In my late twenties, I moved to China on a life adventure — no particular plan, just a sense that something interesting was waiting. I stumbled into education consulting almost by accident. And then I couldn’t stop.
What hooked me wasn’t the prestige of the outcomes. It was the work itself: sitting with a teenager in the middle of real confusion and helping them see a path. The teenage years are a universal mess — it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your family looks like. Everyone is figuring out who they are, what they’re good at, and what they actually want. That confusion isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the whole point. My job is to help students and families move through it more wisely than they’d manage alone.
When Carol and I decided to start Novellea together, it was because we’d already seen what working as a team makes possible. I’ll be honest: part of what drew me to this work in the first place is that you genuinely get to weigh in on where someone’s life goes next. There’s real influence in this role, and I don’t pretend otherwise. But that influence is only worth something if you carry it carefully. Planning a student’s academic direction and college application strategy is a serious responsibility — you are, in some sense, affecting the trajectory of someone’s life. Doing that alone means your blind spots travel everywhere with you. With two senior counselors on every case, we catch more, challenge each other, and bring more confidence to our advice. The model works best when parents are contributing too — not just waiting for updates, but sharing what they see at home — and when students are willing to say what they actually feel, not just what they think we want to hear.
The name Novellea came from what we wanted to bring to this industry: a novel idea. Maybe that’s a different kind of relationship between a family and a consultant — collaborative rather than transactional. Maybe it’s a piece of information that reframes how a student sees their options. Maybe it’s a way of thinking that opens a door nobody noticed was there.
What we want families to feel working with us is simple: not alone. This process is nerve-inducing by nature — there’s no getting around that. But nervous doesn’t have to mean frantic. It can be graceful. It can be wise. That’s what we’re here for.