How to manage your time as a university counsellor

One of the biggest challenges college counsellors often face is finding the time to put all your ideas into practice. Eight years into the role, time management is still my nemesis.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your time.

Start early

Organise your resources for sessions beforehand, whether you have a classroom-style lesson or one-on-one interactions with students.

Create, curate and compile information into packages to access at any time. Create a Google Classroom “Topics” folder so students can find exactly what they need.

Doing such extensive research is a great way to get yourself acquainted with the information, and anticipate any questions that your students might ask.

Encourage students to go through the resources as they frame their queries for you. It also helps if you have access to student records before they join your class. Push for the senior leadership team to assign students to you as early as possible.

Track or document all conversations

This may sound like a time-guzzler but, trust me, it will save you hours of repetitive conversations and rummaging through school records.

Whether you are working with 30 students or 300, it is not humanly possible to remember every single detail about every single student. Start an email thread between you, the student and a parent to minute talking points and any actionable decisions taken.

This will also protect you from any false claims made later by students, parents or even your own senior leadership team (SLT). Receipts are important.

Make SLT take note of your work

If you are a teacher-counsellor like me, your workload and deadlines can be very demanding. When that end-of-term paperwork meets college-application crunch time, and the holiday season is approaching, it is difficult.

Ensure that your SLT has a very clear idea of all the hours you put in. This will help them help you, by cutting out any extra duties that are making your workload worse. 

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Log every meeting with students, parents and university representatives. Create a Google doc to be shared with your line manager and your point of contact on the SLT.
• Attended an information session outside of working hours? Share the information in an email. Counsellors often spend a lot of time working outside official hours and not everyone on the SLT may recognise that.
• Consider sending a monthly or weekly update to the SLT. This could include stats, such as the number of meetings conducted, the number of university reps you’ve met or the number of recommendations you’ve written.

Stick to your office hours

Depending on how your school day is organised and whether you have multiple roles, office hours is a great way to allow students to see you as often as possible. It also allows you to take less work home.

Afraid no one will show up to see you? Work on that research you've been putting off, make a courtesy call to that university rep you met last week or go through some draft essays.

Having designated time in your schedule to meet students and do those necessary tasks can really help get things on track. Better yet, advocate for writing hours to be included in your timetable if you are a teacher-counsellor. Needless to say, it makes room for greater work-life balance.

Reach out to the counsellor community

Look to the community to get reliable and valid information. Personal research is most insightful but sometimes you need answers faster, and with finer detail than websites and university representatives offer.

If there are multiple counsellors in the school, it’s likely they will have different specialties. One of them may have attended that counsellor fly-in for Turkish universities. Perhaps one of them is an ace essay coach? Reach out to them to help you get things done more efficiently.

Offer the same in return. Learn from the best practices of counsellors from other schools. You may also find yourself in a situation that has affected students nationwide, such as exam cancellation as a result of political unrest. At times like these, it helps if admissions officers hear a coherent narrative from a diverse set of counsellors from the region.