Arriving at campus at around 8 a.m., College & Career Center (CCC) advisor Sierra Ward starts her typical day filling out call slips, checking for urgent emails and getting ready for the day.
During the school day, she’ll spend most class periods keeping the CCC open for students working on applications or looking to have questions answered. In the height of application season from September to late October, she hosts college admission representative visits throughout tutorial, lunchtime and after school. From after school to evenings, she’ll continue meeting with students, reviewing their essays and answering emails — all in addition to attending school events and athletic games.
Though this is only her third year at Saratoga High, Ward has brought with her 25 years of experience in college admissions. She manages work permits and volunteering, but her primary role as a college counselor is to guide students through the application process. This includes helping build college lists, complete applications, create extracurricular lists, revise essays, craft resumes, practice for interviews and apply for financial aid or scholarships.
The process usually begins with Ward setting up a meeting with juniors in early January, where she gets to know their individual situations and interests in terms of majors, politics and school spirit, among other factors, for college preferences. Ward helps students with filling out their Common Application and drafting their essays, tasks which are best to be started before the summer.
During tutorials in the spring, she hosts group presentations on topics such as opening a Common Application, approaching UC Personal Insight Questions and applying for financial aid. Ward hosts college app and essay bootcamps over the summer, and she shifts towards having more individual meetings with students in the fall.
Despite having worked with only a few students in her first fall semester at SHS two years ago, Ward feels glad that many more are increasingly taking advantage of the services offered by her and the school. For the Class of ‘26, she will have known some of the students since their freshman year.
“I feel like almost all the seniors have worked with me in some way, that it almost got overwhelming at some point — which is great, because [luckily] we have our four guidance counselors who are outstanding [in addition to] me,” Ward said. “It’s a lot, but this is what it’s supposed to be like.”
Because of this, Ward has had to start dividing up the work between herself and the other counselors, figuring out how to balance giving support to students who may already have additional help from private counselors.
“It’s been a good dilemma, but all of a sudden, this year was the year I felt like people had really, truly found me and were working with me for a long time, which was great,” Ward said.
Ward keeps track of students’ progress in a huge spreadsheet with over 200 columns. However, she emphasizes how the idea that she is stretched thin across an entire class of students — which often leads parents to employ private counseling — is completely false.
“The myth is that I have a caseload of 280 seniors every year or so — I don’t, and people forget that we have four amazing counselors,” Ward said. “There might be a student who’s not working with me at all — they’re working with their counselor, and Mr. Louie or one of the assistant principals is writing that rec letter. So to say that I have a caseload of 280 is not even close to the truth.”
From data collected in the senior exit survey from the Class of ‘24, around 40-50% of seniors worked with outside private counselors. Ward said the problem with the route — besides the high costs — arises from the unreliability and wide range of services provided, necessitating that families do thorough research before committing to a private counselor.
Ward notes that while she’s worked with many amazing independent counselors herself, it’s important to note that there are also parents (who have only experienced pushing their own child into college) seeking to offer their services. She recounts one recent instance where a private counselor’s advice conflicted with her own feedback.
“The outside counselor had actually deleted one of the most important comments that I had made in their essay. And the comment that I made was like college counseling 101 — it was such a fundamental thing, and if the student didn’t do what I’d suggested, their essay was going to just fall flat,” Ward said. “So that’s where I think there’s a problem in quality.”
While she isn’t outright opposed to students having an outside counselor, Ward believes that with the school’s multiple resources, there is little need for students to seek extra help.
Still, she says students need to appreciate the value of everyone’s time, and they shouldn’t be working with two professionals intensively and creating redundant workloads. If they have a quality outside counselor, Ward feels that students shouldn’t need to also work intensively with the administration and resources at school because they would be doubling up their time spent.
“The conflict is when people get bad advice provided from someone outside, or when a student is working really intensively with me throughout the spring semester and summer, and then tells me in the fall that they’re working with an outside [counselor] as well,” Ward said. “I’d invested so much time in that person that I could’ve invested in somebody else.”
Another benefit provided by Ward is her willingness to work with parents. Since her office is on the school campus and she schedules meetings mostly during school hours or immediately after school, she’s a lot more accessible to students, who can schedule meetings during school hours. However, she still invites parents to come for the initial meeting and encourages them to be on the same page from the start of the conversation.
“I love working with parents — they’re just concerned about their kids, which is fine. They get stressed about their students, which is also fine,” Ward said.
Because she loves to be available for parents, she dedicates an effort to attend athletic events — on top of her intense fall workload — because she sees them as opportunities that allow her to not only engage with the SHS community but also interact and answer questions for parents and students alike.
In the next few weeks, Ward will be shouldering an especially intense workload as she helps seniors work through the process of strategizing and completing their applications — all of which she does with a passion for helping students.
“For college counselors, this is the time of year where we might be working 12-14-hour days, especially September and October,” Ward said. “That’s just the way it is. But I feel I’m too invested in this position and I want to help students.”