First Comes Humility

Estimated Reading Time: 8-10 minutes

First Comes Humility: A College Counselor's Embrace of DesignThinking

Pinned above my desk at work is a card from the L+D Deck that says, “Determine whose needs should be researched to understand the problem more deeply.” When I started the Leadership+DesignFellowship in 23-24, I was all-in on leadership and completely indifferent about design. Design thinking, I assumed, had nothing to do with me. It belonged to the people at my school who had the word “Innovation” in their titles; its provenance was in our maker space, not the college office. What place did design thinking have in college counseling? 

That year, I learned from the good folks at L+D that human-centered design begins with empathy. Empathy, at least, did come naturally to me as a college counselor. As much as we’re advising students on the college essay and the Common Application, we’re also counseling adolescents who’ve arrived at a major turning point in their young lives. For families, the college process often becomes a lightning rod, with relational complexities and years-long dynamics coming to a head. My role requires me to empathize with all of the players and identify their needs. 

Having been around the block long enough, however, I’ve noticed how expertise can curdle empathy. Let me guess – this student is stopping by my office because they’re having misgivings about the essay draft they emailed me at 2AM last night. Mom’s calling days before the Early Decision deadline? She wants to make sure “they” are making the “right choice.” The application process is new to them, but it’s not new to me – far from it. My extensive experience could occasionally impede my ability to empathize. So as I began to embrace design thinking more, I considered that empathy – an external expression – might not be my first step. There was something I needed to straighten out internally before I turned my gaze outward. 

The Reluctant Designer

That was all a couple years ago. Smash cut to Summer 2025: I’m traveling throughout Asia, conducting empathy interviews with groups of international parents. Their children were current students at my school, and I sought to better understand these parents’ perspectives and experiences with the goal of strengthening our office’s support for international families. Instead of assuming I had it all figured out, I went into these conversations ready to learn, and ready to be surprised. So, what had changed?

Well, for one thing, I realized that college counseling and design are not the strangest of bedfellows. In my role, I’m not only providing individualized counseling, I’m designing programs as well. And I’m designing experiences: similar to how Will Guidara writes in Unreasonable Hospitality that hospitality is not only about the product he delivers as a restaurateur, but how the experience of his restaurant and staff make diners feel -- as college counselors, the student’s college matriculation matters less (to me, at least…but keep that between us!) than the fact that the student feels seen, understood and supported throughout their college process. Once I had loosened up my understanding of design thinking – turns out it wasn’t just about 3D Printers and the Cricut machine after all – I began to see how relevant it was to my work.

Design Process #1

For several years, my office had been spinning its wheels about how to best support our students who would be the first in their families to attend four-year colleges. These first gen students did not start the college process with the same savviness and know-how (what Bourdieu would call cultural capital) as their peers whose parents did attend college. With equity in mind, we knew we had to change our approach for these students, but how? We were revisiting this question around the same time I was making design thinking’s acquaintance in my L+D Fellowship. I thought to myself, “Why don’t we just ask?” Why don’t we just engage this community in conversation? Why presume that we know more, or know better, than the very people we are trying to support? 

We embarked on a design process. In those initial conversations, we took off our “expert” hats and just listened. Many empathy interviews later – including with current first gen students, recent first gen alumni, and first gen faculty and staff on our campus – we prototyped what a new multi-year program could look like, one that would become a community of celebration and support. The design process is still ongoing, with each passing year the program increasing in fidelity.  

Parents: A New Narrative 

At the same time that we were conducting empathy interviews for that design process, a colleague in my office had the good idea of doing something similar with our international students. We had all recently attended a webinar about supporting the mental health of AAPI (Asian, Asian-American and Pacific Islander) students throughout the college process. While not all of our international students identify as Asian, many do; and regardless of how they identify racially or ethnically, most of our international students primarily apply to U.S. colleges – a landscape of higher education that their families are typically unfamiliar with. We had held a focus group with international student leaders at our school to learn more about their perspectives and experiences, which was a great jumping off point. But there was another piece to this puzzle, another constituency I was eager to engage in conversation: parents. 

I’ll level with you: every college counselor has a story (or 20) about a parent. These anecdotes about individuals often become a single story we tell ourselves about “parents.” It’s “parents” who get in the way, “parents” who have unreasonable expectations. I’m putting “parents” in quotations because the kvetching tends to be about the category writ large, a “unitary entity with fixed agendas and motivations,” as Greg put it in a L+D newsletter from last year. It was easy to lapse into certainty about parents’ goals and motivations. What would happen, I wondered, if we got curious about parents? 

This musing was well-timed. I had recently become eligible for sabbatical at my school, and my husband was due to take his as well. We had talked about using some of that time to travel throughout Asia. I could use that sabbatical opportunity – and funding – to meet with current parents abroad, many of whom are rarely able to get to campus. What might I learn if I approached those conversations with empathy and curiosity, instead of judgment and certainty? 

Taking The Show On The Road 

The result was, essentially, a listening tour. With that L+D card (“Determine whose needs should be researched to understand the problem more deeply”) serving as my mantra, I set up group meetings with Loomis parents in four different cities: Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. I was not there to offer college counseling, or to provide answers – I was there to ask questions. My goal was to leave each city with a better understanding of how the parents there perceive the admission process; how they perceive the support our office offers; and how they perceive the landscape of American higher education, especially in this present moment of scrutiny. 

In each conversation, there were multiple perspectives and experiences. There were contradicting viewpoints, not only within the room, but oftentimes within a single individual parent. Initially, I found these contradictions frustrating, but as I got deeper into the work, I challenged myself to embrace both/and thinking. The parents I met with cared deeply about the mental health and wellbeing of their children. They wanted the college process to be one of self-discovery and exploration. And they were also candid with me about the intensity of the job market in their cities, about the social pressure to hire external consultants, and about their anxieties regarding the American political climate and international relations. We had frank conversations about economic pressures, status markers and cultural norms – realities that I couldn’t just wish away with platitudes about “the right fit.” 

While I had expertise to share about how college admission works, and was happy to share that when it came up in conversation, I had to accept that I don’t have expertise in many of the forces that shape these families’ lives. I thought back to that initial question: Why not ask? 

First Comes Humility 

I’d always been told that human-centered design begins with empathy. But I would counter that humility is the first of the preconditions. Humility presupposes that actually, you don’t have all the answers. Actually, there are others to learn from, and to build with. I think this is why I initially didn’t see designthinking as relevant to my work as a college counselor. I’m supposed to have all the answers: knowing the complexities of the application process, knowing which colleges are going to be a good fit for the student, knowing what makes a good essay, and what makes a good list strategy. I’m used to being seen as the “expert” – a position of power, but a burden, too. What a gift design thinking has given me: an opportunity to check my ego at the door and go get my learning.