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WEEK of September 24, 2007
@BFS! archives

Upper School Welcomes New College Counselor

by Jeffrey Stanley

Lindsey S. Berns has joined the Upper School as the new Director of College Counseling. She hit the ground running this July in preparation for the new school year. “My position covers a lot of different things, mainly helping students find out about and apply to colleges that would be a good fit for them and also helping parents navigate that process,” she explained. “There’s a lot of family counseling involved.”

The other side of her job is informing colleges about BFS and what is unique about our students. With that in mind, she plans to start getting to know Upper Schoolers as soon as they enter ninth grade. “I begin working with them very intensively in January of their junior year and by then I’ll already know them.”

In addition to two Master’s degrees and a BA from Oberlin College, Lindsey’s international work experience merges well with the start of the Upper School’s new IB curriculum this year. “Colleges really respect it. It’s shorthand for depth and breadth in the curriculum. I can say, ‘we’re an IB school,’ and colleges know what that means.” Lindsey also speaks French, Turkish and Spanish. She was associate director of college counseling at Lycée Francais de New York for one year before coming here, and prior to that she was a college counselor at an IB school in Gebze, Turkey. “My husband and I wanted to have an adventure,” she confessed. “The Tev Inanc Turkes High School is funded by a charity for students who are very poor but very gifted. The kids learned English, got to travel and really got a world-class education there,” she said, some of them going on to MIT and Harvard.

Lindsey came into high school education via the New York City Teaching Fellows Program and still does a little pro bono college counseling in her spare time. “My experience was really eye-opening,” she said, “to see how many great students come out of [public schools] and have no support whatsoever. So I’ve taken on a group of eight kids that I’m working with independently. They’re all first generation Americans and really top achievers.”

Now that her first summer setting up shop at BFS is over and the new school year is underway she’s looking forward to meeting our students and getting to know them. “Everyone from the maintenance staff to the teachers seems concerned about the students’ well-being,” she observed. “The faculty seem wonderful, really caring, very smart.”

See the BFS College Counseling Resources page.

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