The Putney School prepares students to direct their learning innovatively, pursue inspiration passionately, engage the world meaningfully, and participate in a community responsibly. A Putney student is both a cartographer and an explorer—mapping the course of their education, embarking on unknown paths of discovery, and charting new routes forward through unexpected terrain—and the Office of College Counseling occupies a unique crossroads in the topography of their curriculum.
The College Office exists in a place of intersection and transition; it stands along the border between Putney’s educational philosophy and more traditional models of scholastic assessment, at the waypoint between youth and adulthood, and atop the observatory from which students shift their gazes from the present to the future. Our aim as college counselors is to help students successfully navigate these intersections and encourage current interests to grow into future ambitions as present skills lay the foundations for achievements-to-come.
The college process at Putney can feel especially daunting because it requires interfacing between our program of studies and more standardized pedagogies, but it is also a space of profound self-determination, where students can employ the very tenants of engagement, independence, and autonomy that The Putney School strives to teach. Applying to college at Putney is about the student not the college. It is a process shaped by and tailored to individual students as they reflect on fundamental questions about the future, discovering the answers to many questions while embracing the freedom and potential for growth that lives where answers remain unknown.
Who am I? Who do I want to become? What do I value? What do I want to achieve? How do I learn best? Where do I learn best? What type of community do I want to join?
Our office supports students along every step of the college process from a place of empowerment, to ensure that despite the sometimes fraught nature of applying to college, our students don’t lose sight of their ownership of both the process and the results.