Meet Hanifa!

Hanifa Abdul Sabur, College Counselor

In a journey that began as an undergraduate student at Swarthmore and continued as a graduate student at Columbia where she earned two master's degrees, Hanifa has spent more than 17 years of her professional life teaching and counseling every kind of student, from high schoolers across the United States and around the world, to Ivy League college students, to nurses struggling to balance schoolwork with saving lives during a pandemic. Hanifa’s students have gained admission to over 100 colleges and universities including Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Cornell, Georgetown, Tufts, Boston College, NYU, Swarthmore, Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, Northeastern, Boston University, Brown University, UPenn, University of Chicago, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and University of Oxford.

Hanifa approaches her counseling with the goal of helping students prepare to not only get into colleges that match their strengths and needs, but also to thrive in those places. She has a talent and instinct for helping students discover value in themselves, and she helps them share it compellingly with admissions readers. She particularly excels with students who are undecided or have a wide range of interests, helping to curate an application narrative that reflects their strengths as thinkers, learners, and community members. Hanifa also thrives working with self-driven students who have specific goals and just need clear guidance and support in accomplishing them. 

At her counseling best, Hanifa creates true partnerships with both students and their families. She particularly appreciates working with students who are engaged in their own journeys rather than acting as passive observers who require micromanagement to take action. She applies a strengths-based perspective and maintains a consistent, strategic sense of the bigger admissions picture that helps the smaller steps along the journey make sense. Families frequently tell her they couldn't have done it without her guidance and support.

As she describes it, "I'm a cheerleader who leads with recognizing and utilizing strengths to optimize students' profiles."

Hanifa has shared her expertise through national Collegewise webinars on topics such as college majors, course selection, and careers in natural sciences. She also helps curate and write articles for The Digest, Collegewise's internal counselor professional development series. In 2025, Hanifa was invited by the OACAC Inclusion, Access, and Belonging Certificate series to co-present a training about supporting Muslim and Jewish families.

When not counseling students to greatness, Hanifa enjoys hanging with her own crew of four kids, forcing her friends to partake in online personality quizzes, breaking rules in the kitchen, and trying to find out if love really is blind on Netflix.

Education & Experience

Columbia University, M.A., M.Phil.

Swarthmore College, B.A.

National Career Development Association, Certified Career Services Provider

18 years of academic counseling and coaching experience

Extensive experience working with international students

Professional Organization Memberships

NACAC: National Association for College Admission Counseling

PNACAC: Pacific Northwest Association for College Admission Counseling