Meet Joelle!

Joelle Santiago, College Counselor

Joelle began her work in education during the COVID pandemic when she created an emergency volunteer tutoring system, pairing recent Columbia graduates with families looking for support with the transition to online learning. What began as a response to students in need quickly became a career calling, and Joelle has since held various posts focused on helping students get where they are trying to go. She’s counseled students through the admissions process, helped them find and share their best stories in college essays, and successfully tutored students to raise their scores on the SAT, ACT, and various AP exams. 

Joelle’s counseling approach could best be described as focused, healthy, and fun. She prioritizes her students’ well-being, an important safeguard given the anxiety that’s become all-too-prevalent for teens during college planning. She helps her students set appropriate goals and identify the steps to achieve them. And she engages her students as an approachable, encouraging mentor, one with whom students actually look forward to meeting. As Joelle puts it with her representative combination of truth and humor, “My superpower is making my students laugh—it’s how I trick them into getting their work done.” 

A graduate of Barnard College of Columbia University where she now volunteers as an application consultant for the Fulbright program, Joelle is also an adjunct faculty member at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. These experiences have given Joelle insights into what we often refer to as “the other side of the desk”—the admissions side, where applications are read, applicants are evaluated and discussed, and admissions decisions are reached. That understanding of not just what a student must do to become a competitive applicant, but also how their application will be received and evaluated, frequently subjectively, by the admissions readers is how Joelle presents her students with a unique competitive advantage.  

Never one to rest idle physically or mentally, when Joelle is not bouldering to scale great heights or running to cover great distances, you’ll find her immersed in the study of multiple languages with dreams of becoming a fully fledged polyglot. 
 

Education & Experience

Barnard College of Columbia University, B.A.
Fulbright Scholar
Tutor, project manager, editor, and admissions coach, multiple college planning firms (2 years)
Adjunct faculty, Director of Pre-College Program, NYU Tisch School of the Arts (2 years)