Meet Taylor!

Taylor Florio, College Counselor

Some students feel like the college admissions process just wasn’t designed for them. Maybe their grades don’t tell the whole story. Maybe they’re overwhelmed, easily distracted, or just haven’t found the thing that makes them light up yet. Taylor loves working with those kids.

Families who work with Taylor consistently reach for the same word: encouraging. She makes her students actually believe in the path ahead—because Taylor has thought it through, laid it out, and refused in the kindest way possible to let them off the hook. Students come to sessions, get to work, and leave feeling better about the journey than when they started. When a student needs a direct conversation instead of a reassurance to get across the finish line, she has another gear she calls “tough love Taylor”—and she doesn’t apologize for it.

Her students have been admitted to dozens of colleges across the country, including Tufts, Villanova, Brandeis, Bucknell, University of Rochester, Colorado School of Mines, McGill, University of Toronto, Creighton (with a guaranteed dental school acceptance), Penn State, Ohio State, University of Maryland, Tulane, and UNC–Chapel Hill.

Taylor’s perspective on this process is unusually three-dimensional. She has sat inside an admissions office as a regional recruiter at the University of Alabama, learning what it looks like when a file lands on a reader’s desk. She has worked in enrollment management at Honeywell, understanding the business logic behind how colleges actually fill their classes. And she has spent years as a college counselor, guiding students through the same process she once observed from the other side. Very few counselors hold all three of those vantage points at once.

In 2018, Taylor founded CROWN, a Charlotte-area regional network for college admissions professionals. She recently partnered with CROWN’s current president to launch a monthly networking meetup between admissions officers and local independent college counselors—five successful sessions in. She also serves on the advisory board of an independent school in North Carolina.

Away from work, Taylor has potty-trained her cat to use the toilet—a fact she shares with complete conviction. She boxes. She thrifts. And she is constitutionally incapable of walking past a good second-hand find.

Education

Florida Gulf Coast University, B.A. 

Experience

Senior educational consultant, independent college planning firm 

Regional Recruiter, The University of Alabama 

University Relations Campus Lead, Honeywell 

Assistant Director, Queens University of Charlotte 

Current Chair of the Independent Educational Consultant Special Interest Group with SACAC

Professional Organization Memberships

SACAC: Southern Association for College Admission Counseling

NACAC: National Association for College Admission Counseling