Meet Tien!

Tien has helped place students at well over a hundred colleges during her 17-year career as a college counselor, including all the UC and Cal State schools, Stanford, USC, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Columbia, Georgetown, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Swarthmore, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Harvey Mudd, Boston College, Emory, UT Austin, Tulane, UNC – Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, and Scripps. 

Tien has spent her entire career counseling students in the San Francisco Bay Area, including stints at Fremont Union High School in Cupertino and Archbishop Mitty HS in San Jose as a college counselor and department chair. 

We ask our most experienced counselors to participate during our hiring process at Collegewise (not unlike the way Caltech invites professors to weigh in for admissions decisions). The feedback from Tien’s first interview with a Collegewise counselor could best be described as succinct and direct—hire her immediately! Tien is the quintessential Collegewise counselor—deeply experienced with every element of the process, loves working with teenagers (and the feeling is mutual), always eager to learn more, and refuses to accept complacency in her knowledge or her work. 

A graduate of San Jose State University, where she earned both a BA and a PPS credential, Tien also has a certificate in college admissions and career planning from UC Santa Cruz. When she’s not guiding students to college, Tien is also a mom, a fitness enthusiast, and the self-proclaimed number-one fan of In-N-Out Burger.