College & Career Counselling
Our program is guided by the Right Fit Philosophy, which recognizes each student as an individual with a unique set of needs that will require a correspondingly unique environment in order for their potential to be realized.
THS is extremely proud of its record of college acceptances. In the past four years, we have graduated 41 students who have been offered spots at 118 different universities and colleges across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Australia. As of the graduating class of 2021, we have had acceptances to institutions as diverse as University of California Berkeley (in Architecture) and Berklee College of Music. (So we go from Berkeley to Berklee.) Our students have been accepted at 20 of the top 100 US universities and 16 of the universities top-ranked globally, including University of Toronto, University of Sydney, University of Manchester and University of California, Los Angeles.
Part of the reason for our success lies in the strong college counselling program, but part of the success lies in helping students to find their own direction and, as part of that journey, to identify their own best education pathway.
It is our belief that an individual at the right school with the right motivation studying the right thing will have a much greater chance at becoming right in the world. Success for one student will not be success for another.
We recognize and work to develop three foundational components that lead to a successful college search and selection process for the individual:
- Community - a collection of people who come together in the spirit of discovery without fear of negative consequences of self-image or status, creating a healthy environment for interpersonal risk taking. Only under such conditions, can the real work of purpose discovery begin.
- Purpose - “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self” - William Damon. This element of the program is founded on the research by Stanford psychologist, William Damon, a world renowned researcher in the area of adolescent purpose and author of, A Path to Purpose. For a quick overview of why Purpose is important, visit this link here.
- Autonomy - the desire to be a causal agent of one’s own life and to act in harmony with one’s emerging sense of self. Or put more simply, the student is in the driver’s seat.
In practical terms, we take our students through four distinct stages.
- Grade 10 - Students participate in the Project Wayfinder course that seeks to unearth a sense of purpose in the student.
- Grade 11 - The 1st half of the year is spent leveraging their understanding of purpose to investigate potential post-graduation pathways that could realize that purpose in the world.
- The second ½ of grade 11 is spent developing a plan for pursuing the post high school pathways identified as vehicles for purpose. In most cases, this ends up taking the shape of the traditional college or university search process.
- Grade 12 - Each individual executes their plan, which in most cases, is the traditional application process required of colleges and universities around the world.
“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”
- John Wooden
THS College and Career Counseling Podcast
The THS College and Career Counseling podcast seeks to enliven conversations around purpose, 21st century careers, and university pathways. It is our aim to educate, agitate, inform, inspire, and otherwise empower our students to put their best foot forward in the pursuit of human flourishing. The most recent episode can be found below.
Begin your journey