A "Pain Point"  is not just something you describe to your podiatrist when discussing a bunion or the knot in your neck after a long day in the office.  Within business schools, sales and marketing organizations, and companies across the globe, this term has become de rigueur. A pain point is the challenge a potential customer faces that will impel him or her  to buy your product or subscribe to your service.  A successful organization needs to solve a "pain point" in order to vie for your business. Whether we like to think of our efforts in the Admissions Office in this way or not, identifying and solving for a family’s pain point is our responsibility every time a family walks onto campus.

About a month ago, a mother robin built her nest directly above the entrance to Proctor’s Admissions Office. For days on end, I lugged a ladder out of the closet and tried to snap the perfect picture of the nest full of chicks. Alas, I was never able to capture a good enough of picture to post. Late last week, when I checked the nest on my way into the office, it was empty. Mama robin had done her job. She fiercely protected and successfully raised four babies until they were able to fly out of the nest and into a life of their own.

Comprehending the complexity of the role the advisor plays within Proctor’s educational model can only be fully understood once a family has experienced the relationship first hand. We fully recognize this is not the cliche` pitch of "You have to see it to believe it!" prospective families want to hear, but we feel strongly the only way to fully appreciate the role of the Proctor advisor in your life is to live it yourself. In the meantime, here is an open letter to incoming families from a Proctor advisor. 

Each July, Blackbaud K-12 hosts a user conference in Boston that draws educators from around the country together to discuss technology, learning, and the tools we use to help our students unlock their worlds around them. Last year’s keynote speaker, Julie Lythcott-Hames, inspired THIS BLOG POST on how we need to help our parents raise adults, rather than children. Today’s keynote by Dr. Natalie Nixon of Figure 8 Design Thinking sparked an inspired conversation on the future of learning in our society.

On Friday, we will welcome 67 prospective families to campus for the second of our two Admissions Revisit Days. Last week, we asked our prospective families to ‘get real’ (read more in THIS BLOG) as they toured schools one last time before making their final decision. Today, we ask our visiting families to consider the role of an independent school in their child’s development.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the immensity of the decision our families make when they decide to invest in a Proctor education. Since Friday’s Admissions Revisit Day is the final step in the decision process for our accepted students and their families, we thought we would share three pieces of advice with our visitors. 

After reviewing Proctor’s largest pool of applicants we've ever seen (over 600 applications for roughly 100 spaces for the 2017-2018 school year), our Admissions Team delivered decisions to each applicant at 12:01 AM last night. For accepted students, the next month becomes a time of weighing options and finding the school that will best meet their needs and challenge them to grow into the young man or woman they desire to be.

Last week, marketing guru Seth Godin published a blog entitled “The Awareness Threshold”. He discussed the seven step process through which people move from being unaware of an idea to awareness, to categorizing the idea based on our life experience, to forming an opinion, to experiencing the idea, to forming of a new opinion, and eventually to sharing that new opinion with others. This intellectual journey occurs daily as we learn about world events, political happenings, and new technological discoveries.