An experienced professional,
providing personalized guidance

Mrs. Isler far exceeded my expectations in providing support during our son's college search and application process. Her true gift is in pushing her students to write their own quality essays, guiding them to dig deep and show their true selves on paper. This is not an easy process and entails many more drafts than I would have expected, but the results are high quality and genuine. Susan's comments and questions to our son on his writing were insightful, probing, and encouraging. She is able to draw out real and fully formed thoughts and connections between experiences and lessons learned resulting in exceptional essays. While the real work is accomplished through a partnership between Susan and the student, I also found her to be an enormous resource to the parents as well. I appreciated her straight talk and was impressed that she was right on with practically everything she told us from beginning to end (even when they were things I did not want to hear).  She gets the best out of her students and is a supportive guiding hand for the whole family.

Hannah Jennings

Susan’s widely recognised competence in all phases of higher education counseling has stood the test of time with diverse student applications, colleges public and private nationwide, aspirational parents from all backgrounds and the appraisals of peers. Not only does she enjoy the professional respect and ease of access to admission offices but also Susan has the well established skill of identifying the best college fit for each individual. In role, she is a guide, motivator and sounding board all rolled into one. Word of mouth is the only enduring measure of success in the college counseling profession and Susan’s universal stature of excellence is testimony to her career of making it happen in a first class manner for all the constituencies in the complex college placement equation.

Karl van Horn

London, England 

Susan Isler’s expertise and guidance though the college search, visit, application and analysis was invaluable to my daughter, my husband and me. Through research, very strategic listening and direct input Susan helped our daughter explore her wants and helped her discover her true needs. We ended up in a totally different place than where we started. Susan’s process identified so many schools we never would have found on our own and helped my daughter feel very comfortable and confident in her choices. My daughter was accepted to her firstchoice school early decision. The piece of mind we all have about our daughter’s decision is priceless! Cannot recommend Susan strongly enough!

Heidi Deane

Susan Isler has been a huge and important part of our son’s college search.  She is knowledgeable, thoughtful, honest,  and calm in the face of the intense college process.  But most of all – she got to know our son.   She is all about knowing the student and helping navigate the process to find the right fit.

Diane Singer

Having Susan Isler as our son’s college counselor took all the angst out of the process and actually made it enjoyable. Her calm demeanor, her enormous experience, her common sense approach and quiet confidence helped enormously. She really took the time to know our son, his passions and academic goals, his likes and dislikes, the teaching style he works best with, his relationships with his peers.  It is mostly due to Susan’s experience and innate ability to work with college bound high school students that our son was accepted to the majority of schools he applied to, all with significant merit-aid scholarships. Thanks to Susan, we are looking forward to doing this again in a few years.

Bela Anand-Apte

Susan helped guide our daughters through the college admissions and selection process, first, by getting to know them: their strengths, passions, and goals. She listened to our priorities and helped our girls approach the process and their final choice with a level head, keeping in mind both what is possible and what is reasonable. Susan brings her wealth of experience, knowledge, and genuine desire to work in the student’s best interest to her work. 

Christine McCandless

Susan provided all of the tools we needed to educate ourselves on the process and began to work with our daughter early in her high school years.  Susan worked carefully with our daughter to identify educational goals as well as cultural and campus priorities so that she could refine her own thinking about schools that were likely to be a good match in the long run.  She set clear schedules which allowed our daughter to understand how to prepare to meet important deadlines for submission of materials but provided support throughout the period. Susan’s ability to demystify the process allowed us (as parents) to remain supportive cheerleaders rather than nagging nuisances and in the end, our goals were all met respectively! 

Mary K Gray