Counselling was a happy accident for me. I started out at a school as an events coordinator. A few months in, the counsellor left, and I was asked to step in and work alongside the head counsellor. I was skeptical at first. I did not know then that one unexpected opportunity would completely change the direction of my career.

But I took the offer.

Lo and behold, in my very first year, I ended up writing a recommendation letter for a student who got into Harvard University and another who secured admission to Constructor University in Germany. The rest, as they say, is history.

What keeps me going is the knowledge that I get to play a small role in someone else’s big transformation. It makes the many, many, MANY late nights worth it. It makes the hours taken away from my own little one worth it too. Year after year, students walk into the office carrying dreams, doubts, and endless potential, and somehow, every batch reaffirms why I chose this path.

Over the years, working as a profile-building counsellor has taught me many things. Students constantly ask me for the “hack.” They want to know the formula, the secret, the guaranteed strategy.

But the answer is surprisingly simple: you get what you give.

Do good work, and the world often finds a way to return that goodness to you. I have seen students with average grades receive full funding because they were kind, driven, authentic, and deeply respected by the people around them. And I have seen students who had perfect grades, impressive activities, and polished résumés struggle because they lacked humility, empathy, or what we call tameez. 

At the end of the day, admissions are not just about numbers. Sometimes, it really comes down to how many people are genuinely rooting for you. (And my name will always be on that list).

Then there are the students who seemed to have everything — the grades, the extracurriculars, the ambition — yet still did not end up where they had always dreamed of going. Those are the cases that stay with us. Those are the moments we revisit, the mistakes we learn from, the experiences that make us better counsellors for the next child who walks through the door. 

And yet, through all of it, I have learned to believe deeply that there is a force greater than our plans — the Best of Planners. And I trust that, in the end, everything will be okay: those who are destined for greatness will find it — or it will find them.

What makes this journey truly rewarding is that it never really ends at graduation. The relationships we build with students outlast acceptance letters, school years, and university decisions. Years later, they still come back with updates, questions, career news, wedding invitations, and sometimes just a simple message to say thank you.

And honestly, that is the real reward.

I often tell people that writing is my do-or-die. I cannot live without it – in a sticky spiritual sense, and now literally as well. It has become my source of income and sustenance, allowing me to become a financially independent woman in 2022 at the mere age of nineteen.

But beyond the credit I give to what writing has done for my life, I repeatedly get asked the same question: but why? Why do you write?

Some days, I go on a tangent about how writing is my means of introspection. When I write, the sky transforms into Daedalus and Icarus’ playground, and I’m left pondering – is it better to fly, or to take the leap and risk it all? When I write, I begin to notice the cracks in the road beneath me, and I think about how some cracks run a little deeper than others – how between India and Pakistan, too, lies just such a crack. When I write, the daffodils begin appearing like trumpets, and the blades of grass like miniature hands reaching up, asking for something I can’t quite name.

Some days, depending on who I’m speaking with, I take the LinkedIn route – explaining how writing has allowed me to move through marketing, HR, and corporate communication. How no field, really, can go without it.

And on other days, I speak of how writing makes me feel like a child again. How it pumps that youthful fervor, that desire, that adrenaline through my veins – making me want to write more and more and more, until I am physically out of words, until my tongue is parched and my fingers, crumpled.

But underneath all of these answers lives the same truth.

As students and professionals, we’ve been made to believe that we must be specialists. A physicist must have every law memorized, must understand quantum theory, must be able to calculate the center of mass – even if they don’t feel at the center of anything at all. Even if they’ve never stopped to wonder what actually lies beneath that center, what the earth holds in its core that no equation can reach. They must not ask, because it is beyond empirics. A biologist must know where every vein and artery lies, how the synapse fires, how a cell divides and conquers. But they must never ask what it takes for a mother to give a part of herself away to another, how she metamorphoses to form another. 

We claim to be specialists, that we know everything within our fields. But we rarely stop to notice how narrow those fields really are – how we operate within institutions without questioning them. What would happen if we dismantled the systems we’ve inherited? What would a physicist do if the constants weren’t constant? What would the doctor feel if they were the patient, not the practitioner? 

Specialization and expertise, in our day and era, is not about knowing too much about a field. It’s about digging so deep into such a small hole that that’s all you see.

This is why I write.

Writing refuses to let you stay in your hole. To write well, you must be willing to be many things at once. You must think like a scientist – curious, rigorous, unafraid of being wrong. You must see like an artist – noticing what others walk past, finding the trumpet in the daffodil. You must build like an architect or an engineer – with structure, intention, every word load-bearing. And you must feel like a human being – which is to say, you must be willing to be undone by things, and then package and put yourself back together on the page.

In the simplest words, to me, writing has never been a discipline. It is the refusal of singularity.

And so when I sit across from a student – nervous, rehearsed, already performing the version of themselves they think I want to see – and I tell them “there is a writer in you”, I am not talking about grammar or structure or college essays. What I’m saying is that I see you. I see the physicist who wonders what lies beneath the equation, and the center. I see the biologist who feels the affect even when positivist science rejects it – who questions why it’s butterflies in your stomach when we’re in glee and mice when we’re hungry. I see the child who wanted to be a flight attendant, the teenager who lost a night too deep into Greek mythology, the person who has loved many things and been made to feel that this is a flaw. Most importantly, I see the student who has never thought of themselves as a writer in the first place – who believes writing belongs to someone else, someone more certain, someone with a tidier story, and a conclusion.

But writing has always belonged to the uncertain. To the philosophers, activists, homemakers, historians, economists, the people with too many questions and not enough boxes to put them in. To the ones who feel things in their bodies before they can even name them. To the ones who are, in other words, fully human.

As a writer, let me tell you – this is not a flaw. It is the full shape of a person. And that is exactly where we begin our Common App process – and why we must all pursue writing as discovery: of a past you bear, a present you embody, and a future you hope for.

شہ بے خودی نے عطا کیا مجھے اب لباس برہنگی

نہ خرد کی بخیہ گری رہی نہ جنوں کی پردہ دری رہی

the kingdom of ecstacy has granted me a robe of nakedness
my intellect no longer weaves a covering, my fervor no longer tears it off

If I had to term the overall nature of writing demanded by the Common App under one genre, I would term it under Creative Non-Fiction; specifically Auto/Memoir.

“A memoir is a non-fiction, first-person narrative focusing on specific, personal experiences, memories, or a particular period in the author’s life, often emphasizing emotional truth over a strict chronological timeline.”

The CommonApp asks you about the nature of your academic interests and where they stem from just as intensely as it asks of how and why you want to pursue them. The Common-App asks about conflict, friendship, loss, growth, joy, hardship and your favourite kind of tiramisu; all in the breadth of five hundred words. 

The college essay then, is a memoir written by someone who is still becoming the person they are trying to describe.

It is very important that you get to know this person.

Memoir, properly understood, is not concerned with extraordinary lives. It is concerned with the act of keenly observing your very ordinary life. There are certain moments where the mind lingers. It moves on. It returns. It rearranges. And misremembers. These moments are soft at the edges, sharp at the center. 

Good writing begins not at the point where you notice these moments, but at the point where you notice your noticing.

You are not interesting because something impressive happened to you. You are interesting because of the angle with which you observe it, and the nuance with which you write about it.

A writing practice then, despite its reputation, is not primarily about writing. It is about perception. A notebook accumulating fragments of weather updates, road closures, song lyrics, cricketing stats, phases of the moon. A journal under your pillow. A note in your phone. Documenting the joy of being unable to see out the back windshield because the car is filled with balloons, or the inability to fall asleep in your best friend’s room because her AC has a nest of birds inside it; who chirp ferociously come dawn. Harboring an overheard sentence that does not belong to you but insists on staying by your side. Sprinting across the futsal court with droplets of rain beginning to stain your uniform. Feelings you will never experience for the first time again… write them down. 

Discipline here lies not in producing pages upon pages of observations, but in refining the voice of your attunement. Why was this moment memorable for you? What did it make you feel? How does it feel when you feel?

It helps, at this stage, to develop an affection for your own peculiarities. The interests that refuse to make sense. The thoughts that arrive at inconvenient times. The version of you that does not perform well in introductions. The ‘bas yeh mera shouq hai!’, and nothing more.  

Originality is often mistaken for novelty in experience. It is, more often, novelty in perception.

So hone your interests; cultivate your weird, your goofy, your sensitive, your sentimental, your bizarre, your divine— live outside the margins; but write within the lines. 

The most compelling essays do not conclude so much as they continue; they allow for uncertainty and they welcome growth. They suggest a mind in motion; one that is willing to revise, reinvent, and renew itself. 

You are not presenting colleges with a completed self, a final version of your being, at the age of 18. You are merely offering them a record of your attention and a pattern of your thought.

A college essay then, with all your accolades and achievements, must also reflect your most authentic self: a person you are only just getting to know.

This is your Making. And you are its Maker.

I was introduced to college counselling in A2. By this point I had upgraded schools, and my new school was full of incredibly smart, incredibly ambitious girls. It felt like everyone was applying to the Ivy Leagues. As a self-assured smart girl myself, I wondered, “Is this actually possible?”

I took the SAT thrice. It was common practice. Looking back, I don’t know that I would’ve wasted my Baba’s money like that, even though he didn’t mind. But I exonerated myself because I had learnt, in my attempts to crack the SAT, a simple but grueling learn-anything algorithm: try, fail, troubleshoot, iterate. I vowed to teach kids what I had learned, save their parents some dollars. Before decisions were in on my gap year, I became a project lead and SAT tutor at Dream3. 

Right now, I am a writing specialist. More on that in a bit. 

I like to read, I like to write, both on account of Mama, and I like science. These are facts of my heart’s inner state that I have learned to wear on my sleeve. Over my years at Dream3, I have been encouraged to, by virtue of being involved in educating kids in wearing their own hearts on their sleeves. 

I liked tutoring the SAT and I liked conceiving of and overseeing both insightful and impactful student projects, and best of all, I liked collaborating with the kids themselves. My interests were manifest at this stage as well, but I naturally grew interested in the final product. The application, and more importantly, the essays. 

In the beginning, we had issues with brevity. Often my students and I would dive deep into their intellectual interests and personal growth journeys. And I mean deep. I remember one of the first supplements I worked on: four weeks to produce a piece about geometry, 750 words for a 250-word prompt. It was an essay about geometry, but it was also an essay about beauty, an essay about appreciating many ways of seeing the world. The final product, hacked away at with surgical liberty, was 249 words. I pulled my hair out in chunks. 

Oh, another one. About grief, evolution, and neuroplasticity. 900 words. The longer essay got him into Harvard, but the kid went to Yale, where the essay went in a 250-word version.  

Now, I don’t have that problem so much. I have learned precision. My work has been better for it, although it was perfected in other parts of my life first. 

It’s important to note that Dream3 exists in my life alongside various other preoccupations. I’m a fourth-year medical student. At what many consider the best medical school in the country, the expectation is to devote myself to singularity. And while I have not given in entirely, I have learned its crafts. 

Medicine has given me many things. Discipline, people skills, intellectual depth, to name the relevant ones. Precision in language I pursued separately, too, in writing and through public speaking. I speak on my university team, and I have a lot of fun winning debates by taking them to unexpected places. It helps with medicine; I find it relatively easier to help my patients understand what’s up. 

To Dream3 I bring an almost diagnostic approach. I like to meet kids where they’re at, and I like getting them to challenge themselves. In writing, this manifests as long-term relationships built over many different arcs of narrative development, either through a writing curriculum, summer camp applications, common-app intensives, or supplement-writing intensives, usually a mix of all of them, usually in that order. 

It also shows up in how I teach how to write. We read together, analyse, try. Troubleshoot, iterate. Some think AI has made this skillset obsolete, to which my only answer is, it hasn’t yet. Every year admissions trend towards plain, earnest writing, framed in the student’s own understanding of the world. And that’s just part of the win; students are happy with the process. They leave knowing themselves better. 

I know I did. Briefly I was counselled at Dream3 as well, and I walked away from it happy, hopeful about my options.

It all began with a first phone call with Ayesha Hasan.

I was still in the throes of Pakistan’s fragmented and templated consulting system, working over-time at a job that required a barrage of fake activities to be drafted from scratch on the daily. Students came in hordes, with long resumes and a burning will to make it to the top. I’ll admit it was a jarring observation – watching hundreds on a conveyor belt being prescribed the same rituals, routines and sub-par experiences. Before that call, I had witnessed students cry over rejection letters, parents drain life-savings over emotionally vacant narratives. It stirred an unease in me. Why were genuinely good students being asked to perform their irrelevance?

In that phone call, Ayesha Hasan didn’t pitch me, nor was that her intention. She explained to me her vision for the Dream 3 Difference; about the students she had worked with and how. She had noticed the same trends and observed the currents of a broken education system that we both badly wanted to fix. 

A long-standing, yet current critique of Pakistan’s counseling domain is that it relies too heavily on prescriptive marketing and unethical cheat-codes. Most firms treat students like assembly lines; intake, assessment, false narratives and fake accomplishments. 

But what’s the problem if it’s getting the job done? 

We say it’s not. 

Instead, it’s generating activities that are interchangeable, indistinctive and banal. Any student could produce the same list and universities would learn nothing unique about them. Ultimately, there is nothing setting them apart from a list of other prescriptive profiles. 

Ayesha H. asked what I wanted, should I become a member of the ‘Dream Team’; I remember telling her: “I don’t want to build profiles, I want to build people.” It was in this earnest exchange of Pakistan’s underdeveloped learning realities that we struck an allegiance; to continue building capacities in students who would find it otherwise impossible in the current educational landscape. 

That phone call was the beginning of a now 5-year journey that has culminated Dream 3’s vision into practice. 

The vision is simple; find something that the student loves and provide them with the support they need to do that in the real world, vis-à-vis real people. Everything else simply follows; the grades make sense, the essays write themselves and the interviews feel like conversations. To put it short, Dream 3 was never selling a formula, it was selling integrity. 

We empower our students by reminding them that the most profound work is a consequence of life’s mundane experiences. Sometimes, what sparks wonder in our everyday interactions, is really what sets us apart; not a coveted National placement, or leadership title. We direct our students to ask: what would you do if no else was watching? The answer is rarely ever grand. It is almost always something small – a moment of quiet kindness, showing up consistently, or even a burst of laughter that sparks a novel idea. 

I suppose, 5 years after that phone call, I can say I am proud of being part of a system that offers care in education. It’s a system that boasts results, not academically but through harnessing the experience of life itself. We believe that the truth is far more compelling than a made-up story ever could be. 

To conclude, for anyone reaching who has high aims, remember: universities do not want your CV, they want your evidence. Genuine depth, felt experiences, and sustained action always outperform a meaningless, packed resume. So, do less, feel more and stay longer; that’s the only strategy that can’t be copied.

Because when you sit down to write your story, you will not need to contrive it. You will only have to reach back and remember what you did. And that’s the difference between a profile and a life.

In 2016, I first interacted with the Pakistani industry of educational consultancy while applying for my undergraduate studies to the U.S. as an A-level student from a private school in Lahore. More resourced than others, my school was able to provide us with the necessary fundamental guidance and counselor to assist us with our admission journeys. At the time, I would scoff at the growing popularity private counselors were earning in this arena: the opinion was beginning to form that this was absolutely necessary expenditure if you were to have a fighting chance at the highly competitive undergraduate admissions and scholarships the greatest empire in modern history dispatched every year.

We had no idea that a new bubble was about to burst: we were around two dozen private school kids, at one counselling company known to be the best. Today, the company I help run is a “boutique” college counselling firm, hosting a maximum batch of 70 students per year. Our prices are on the higher-end because of the personalized nature of the service we have curated over the past several years, so our audience ought to arguably be limited. Yet, each year, we are pained to refuse many prospective clients to limit our batch to 70 high-performing students. We serve this cohort by employing a large number of highly qualified profile building and writing counselors from across the country; our student-to-counselor ratio never exceeds 10:1.

At Dream 3, we have evolved college counselling into a holistic ecosystem of tailored mentorship. How do we deliver on this promise? First, we co-develop a personalized roadmap of intellectual and extracurricular development with the student, and we revise it weekly based on their evolving findings, interests and performance metrics. This roadmap is not a static document; it lives and breathes with the student, the counselors and all involved stakeholders. Second, across many months, we conduct a writing curriculum coupled with Oxford-style writing tutorials where students learn to construct arguments, revise drafts rigorously, and find both their authentic voices and the unique, grounded perspectives that inform them. Beyond these traditional services, we have now begun integrating our young Pakistani students into robust networks of subject mentors, research specialists, field experts, industry leaders and community stakeholders. Our argument is simple: a prospective top-school applicant must perform as one in the now. How would mentorship from Oxford or an Ivy League program inform the student’s schedule, goals and aspirations today? Once we figure that out with our students, we begin working that into our shared realities. This is how we are utilizing the opportunity provided by the United States college admissions industry to transform the effort and attention our students receive in their final years of secondary schooling.

Importantly, our vision extends beyond our own clientele. The goal is never merely to maximize outcomes for 70 students. Rather, we believe in building models that can one day benefit the entire landscape of Pakistani education (as we have already made some hopeful strides in this department). By extensively documenting our curricula, training external counselors, and sharing best practices with schools, we hope to raise the standard of college counselling nationwide. A rising tide lifts all boats. Our success will not be measured solely by the acceptances our students earn, but by how many other institutions adopt and adapt our methodologies. This is the transformation we are beginning to conceptualize: to guide this industry away from its origin as merely a private shortcut into a destiny where it can accomplish its status as a reformatory tool for Pakistani private education, perhaps even a public good in itself.