Counsellor​/Senior Counsellor

Position: Counsellor / Senior Counsellor
Undergraduate Admissions Counsellor (US Admissions Only)

Remote (India-based) | Fractional / Part-time / Full-time
Beacon House

About Beacon House

Beacon House is a high-judgment undergraduate admissions advisory working with a small number of families targeting the most selective universities in the United States.
We are not a volume counseling firm. We don't sell templates, 'profiles,' or execution-only services. Our work is upstream: helping students make defensible academic, extracurricular, and narrative decisions before applications are written.
We work deeply, selectively, and with real ownership of outcomes. We value intellectual honesty over comfort, clarity over performance, and judgment over checklists.
We are onboarding a small number of US-educated Admissions Counsellors who can operate with independence, precision, and restraint.

The Role
As a US Admissions Counsellor at Beacon House, you will lead a small, capped caseload of students (typically 5–8) through the full arc of US undergraduate admissions.
This is a fractional role with predictable engagement across the admissions cycle. It is designed to coexist with other serious professional commitments, but it is not a side gig, an essay-editing service, or a pay-per-draft arrangement.
You are expected to think like an owner. That means taking responsibility for irreversible decisions and making calls with clarity, not outsourcing decisions to 'options,' rubrics, or consensus.
This is not an editing or draft-review role.

What You'll Do

• Lead high-quality discovery conversations to understand a student's intellectual interests, constraints, motivations, and risk posture

• Diagnose what is true about the student, what is merely aspirational, and what cannot be made true in time

• Take ownership of key 'irreversible calls,' including school strategy, risk trade-offs, narrative focus, and activity prioritization

• Set academic and extracurricular positioning grounded in reality, not hope

• Help students identify authentic narratives rooted in lived experience, not manufactured stories

• Convert decisions into restrained, coherent essays and supplements, with strong control over subtext, omission, and tone

• Ensure coherence across academics, activities, essays, recommendations, and school list strategy

• Prepare students for interviews with realism and confidence (not rehearsed scripts)

• Communicate directly with families when trade-offs are uncomfortable, and hold the line on what is defensible

• Collaborate with internal reviewers on high-stakes, ambiguous, or high-risk cases where judgment needs escalation

What This Role Requires
This role is only for candidates who meet the following criteria.

• Undergraduate and/or graduate education from a highly selective US university, or equivalent long-term immersion in the US higher education ecosystem

• First-hand familiarity with US undergraduate admissions expectations at the Top 30–50 level (and how those expectations differ across institution types)

• Prior experience mentoring, advising, or directly supporting students through US undergraduate applications in a way that involved real decision ownership
Experience as a former admissions reader, senior counselor, or long-term mentor is a strong plus.
This role is not suited for candidates whose primary experience is Indian undergraduate admissions, exam-driven counseling, or execution-only services. If your approach relies on checklists, archetypal 'successful profiles,' or precedent-heavy comparisons, this work will feel uncomfortable.

You'll Thrive Here If You Are
Judgment-oriented
You are comfortable taking a position when the answer is not obvious. You understand trade-offs, can explain your reasoning, and do not hide behind menus of options.
Direct and calm under pressure
You communicate with precision, especially when conversations are tense. You treat student work seriously, respond reliably, and do not create drama.
Structured, not formulaic
You can manage complexity without turning the process into a factory. You value clarity over checklists and can run a clean, disciplined process without reducing students to templates.
Authoritative in narrative and…