Your student can run their own semester.
PACES: College Edition — an 8-week group intensive teaching college students the five skills colleges assume they already have.
Eight Sundays · September 13 to November 1 · 3:00–4:15 pm ET · 8 students
The Thing Nobody Tells Families
Here is the structural fact that catches almost every family by surprise in the first semester:
In high school, the system was built to notice. A teacher saw the missing assignment. A counselor pulled the student aside. An IEP or 504 followed them from class to class without anyone having to ask.
In college, every single support service is student-initiated by design. Tutoring, office hours, academic coaching, disability accommodations — all of them exist, all of them are staffed, though often understaffed, and all of them wait to be contacted. The student has to notice they need help, decide it’s warranted, be willing to ask, and then walk in and start the conversation. There’s no deadline. Nobody prompts them. And if they stop going, chances are good no one follows up to check in on them.
Colleges say this out loud. I’ve heard it from many different institutions in this last month alone. What almost none of them do is teach the skills the whole system rests on.
That’s not a motivation problem. It’s a skills problem, and skills can be taught.
What is PACES: College Edition?
PACES builds the five critical skills colleges assume your student already has and can execute entirely on their own.
P — Planning. Building a week that survives contact with a real semester, and rebuilding it when it breaks.
A — Autonomy. Starting the thing without an external cue, which is often the hardest part for many students.
C — Communication. Emailing the professor. Showing up for office hours. Asking the question. Saying the sentence out loud.
E — Execution. Getting from intention to the first ugly step, carrying through all the steps in between, and then to done.
S — Self-Advocacy. Knowing and articulating specifically what you need, and getting it before it’s an emergency.
Eight weeks, live, in a group of no more than eight students. We practice the actual moves, not the theory of the moves. Your student leaves with scripts they’ve said out loud, systems they’ve stress-tested, and a plan for the week they inevitably fall behind.
Why eight weeks. This isn’t an arbitrary number. Eight weekly coaching sessions is the dose shown in the published research to produce significant gains across all ten subscales of the LASSI, a validated measure of college learning strategies.¹ It also covers your student through the first collapse point — weeks six through ten, when midterms land and the systems they built in August stop working.
What’s Included
Eight live group sessions. Sundays, 3:00–4:15 pm ET, September 13 through November 1. Capped at eight students so everyone can talk, no one is left out, and everyone learns from each other.
Async coaching support between sessions. Your student can reach me during the week, with a 24-hour response window. This matters more than it sounds: when something happens on a Tuesday night, they don’t have to wait for Sunday afternoon.
Run Your Own Semester — the PACES Companion Workbook. Eight weeks of exercises I personally built for this program. Every exercise carries a “why this works” box naming the actual mechanism, and a note on where the science is solid versus where it’s still thin. Your student gets the reasoning, not just the instruction.
LASSI pre/post measurement. We assess at the start and at the end using a validated instrument. The LASSI is the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory, used by college and university academic support centers across the country to measure the strategies students actually use — time management, concentration, test-taking, and whether they seek help when they need it. You’re not buying a feeling that it went well. You get a before-and-after on ten specific learning strategies.
Monthly parent updates. A real email from me each month with a practical one-pager. Not a grade report, and not a surveillance tool: your student is doing the work and getting the support during our sessions. This gives you context on what we’re working on and how to support them from where you are.
Finals Strategy Session, December 13. Included for every group family. We come back together before finals and build a tailored plan to get through the exams.
Who PACES is for
Students who are bright and struggling, and who are willing to show up, do the work, and get the results their efforts deserve.
Skills, not labels. PACES is open to any student, with or without a diagnosis. There’s no documentation requirement and no evaluation to submit. Intake asks about motivation and what’s hard right now, and it gives you space to share anything else you think would help me — a diagnosis, an evaluation, a 504 or IEP history, or just your own read on your student. That part is entirely voluntary, and it never affects whether your student gets a seat. I coach skills, not labels, and I’m not interested in putting barriers in front of a student who wants help.
That said, this works best for a student who is willing. I can teach a reluctant student a great deal, but I can’t want it for them, and I can’t guarantee results. If you’re not sure where your student sits on that, I welcome that conversation before you enroll rather than after.
What We Don’t Do
I’d rather you know this now than be disappointed in October.
No recordings. Students talk about hard things in this room. It’s a small group and it only works if it’s private.
No make-up sessions, and no substitute 1x1s for a missed group session. The cohort moves together. If your student misses one, they get discretionary summary notes and jump right back in the following week as planned.
No promises about grades. I will not tell you this program produces a GPA. I don’t know your student’s professors, course load, or roommate situation, and the effort rests entirely with them. What I can promise is skills and process, measured — the LASSI numbers show whether the learning strategies moved. I also promise I will do my best to support your student and to find the strategies that work for them.
Investment
$1,995 for the semester.
Payment plans are available: a $495 deposit to secure your student’s seat, then two payments of $750. The total is the same either way, so choose whichever timing works for your family. You’re also welcome to pay in full at registration.
For context: one failed semester at a private university can cost $30,000 or more in tuition and fees, before you count the lost time and the hit to your student’s confidence in themselves.
Enroll now
What if a group isn’t the right fit?
The 1×1 Semester Partnership is individual coaching for the full semester, weekly, roughly thirteen to fourteen sessions from September through finals. It includes async support, parent check-ins at the start and midpoint with your student’s knowledge, and the same LASSI pre/post measurement.
I have a cap of five 1x1 students per semester, because of the individualized attention I provide in my 1x1 engagements.
The two programs are separate on purpose. The group provides curriculum, peer learning, and belonging. The Partnership provides individualized attention and depth. A family who wants both can enroll in both programs. Reach out and let’s talk about what you think works best for your family.
About Jennifer
I’m a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) through the International Coaching Federation, with deep training in ADHD and executive function, including specialized work coaching children as young as five.
My clients are high-performing college students and adults who know exactly what they should be doing and can’t seem to make it happen. That distance between knowing and doing is the execution gap, and closing it is the whole of my work.
Before coaching full time, I spent 24 years as a federal government analyst, where I was my organization’s only credentialed ADHD coach and built its first burnout coaching group.
I know this work from the inside. I have ADHD myself, and I’ve spent my career learning to succeed in a demanding job with the brain I actually have rather than the one the systems were designed for.
I also just sent my first child off to a top-40 research university, which is exactly why I built this program now, for these students. Selective admissions don’t protect anyone from the very real gap in these skills. Coaching does, and I’ve watched it make the difference for students throughout college and well into adulthood.
I’m not a cookie-cutter coach. I don’t use cookie-cutter approaches. Everything I do is built around the specific person in front of me.
FAQ
Q: Does my student need a diagnosis?
A: No. Nothing is required to enroll — no diagnosis, no documentation, no evaluation. The intake does invite you to share whatever you’d like me to know, and I’ll say plainly why: the more I understand about how your student’s brain works going in, the faster I can be useful to them. But it’s your call entirely, and it changes nothing about their seat. I coach skills, not labels.
Q: What if my student doesn’t want to do this?
A: Talk to me before you sign them up. A somewhat-willing student can do well in this program. A genuinely unwilling one is a different conversation, and I’d rather have it before you pay than after.
Q: Is this tutoring?
A: No. Tutoring teaches the content of a course. PACES teaches how to run a semester — planning, starting, asking, recovering. Those are different skills, and the second one is why capable students fail courses they can substantively understand.
Q: What if we’re in a different time zone?
A: Sessions are 3:00 pm Eastern on Sundays, designed specifically to be workable across the continental US. If you’re outside that, email me and we’ll talk about whether it’s realistic.
Q: What happens after the eight weeks?
A: The Finals Strategy Session in December is included. I also offer a Through-Finals Extension for families who want continued support into November and December, and a Spring Bridge program for alumni. Neither is required, and I don’t push them. I’m always happy to talk through what your student specifically needs.
Q: Can we start after September 13?
A: No. Once the first session happens on September 13, enrollment closes. The cohort forms in week one and stays together.
Q: What’s the refund policy?
A: No refunds once the program begins, and if you're on a payment plan, the remaining payments are still due. I cap PACES at 8 students: when your student takes a seat, I turn other families away—and once we start, that seat can't be refilled, because the cohort forms in week one and moves together. If you're unsure whether the timing is right, talk to me before you enroll — I'd rather help you decide than take a payment you regret.