Elite Student Coach’s Dan Ulin On The 5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School
Experiment with new activities and ideas. There’s nothing wrong with classical piano, violin, tennis, soccer, and debate, but hundreds of thousands of kids are engaged in these activities. Colleges see these on the “Activities” section of the Common App every fall. If your child is going to go all-in on one or more of these “Holy Five” activities, they might, for example, add dimension to what they’re doing by starting a wheelchair tennis program or creating hip-hop interpretations of classical piano pieces. The earlier your child learns that the world is a giant idea lab and that outstanding people stand out, the better.
School is really not easy these days. Many students have been out of school for a long time because of the pandemic, and the continued disruptions and anxieties are still breaking the flow of normal learning. What can parents do to help their children thrive and excel in school, particularly during these challenging and anxiety-provoking times?
To address this, we started a new series called ‘5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School.” In this interview series, we are talking to teachers, principals, education experts, and successful parents to learn from their insights and experience.
As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure to interview Dan Ulin.
Dan Ulin, Founder & CEO of Elite Student Coach, is a talented educational consultant with a remarkable track record of 98% when it comes to enabling his mentees to gain admission to at least one of their top three choices in prestigious colleges and graduate schools — but kids’ getting into highly selective institutions is a byproduct rather than the end product of his unique one-to-one program. He also empowers young people to become world-class communicators, showcase and monetize their talents, master the art of mentoring others, and crush it in school, work, and life.
Over his 40 years as an educator, communications expert, and mental health professional, Dan’s worked with thousands of ambitious kids, taught creative writing at Andover and multinational marketing at The Wharton School, lectured at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and developed English-language curriculum materials for the Japanese high school system with Panasonic and the Ministry of Education in Osaka.
He’s lived in six countries and worked in 33 more throughout Asia, Europe, and the U.S., run his own marketing strategy firm, and leveraged the critical communication skills he first acquired as a teen mentoring middle schoolers in working with organizations like Boys & Girls Club of America, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, Mitsubishi, Princeton in Asia, BMW, Apple, Airbus, Wharton Executive Education, British Aerospace, American Airlines, Toyota, State Farm, and The House of Blues.
Dan graduated with Honors from the University of Pennsylvania, earned his MBA from the Wharton School, and received his MA in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us a bit about your “backstory”?
I was hooked on teaching from the moment I had the chance, at the age of 11, to run a workshop on card magic for third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders in my hometown of Newton, Massachusetts. Seeing the proverbial light bulb go off above kids’ heads was one of those incredible “aha” moments for me. I continued working with learning-disabled (the label that was used in the 1970s and into the 1980s) adolescents and teenagers while I was in middle school, high school, and college.
When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, I was fortunate enough to land a job teaching creative writing and music at Phillips Academy Andover. It was a fantastic opportunity. Shortly after that, I moved to Osaka for a six-month research fellowship with Panasonic, during which I developed a new set of English-language teaching materials for the Japanese high school system. One thing led to another, and I ended up staying in Japan for four years, followed by another three years in Europe on either side of my MBA.
After I completed the work with the American client who’d hired me to build their global sales operations (I’d met them while working in Tokyo as the first non-Japanese employee of a massive trading company during my last two years in Japan), I moved to Los Angeles to seek my fortune as a screenwriter. My first three screenplays were truly awful, but somehow I ended up landing a job with the legendary director Ridley Scott and his late brother Tony, reading scripts and learning the ins and outs of what made one a great story and, by extension, a worthwhile investment.
I continued to work with adolescents and, from time to time, as a tutor after I started my own marketing communications company (which was the perfect fusion of my passion for writing, marketing, and corporate communications), but I dearly missed working with them on a more regular basis. The throughline in all of my work up to that point had been education and communication, and I decided to go back and earn a master’s degree in clinical psychology. I wasn’t sure I wanted to open my own practice, but I felt confident that I’d figure things out as I went along.
After earning over 3,000 hours as an intern at Airport Marina Counseling Service, one of LA’s most respected community mental healthcare clinics, I was approached by a couple of my friends whose high school juniors and seniors were preparing their college essays and application packages. This was around the time that the competition to top 100 schools in the United States began to skyrocket. I realized right away that gaining admission to a great school, as defined by what was a terrific fit for the teen in question, rather than what made jaws drop at cocktail parties, was all about punching through the clutter, commanding the attention of admissions officers, and communicating your utterly unique qualities as a candidate.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
At its core, mentorship is a process of co-creation. There’s a built-in feedback loop; as my mentees let me know what’s working and not working for them, I become a better mentor for them, and they, in turn, become better mentors for their own mentees.
One of my most intriguing stories occurred during my clinical rotations as part of my internship, following the completion of my master’s degree in clinical psychology. I was working with an adolescent patient who’d suffered a severely traumatic event and hadn’t spoken to anyone in nearly a year. I honored her silence during our sessions together until one day, she spotted a deck of cards in my knapsack. I asked her whether she’d like to see a card trick. She arched an eyebrow and, long story short, I ended up developing card magic as a mode of play therapy. This happened entirely by accident.
The point I’d like to make here is that the passions and hobbies we develop early on in life can impact and inform our work as adults. It’s essential to maintain an open mind and, rather than dismissing childhood pursuits as off-limits when it comes to communicating and interacting with others in a meaningful way later in life, lean into the idea that everything is fair game. We’re memory-making creatures, and this shows up in our emotional interactions with others throughout our lives. I’m paraphrasing the brilliant Maya Angelou here in saying that folks may never remember the card trick we taught them or the song we sang at the dueling piano bar, but they’ll never forget how we made them feel.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” This always resonated with me because, when I was a kid and fearful of stepping up and self-advocating, I realized that if I didn’t try, I had absolutely no chance at succeeding. And this became key in helping me understand that “failures” are merely opportunities for success in disguise.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The three character traits that have had the most significant impact on my success are creativity, curiosity, and resilience.
I grew up reading a lot, but also doing a great deal of writing. I believe that great readers make great writers. Generating a story out of thin air — in essence, creating something out of nothing — was and still is a massive thrill for me. I was a bit of a loner as an elementary school kid, and I remember writing short stories, plays, and teleplays during my free time. I encourage all of my mentees to exercise their creative muscles during the course of our work together by giving them, for example, time-limited story writing exercises in which they pick three objects they see around their room and, using only those items, create a story in ten minutes that has a beginning, middle, and an end. I guarantee them an “A” and, since this isn’t an in-school exercise, they generally jump in with both feet. This helps kids understand that “perfectly imperfect” is a beautiful thing, and in the process, it helps them build confidence.
Curiosity is essential for any great student to embrace as early as possible in their academic career. One of the great joys of living in Japan was waking up every morning realizing I knew even less about my adopted home away from home than I did the day before, and that there were endless doors to open when it came to becoming even more fluent in the language and learning more about who I was as a result of the fish-out-of-water story into which I’d written myself. The adage that we’re the authors of our own life stories is entirely accurate. Had I not tumbled into rabbit holes like card magic and Japan and piano (I’ve played in piano bars, solo as well as dueling, around the world, but still can’t read a note of music), I’d never have learned that remaining insatiably curious is rocket fuel for any career, academic or otherwise.
Resilience is a critical character trait for anyone to develop, and the earlier in life, the better. Holding a job (in my case, delivering newspapers at 5:00 a.m., performing magic shows at the local VA and birthday parties, and working with fellow students with learning disabilities, all of which I was doing by the age of 12) builds resilience and grit. Learning to tackle things you don’t always want to do at times that aren’t particularly inconvenient is a fast track to building character. Hand in hand with resilience goes the art of improvisation, a skill that children should study at school or local community arts centers, if possible. Life is a long-form improv, after all, and this highly overlooked skill, in tandem with resilience, goes a long way toward ensuring success in school, work, and life.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
The first of three books in a series I’m writing to empower teens and their parents in an era of increasing uncertainty surrounding college and grad school admissions success will be released at the beginning of the year. Please stay tuned!
My core business is a high-ticket, one-on-one mentorship program for gifted (and often neurodiverse) college- and grad school-bound teens and twentysomethings. It’s continually evolving in terms of content and direction in direct response to admissions requirements and shifting patterns in job hiring and graduate school admissions. I have a few remaining spots in my by-application-only program for parents who are interested. However, as much of the work I do involves parents, and there’s never a clear roadmap to follow when it comes to planning their children’s futures, I’m also launching a program for moms and dads.
This won’t be a traditional group coaching program, but rather a unique membership opportunity for parents seeking a step-by-step playbook based on the proven one-to-one mentorship model I’ve developed over the past two decades. I’m limiting participation in this program to 25 families. I’ve started a waitlist, and this will be available at the end of 2025. I’m excited about serving a larger group of families, and I encourage any parents interested to contact me at Dan@EliteStudentCoach.com.
For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about why you are an authority on how to help children succeed in school?
Over nearly five decades, I’ve had the good fortune to work as an educator, mental health professional, writer, entrepreneur, communications expert, journalist, and performing artist. Along the way, I’ve developed a highly unique set of skills.
The Elite Student Coach program I’ve put together for my mentees, which empowers them to excel not only in school but also in their personal and professional lives, came together more by accident than by design. That said, the focus on enabling the kids with whom I work to master the art of communications, become entrepreneurs and start businesses while still in high school, and learn how to mentor others is central to helping them succeed in school. Kids are professional students…full stop. Doing well academically is any teen’s job, and when they learn to pull together these three key skill sets, they discover, among other things, how to source self-esteem and confidence from within. Ultimately, confident adolescents and teens excel in school, at work, and in life. My goal is to accelerate their progress as early as possible (my youngest mentee is eight years old!) so that gaining admission to top-tier colleges and universities that are ideal fits is a byproduct rather than the end product of their middle school and high school journeys.
In mentoring the kids with whom I work, I’m very clear with them that I’m older, not wiser; I simply have more life experience when it comes to things I would have preferred to have learned earlier on. For example, it took me until I was nearly 40 to realize that perfectionism has no real payoff and that holding oneself to a high but not impossible standard is a far better play. So why not bring that to my mentees decades earlier and let them try the idea on for size themselves? In doing so, I’m effectively “folding time” for them.
I know the mentor/mentee relationship is shifting into high gear when my mentees push back and let me know certain things we’re working on or observations I’ve articulated aren’t working. This is wonderful because it allows me to refine my approach and become a better mentor for them, which, in turn, models the flexible, pay-it-forward mentorship philosophy they incorporate into the workshops in creative writing, debate, landscape painting, and other things that they run with younger kids. There’s no monopoly on wisdom; when my mentees understand this and realize I am hearing them, and then take this into the world in their interactions with others, they’re not only cultivating monetizable skills that no school can teach them, but also AI-proofing themselves. As powerful as AI is and will ever become, it’ll never replace that all-important human-to-human connection that my mentees learn to cultivate in real time. It’s an astonishing thing to watch the kids I work with grow and transform (and, in turn, help others to grow and transform).
And finally, in an age in which we’re seeing a 30% dropout rate among college students due to mental health-related issues, I bring my applied psychology into the mix with my mentees so that they can understand themselves on a deeper level and, once they arrive on college campuses, be of service to their communities. One of my four mentors says that, in many ways, I’m “mental health proofing” the adolescents and teens with whom I work. I’m not sure I’d take it quite that far, but with the understanding that we’re people, not pathologies, and that our diagnoses don’t define us, I do my best to bring what I learned as a mental health professional to bear in my work and distill down the most essential concepts so my mentees can put these concepts to use right away.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. Can you help articulate the main challenges that students face today that make it difficult to succeed in school?
I believe there are two main challenges students face that make their academic journey very difficult.
The first is the anxiety that surrounds “getting things wrong.” Reframing mistakes as learning opportunities is critical. We’re taught in school to get the “right” answer and penalized when we don’t, but learning only happens when we learn to course correct and, in the absence of being able to pick up a concept straight away, learn to grasp it in a way that’s meaningful and “sticks” for us.
This approach varies from student to student; some children need more repetition, while others require more context (such as, for example, when learning a new language). What I’m getting at here is that there isn’t a “one size fits all” way to learn. This is problematic in school systems that have to cater to large numbers of students, as well as in smaller schools that can focus on smaller groups of kids. Every kid is different, and because the neuroplasticity of the teenage brain is so complex, that child is changing, growing, and adapting in real time. Add to this diagnosed as well as undiagnosed learning disabilities and language processing problems, and we’re looking at a boatload of challenges facing students when it comes to succeeding in school. But again, challenges are more often than not learning opportunities in disguise.
The second challenge kids face is managing uncertainty. I often tell my mentees to lean into the things that terrify them the most, whether that’s taking an exam, managing a social challenge, handling a job interview, tackling a difficult discussion with a teacher, or deciding where to go to college. Uncertainty swirls around us every second of our lives. There’s an old saying in Yiddish: “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht.” It translates as “Man Plans, and God Laughs.” The things that we fear are coming our way, whether we like it or not, and I believe it’s far better to run at them proactively than to wait for them to catch us when we least expect them to happen. This plays into why so many kids procrastinate; the truth is that worrying about doing something (such as a paper due in a week) is typically more painful than actually getting started on the project and seeing how things turn out.
Can you suggest a few reforms that you think schools should make to help students thrive and excel?
I believe schools need more effectively thought-out policies regarding device usage. This is obviously easier said than done, as kids and parents often need to stay in touch throughout the school day, but given that Internet addiction is a serious problem and can negatively impact students’ in-class participation and their ability to concentrate, something needs to happen.
And while schools are designed to educate students in a variety of subjects, I feel it’s more important than ever that they begin helping kids prepare for or at least think about potential careers downstream. Most high schools and many colleges weren’t designed to make this happen. With certain exceptions, existing career counseling centers can’t handle the ever-shifting nature of the job market in an era in which AI is transforming the economy at warp speed.
This, however, presents an excellent opportunity for schools to step up and provide on-ramps to new careers, as well as clearer paths to real-world shadowing opportunities and internships for students.
Can you please share your “5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School?”
I recommend that parents encourage their kids to:
1) Experiment with new activities and ideas. There’s nothing wrong with classical piano, violin, tennis, soccer, and debate, but hundreds of thousands of kids are engaged in these activities. Colleges see these on the “Activities” section of the Common App every fall. If your child is going to go all-in on one or more of these “Holy Five” activities, they might, for example, add dimension to what they’re doing by starting a wheelchair tennis program or creating hip-hop interpretations of classical piano pieces. The earlier your child learns that the world is a giant idea lab and that outstanding people stand out, the better.
2 Embrace failure and reframe “mistakes” as learning opportunities. While kids should obviously strive to get the best possible grades, they must learn to hold themselves to high rather than impossible standards. I have a mentee who, at 14, used to beat himself up if every grade he received wasn’t an “A.” When I helped him understand that incorrect answers on pop quizzes were a terrific chance to learn how to approach the material and study more effectively, the light went on for him. He found a study partner who was experiencing the same sort of difficulties, and together they devised a system for maximizing their grades in that class while having fun as they mastered challenging material.
3) Read, read, read! Great readers make great writers, and the more kids read (anything they can get their hands on), the better. Teens who read physical books are outliers and develop a natural talent for written expression as a result of their exposure to different writers’ styles and “voices.” Pro tip: reading an analog book while listening to the audiobook version at 2.5–3x speed (because we listen much faster than we read) can improve retention by as much as 450%, as the material engages different parts of the brain simultaneously.
4) Build communication and other soft skills. These include, but are by no means limited to, writing, public speaking, persuasion, negotiation, active listening, and emotional intelligence. An easy way to do this is by running short (three-hour) workshops on topics your child loves, such as landscape painting, creative writing, mindsets for competitive athletes, improving your chess game, baking, etc. I encourage my mentees to use a simple “Market, Mentor, Monetize” model that rocket-fuels their soft skill sets, dramatically improves their time management chops, and, at the same time, helps them…
5) …become entrepreneurs and mentors. Whatever profession or series thereof your child ends up pursuing, they’re always going to be in the business…full stop. Starting a small business while still in middle school and learning to mentor others simultaneously will put your child far ahead of the pack. And just because they’re ahead of their peers doesn’t mean they can’t, metaphorically speaking, reach back and help other kids pick up the pace. Young leaders bring out the very best in other people, not only in school but in every other aspect of life.
The bottom line here is that success in school has as much to do with what goes on outside the classroom as it does inside the classroom.
As you know, teachers play such a huge role in shaping young lives. What would you suggest needs to be done to attract top talent to the education field?
Based on my experience as an American who has been fortunate enough to live in six countries and work in another 33, teachers aren’t as honored or respected here as they are in many other countries. It’s time for that to change. We need to make teaching a more rewarding profession and incentivize whip-smart young professionals to enter the field.
Teachers themselves need access to continuing education to stay on top of their game. In my opinion, this should be built into their compensation packages. We can’t expect poorly-paid high school teachers to shape the minds of brilliant college-bound teens if the teachers themselves don’t have free access to top-notch educational resources.
Providing extremely low-cost loans and increasing the number of available scholarships for aspiring teachers, as well as increasing pay to create more attractive entry points, will become even more critical as the number of teenagers attending school in the United States continues to decline.
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? They might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I’d jump at the opportunity to meet Warren Buffett, who once said that the “…one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now — at least — is to hone your communication skills — both written and verbal.” Mr. Buffett is a personal hero of mine on so many levels, and it would be a great honor to meet him.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can visit my website at www.EliteStudentCoach.com
As well, they can visit my YouTube channels at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dan+ulin and https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elite+student+coach and my LinkedIn page at https://www.linkedin.com/in/danulin/
Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!
Elite Student Coach’s Dan Ulin On The 5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.