Introducing Soar: the College Counselor's Edge in a World Run by AI

Webinar Transcript: Introducing SOAR Speakers: Swami (Venkates Swaminathan) (Founder & CEO, LifeLaunchr) and Claire Schadler (College Admissions Coach)

Swami: Hi, Claire!

Claire: Hi, Swami! Good to get to do this with you. I love doing webinars like this.

Swami: Thank you everyone for being here. Claire and I are delighted to be with all of you today. My name is Swami, and joining me is Claire Schadler, my colleague in Penn. We're going to be talking today about SOAR — our new platform that we're really delighted to introduce to all of you.

It's been a while since we've had it out there in private beta, and we're really excited to bring it out to the world at large. So thank you all for being here today. We're going to walk through this presentation and then a demo, show you how it all works. One of the big reasons we're doing this is to answer your questions. As we go, if you have questions, please put them in the chat. And of course, at the end, we'll give you the link so you can explore SOAR and sign up for yourself.

So let's jump in. Today's presentation is about SOAR, and I want to talk a little bit about what SOAR is first, but first I want to talk about who it's for. SOAR is built for counselors — so that could be independent educational consultants like many of you, who really have to carry the entire relationship with your student. You spend a lot of time with your students working on applications, essays, profiles, summer plans, all that kind of stuff. And what we want to look at is how SOAR changes all of that process for you and how it will help you do a better job, be more effective — not just more efficient.

Some of you are school counselors, and school counselors typically have much larger caseloads. One of the things that means is that every time you meet with your students, a lot has happened since the last time. It's really helpful to have a way to say, "What has happened?" — and catch up and be able to use your time together with the student much more effectively and efficiently.

[Note: Brief technical aside about blurry slides for some attendees — slides to be shared at end of webinar.]

A little bit about us. I'm Swami (Venkaes. I'm the founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr and of SOAR. I've been in IEC for over a decade. I founded LifeLaunchr in 2014, and before that I spent an entire career — multiple decades — in software. We will share the slides at the end, just so you have them.

I've had a long career both as an IEC and in software, and I think this really brings the two sides of that together. I'm excited to share this with you today. Claire, perhaps you'd like to introduce yourself?

Claire: My name's Claire Schadler, and I've worked as a college admissions coach for about 10 years. I've been working with SOAR since Swami created it, so I've had a chance to use it over the last few months. I'm excited to talk about it today with everyone.

Swami: Thank you, Claire. So let's start with where we are in the whole business of college admissions counseling. I happened to be at a HECA Zoom session last week where people said — and I'm not quoting anyone by name — parents are saying to all of us that they can just use AI themselves. And so we all have to deal with that objection: "Well, why can't I just use AI myself and figure this out?"

Some people were also saying it was harder to fill their roster this year. I think there are a lot of factors. AI is certainly only one of them. Demographics — Mark Claro, the former head of IECA, wrote a post on Substack a few days ago about the changing demographics, meaning there are fewer students applying to college now than last year, and that trend will continue for a while.

And then of course, AI doesn't just affect essays. We think of AI and essays — how does that affect what our students are writing? But it brings up much bigger concerns for parents about what it does to the jobs their kids might be applying to, how they're preparing for a career, and so on. Where we are is that this is a moment of big change in the work we all do. The world of college counseling has changed fundamentally — and that's one reason SOAR exists in the first place.

Claire, you've been using SOAR since the beginning, and you've been working as an IEC for over 10 years. What are you seeing out there?

Claire: Similar to what you said — that AI might be able to take over everything. But I also think that what you said is important: we need to be innovating and updating, and being prepared for all the different paths our students are taking and for all the questions they have. SOAR becomes a really important tool to help us in a world that is changing — a tool that helps us work with that change.

Swami: I think one thing I want to talk about is the specifics. When we work with students, we see that our students are using ChatGPT, whether we know it or not. They come to our sessions and say, "I heard this or that" — and they got it from ChatGPT, or from TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Misinformation is just a huge problem in the work we do.

And in between meetings, sometimes the work just stalls. Students come in and say, "Well, what happened since the last time?" This has been an ongoing challenge, but I think it's gotten worse. Every parent of a teen has heard the answer, "It was fine." So we have no idea what information our students are getting or where they're getting it from.

The other challenge is that college counseling is bigger than just college. Claire, let's talk about that.

Claire: I mean, yes — this isn't just college anymore because parents have concerns. The work we do used to be pretty well-defined. People would say, "Can you help my kid navigate the transition from high school to college? Find the right college, get a great application, get in." The expectation was they'd go to college, get a degree, and that would lead to good outcomes.

That expectation isn't really how people see the world anymore. Parents have questions: Is this major worth the cost? What can my child do with a degree in sociology? What kind of career paths combine computer science and finance? These are all real questions real parents have asked us.

Swami: Exactly. When I was building SOAR, I was thinking about how we can address not just the nuts and bolts of college admissions, but the bigger questions that are out there. "I have good visual skills — what major can I pursue?" "I want to study computer science, but my math isn't that great." Claire, you told me a story about occupational therapy — would you share that?

Claire: Yes. I had a student who thought she might be interested in pursuing that field, but didn't know much about it. She came into a session, and we were talking about it, and we just asked SOAR to lay out what education would be required — just all the steps. And personally, I don't know all the steps of what it takes to become an occupational therapist.

SOAR just laid out the practical information we needed to know, and then that gave us an opportunity to talk about it instead of having to scramble to find out how many years of education are required, what certifications are needed. Instead, that was all laid out for us very quickly, and we were able to use our meeting time to see what she thought about it, whether she felt it was a good fit, and get into all the aspects of the decision — rather than worrying about the practical information.

Swami: Exactly. A big part of this is that it becomes bigger than any of us can hold in our heads. There are so many choices out there. Colleges are always launching new majors, and majors lead to careers in different ways. Everyone has anxiety about all of this, and it's impossible to hold all that information in our heads.

When you think about the amount of information people need to keep track of, it's far more than we can manage. And the honest truth is that what makes our work meaningful is the human aspect of it — when you're talking to a student about occupational therapy and they say "Maybe I want to do this," and you're able to engage with them at a human level: "Okay, let's talk about that" — instead of saying "Let me spend a week doing research and come back to you."

Claire: Exactly.

Swami: When I built SOAR, this was really the coming together of two halves of a career. I spent a decade as an IEC. But before that, I started with AI before it was fashionable. My graduate research was in AI and computer vision — trying to detect the edges of objects in an image. We didn't have the computational power then that people do now. I've been writing code for 40-plus years, so it was great to bring the two things together and create a commercially ready platform.

My first instinct was to wire things together informally — create a cloud skill here, do something there, and see if I could put it all together. Claire, you did some of that too, and one of the things about it is that it's surprisingly fragile.

Claire: Yes — I used AI in different ways to help with even simple things like writing a meeting report. I thought I'd told ChatGPT exactly what I wanted, and it would give me five great meeting reports — and then the sixth one didn't follow any of the guidelines I'd set. So yeah, trying to do it informally like, "Oh, I'll just do this and it'll work" — and then it didn't. It made a lot more work. I should have just written the meeting report myself, because of the amount of time I spent trying to get ChatGPT to do it for me.

Swami: One of the things people don't quite grasp about AI is that it's stochastic by design — unpredictable by design. A normal computer program, if you give it the same input and run it 20 times, you get the same output 20 times. But AI is designed not to do that. It's designed to use judgment. So if you ask it the same question 20 times, you'll get 20 different answers — sometimes slightly different, sometimes significantly different. And sometimes even things you state precisely as instructions, it will completely ignore.

We had to put a lot of work into drawing good boundaries between things done algorithmically — predictably — and things done through an LLM, to make sure there's a balance of judgment and predictability.

So in one slide, what is SOAR? It's an AI college and career planning assistant that keeps counselors in the loop and students on track in between sessions. It's built for counselors. It's a shared workspace. It's grounded in real data, and it helps you teach your students how to write.

Before I show the demo, I do want to acknowledge that yes, LifeLaunchr is a practice too — we use SOAR with all of our students. But on SOAR, LifeLaunchr is a tenant just like any other. No tenant gets to see any other's information. It's structured with very clear architectural lines about how that works. That isolation is architectural and has always been that way.

There's no way within the app for one IEC or school tenant to see another's data, with some very narrow exceptions. If you ask us to debug something, we'll ask your permission to access information. But otherwise, we don't access anyone else's data.

[DEMO SECTION]

Swami: So let me show you. This is the counselor's view of a student — a test student, Swama Student Three. These aren't real students.

The first thing when you get started is to click the Add Family button. You'll see the other counselors in your practice, and you can decide who the student is assigned to. Then you put in the student's name and email, parent names and email addresses, engagement type details, start and end dates. The end date is meaningful because on that date, the student gets archived — taken off your roster but their account still exists.

You can also decide which modules the student gets: the essay list, Common App essay module, UC personal insight questions, why major essays, why college essays, and so on. We don't enable all modules for every student because we don't know which ones you want — so you decide.

[Question from attendee: "Does SOAR replace other platforms like College Planner Pro?"]

Swami: Not necessarily. If you don't have any other systems and you have SOAR, it should be enough. If you already use CPP, you don't have to replace it. Many of our existing SOAR users have CPP and work with it every day, but they find that students and families aren't really using CPP. SOAR provides the way for you to work with your students and families more effectively, while CPP handles other functions. There's no conflict.

[Student Profile & Transcripts]

Swami: One of the really cool things is that you can upload and analyze transcripts. On SOAR, we never actually show the transcript itself — not to you, not to the student, not to the parent. What we show is an analysis of the transcript data, because transcripts sometimes contain student ID numbers, Social Security numbers, and other sensitive information.

It's stored in a completely encrypted way. But we analyze it, and you can see GPAs as reported. We compute UC GPAs — weighted, unweighted, capped, uncapped. We calculate GPA trends and generate flags, all of which are really helpful if you're looking at a student and asking, "What's going on? What do they need to be concerned about?"

If a student has taken classes from multiple places — their high school, BYU, UC Scout, Florida Virtual School, community college — you can upload all the transcripts and we'll analyze them together to produce a consolidated record, much the same way a college would.

[College Research & The AI Chat]

Swami: One of the key principles is to have a conversation with SOAR — don't just use it as a smarter Google. Don't ask a question, get an answer, and walk away. Ask open-ended questions. For example: "How good a fit is University of Washington's pre-med program for this student?" — rather than just asking yes or no. Then follow up with more questions.

Let me show you an example of a vague question a student might ask: "I have visual skills, I'm interested in architecture, but I'm not sure if my portfolio would be good enough. What are some alternatives?"

This is the kind of question students often have — they don't know how good their portfolio is, and they don't have good insights into what other choices exist.

[SOAR generates results including programs like Girls Who Code at Otis College, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, urban planning, landscape architecture, and various architecture programs.]

Swami: SOAR looks at the student's existing college list and what programs might be similar. It connects to the student's profile and things they've already done. And students being students, they might follow up with: "What about programs in California?"

Claire: I love that a vague question can generate actionable or inspiring results.

Swami: Exactly. At the end, it asks, "Do you want to add these colleges to your college list?" That's what I mean by having a conversation — you don't need a precisely formulated question at the outset.

[Question from attendee: "Does SOAR help me know the financial health of a university?"]

Swami: Great question. You can just ask. Let me type it in... You'll see it pulls from multiple sources. Some answers come back blunt about the risks — which colleges are vulnerable, which are in a difficult spot, which are stable or strong. That's one thing that distinguishes SOAR: we work very hard not to give sycophantic answers, unlike if you just asked ChatGPT directly.

[Grounding in Real Data]

Swami: One of the big challenges we addressed was hallucination and sycophancy. As I built SOAR, one of the things we did was incorporate very highly reliable information as far as possible. We built in data about 1,800+ colleges — including the Common Data Set, IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Dataset), and the Department of Education's College Scorecard.

When you ask a question about, say, Case Western or Carnegie Mellon, it looks it up in our systems first before answering, providing reliable information. We also built in data about 6,700+ scholarships licensed from Peterson, and data about summer enrichment programs like COSMOS and RSI.

When it can't find that information internally, it will do web searches, look at web pages, and use its general knowledge — going through a multi-layered process to make sure the answers you get are as reliable as possible.

And at the end of every answer, it lists its sources so you can click through and verify. I always tell people: please check the facts, because you're providing this information to your students and families and you want to make sure it's high quality.

[Shared Workspace & Transparency]

Swami: SOAR is a shared workspace intended for you to use with your students and their parents. Claire, do you want to talk about what that means in practice?

Claire: This is something I always tell students and parents right when I start working with them. Everyone is going to see everyone else's work. So if I ask a question on behalf of the student, or if the student or the parent asks a question, all that information can be seen by everyone.

It's really helpful because I can see what the student's researching, what their second and third follow-up questions were, what information they received. That's all shared knowledge going into our next meeting. When we talk, I already know what they've been thinking about and what questions they have.

For writing, parents can track that writing has been completed, but they don't actually see the student's writing. That's a really important distinction — parents know their student is on track, but they're not looking at every draft or hovering over that part of the process. The student has the freedom to write what they want to write and also to write a bad first draft without the parent panicking.

Swami: That distinction was built in from the outset — we thought carefully about it. If you're logged in as a parent, you can see the status of your kids' writing assignments, but you can't see the actual writing. It's up to the student if they want to share their writing with their parents.

As a counselor, you can also do work on your own behalf — if you want to do some research without sharing it with students. You can set that at the outset by not selecting a student, or retroactively mark it as internal.

[Meeting Briefs & Session Reports]

Swami: Clara, you spend a lot of time preparing for meetings. Can you talk about the meeting brief feature?

Claire: Basically, you put the student's name in and click "Meeting Brief," and it generates talking points for that meeting — taking into account what you talked about last time. It knows if the student plans to take the SAT coming up in September and might say, "Check on their progress for that." It tells you if the student has done any writing assignments or hasn't, and will say, "Assigned but not submitted — check in with them about why."

It makes preparing for meetings very quick. You don't have to remember every single thing from the last meeting. You can do a quick review before going in and have all the points you want to cover.

For making a meeting report, if you use Otter.ai or Zoom transcription, you can paste in the transcription of your meeting and say "Draft a meeting report," and it will create one with a to-do list at the bottom for both the student and the counselor. It usually takes very minimal editing — maybe one minute instead of 20 minutes.

Swami: And the bottom section of the meeting report is internal — it's only visible to the counselors in your practice, not to students or parents. It can include any concerns or flags that are better kept internal.

Claire: And then you save and send, and that's it. At the end of a meeting, you're done. You don't have to worry about remembering anything. Because of that, when I'm meeting with students, I can spend my time actually talking to them instead of taking detailed notes. Before SOAR, I'd have a document open just to take notes as they talked, then use those notes to write my report. Now I just get to be present, listen, and respond in a conversational way. It's really a game changer.

[The Writing Hub]

Swami: The last thing I want to show is the Writing Hub. It looks different from the rest of SOAR — dark background, light text — because it works differently.

When we built SOAR, we thought carefully about this because there are so many AI writing tools out there. SOAR isn't that. The idea is that you as counselors teach your students how to write, based on a structured writing process. Good writing comes from real, meaningful self-reflection.

As a coach, you have a huge library of assignments you can give students — values reflections, community traditions, someone who influenced you, finding your voice, and many writing practice exercises. If you're working with a student over multiple years, you can assign them writing questions every week or month since eighth grade.

The big struggle with college essays is that nearly every high school English teacher has told students, "Don't use the word 'I' in an essay." So students come to college essay writing — and suddenly it's like the championship game, and it's the first time they've ever had a football at their feet. It's high stakes and intense. When we ask them what they're going to write about, they don't know what to say.

We also incorporated a personality assessment based on a well-recognized five-factor assessment from Penn State. When it comes time for their actual essays, we have a very structured process: they work through prompts, think about ideas, stories, and themes. We borrowed those terms from the WOW Writing Workshop with permission.

Claire: One of the features is that you can ask SOAR to give its observations on a student's writing — generating things that stand out as positive, follow-up questions you could ask, talking points to further the conversation. This is only shown to the counselor — it's raw material for you to do your job better. At the end of it, you read all of this, and only you get to see it. The student never sees any AI-generated feedback. You write your own feedback and send that to the student.

Swami: Right — the student sees your feedback, not AI's.

Claire: I use it as jumping-off points. I don't use the whole SOAR-generated summary. I might think, "Oh, that's something that stood out — I should ask a follow-up question there." It's just a way to get my brain engaged in analyzing the writing, with suggestions for me to think about before going into a meeting.

Also, based on everything the student has written — their activities list, the personality assessment — you can ask SOAR to generate a plan. It might take up to five minutes because it reads everything about the student, but it presents ideas you can use or not use, that only you get to see. It might suggest ideas relevant for a student's Common App essay, ideas for prompts and responses for the UC PIQs, and risks for some approaches — for example, "If you write about research, be mindful that it might turn into a list of research steps."

For students working on their why major essay, it identifies pieces of everything they've done and says, "Here are the things that stand out, and here are the things that might still need work." It's just meant to help you do a better job with your student.

Swami: And I think to me, it also just helps keep everything organized. In the past, information was flowing around in different places — Google Docs, wherever. I really appreciate that it's all in one place and I can always refer back to any of it.

[Q&A Highlights]

Attendee question: "Does SOAR have the level of insight to show nuanced differences between the various Ivies — like Cornell vs. Dartmouth?"

Swami: Yes, it can answer that kind of question. The simplest way is to just ask: "How is the application evaluated differently at Cornell and Dartmouth?" I can't say it'll be 100% perfect, honestly, because universities don't publish that information publicly. But it can do a decent job. The best approach is to simply ask and see what it says — type in exactly what you want to know and see what comes back.

Attendee question: "Are college strategic plans automatically included in AI searches?"

Swami: If you ask about a college's strategic plan, SOAR will look for it and pull information directly from the website. We've asked all kinds of amazingly obscure questions and gotten exceptional answers. SOAR has instructions to look at our internal data but also to do searches to get data directly from web pages — looking for up-to-date information rather than out-of-date information — and then summarize it in a way that's relevant to you and the particular student.

Attendee comment: "I use Whisper Flow together with SOAR, which helps me talk to it. I also have my students practice interview skills on Zoom with SOAR using Whisper Flow."

Swami: Whisper Flow is great — and very soon we'll add the ability within SOAR itself to hit a microphone button and talk to it directly, so you don't have to type.

Attendee comment: "I use these SOAR comments and create templates for struggling students to develop their essays. They feel very grateful."

Swami: Awesome — that's exactly the kind of use case we hoped for.

[Pricing & Getting Started]

Swami: It's free to start with three students permanently. When you're ready to expand, pricing is $29.99 a month plus $6.99 per student per month. If you buy an annual package, you get 12 months for the price of 10. HOWCAM members get a 15% discount. The easiest way to start is with one student at withsoar.ai.

A few important notes on security and privacy: No client sees another client's data. AI doesn't train on your data — your students' data is protected because we use the Anthropic API. The only exceptions are if you give us specific permission to debug something, or if a court orders it for legal purposes.

[Closing]

Swami: Whether we accept AI or not, it's here to stay. The counselors already using SOAR have found it helps them go deeper with students and differentiate their practice. Claire, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you to everyone who was here.

If you have particular scenarios you want to walk through, you can schedule a consultation with me at the link I'll share in the chat. Several great questions came up today that we didn't get a chance to fully address — I'm happy to walk through them live with you.

Claire: Thank you, Swami! And thank you, everyone!

Swami: Take care, everyone. Bye!