As my son is profoundly gifted by most definitions, I have searched for and tried various counseling/advisory services by educators and psychologists for over two years now. Most services we met are good but only good for certain groups of students.

They generally have some really good idea and experiences on how to help kids of certain age, certain gift and certain level of giftedness. They give everybody comes to them a rather similar prescription (“cookie cutter”, dare I say) regardless of the individual situation. For instance, a private school principal said, “ Just come, we can teach any math he wants to learn”. However, when I asked further what she really meant was she’ll teach fractions, not trigonometry, which still makes her school a great one, but wouldn’t help our situation at all.

Some simply told us, “we only serve this age group” or “we only serve top 10 % not top 0.1% students”. They honestly said that we have to find someone else for advice. We really appreciate their honesty. But others are truly hard to find.

Vipul and Jonah are very different. They seemed to become more interested when they realized that they had an “outlier” at hand. They asked lots of questions. They have done lots research with great enthusiasm. They come back to us with various kinds of recommendations. Instead of prescriptions, they give us a lot of “what-if” questions. They walk parents through with their analysis and rationales. They’re interested in discussing our past experiences. They modify recommendations based on new ‘knowns”. In a way, they treat my son as a precious subject for research and nurturing. I received a large number of follow up emails with their new research, new thoughts, new options after initial counseling. I can honestly say, no one I met before worked so hard to understand my son’s special situation and tried to come up with personalized advice. Their outstanding mathematics background is a huge plus when working with kids with gifts in STEM.