Christine Rose, PhD, has 25 years of experience as a university professor, college admissions counsellor, prep school English teacher, and dissertation coach. As a professor, she served on faculty admissions committees where she gained extensive insider knowledge about the behind-the-scenes world of college and graduate school admissions. She learned important patterns regarding which applications make it through to the final round and which ones--often for surprising reasons--are eliminated. After reading hundreds of applications, she learned a variety of tricks applicants can use to make their case stand out amongst the competition. She maintains a wide network of colleagues in academic disciplines representing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as colleagues representing professional degree programs including medicine, law, and business.
Born in Miami to parents from Tennessee and Mississippi, she was the first in the family to cross the Mason Dixon line for college. After completing a semester abroad at Oxford University, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College (to her parents' delight) with a major in English and minor in Religion (to her parents' chagrin). Between her bachelor's and master's degree, at 21 she became the youngest person ever to teach English Composition at Miami-Dade College. Early on, she focused on the literary form of the personal essay. She pursued a master's degree in English at the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Outstanding International Graduate Student Fellowship. She then taught British and American Literature for three years in the Literature Department at Ransom Everglades School (Coconut Grove, FL). During this time she was selected to attend the week-long national Outstanding Young Private School Teachers symposium. When the school administration realized Christine was frightfully unqualified to coach a sport as her faculty extracurricular responsibility, they formally trained her to serve on the college counseling team. In addition to representing Ransom at college fairs, working with admissions offers from the nation's top schools, meeting privately with students and parents, and guiding students through the multi-year process of college selection and application, she developed a week-long college essay workshop for juniors.
After several years of loving the teaching but loathing the bell that rang every 43 minutes to shuffle teachers and students to their next class, she decided to embark on doctoral studies. She completed her PhD at the University of California/Santa Cruz in the transdisciplinary History of Consciousness Department, where she was a recipient of the UC Presidential Fellowship. Her specialties are in the History of Science & Medicine, Modern Thought and Culture, Poststructural Philosophy, and Gender Studies. She has been a professor at Mills College, Macalester College, and UC-Davis and has delivered conference talks and presentations internationally.
Finding more gratification from working individually with students to help them achieve their dreams than from delivering university lectures in 200-seat auditoriums, she left full-time academia to start her private college consulting business in 2012 when she had the chance to move to Germany, so grabbed her cats and seized the day. She specializes in tailoring her work to meet the needs of each individual child and family rather than offering a one-size-fits-all formula.
She enjoys using Berlin as a part-time base from which to explore (thus far) Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, and Finland. Since 2017, she has split her time between Europe and the USA, heading to home base in Miami Beach when the long winter in Berlin begins.