Meet our team.
Former Admissions Officers. Narrative Experts. Fully Dedicated to Every Family.
At Sierra Admission, we’ve built a company that's small by design, fully invested in every family. Our team of former AOs brings decades of experience inside highly selective institutions like Stanford, Vanderbilt, Middlebury, Harvard, and others. We've read students from California and across the Northeast, and we created a full narrative system around helping these students stand out.
Every family works 1:1 with a dedicated consultant — never subcontractors or junior staff — supported by a process that keeps parents fully informed at every stage.
This isn’t a mass-market advising service. It’s a boutique admissions partnership, intentionally capped each year to preserve full delivery quality. We share a common view that our best interests lie in being obsessed with client outcomes.
Why We Built Sierra Admissions
A boutique model designed for California’s unique admissions challenges.
Ben Bousquet, MEd
Director of College Consulting
Ben is the former Assistant Director of Admissions at Vanderbilt University, former Admissions Officer at University of Mary Washington, and was a Resident Director of the 2018 Harvard Pre-College Program.
Ben has a deep understanding of elite admissions, having reviewed 20,000+ applications, presented files to the admissions committee, and selected students for top merit scholarships. At Harvard, he facilitates admissions workshops for 500+ high-achieving high school students. Ben understands the critical importance of the written components of an application, which are often the difference between a deny and an admit.
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Carolyn Orosz, MFA
Senior Consultant
Carolyn Orosz is a former admission officer at Middlebury College, where she read thousands of applications and served as a voting member of the admissions committee. At Middlebury, Carolyn read applications from athletes, international students, and students at top public and private schools nationwide–including Phillips Exeter, The Lawrenceville School, and those in the San Francisco Bay Area. She understands highly selective admissions and the unique pressures and competitions that students face.
Carolyn holds a BA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she taught English and Creative Writing courses. At Sierra, Carolyn leads our school research efforts—focusing on the priorities and programs at the top thirty most popular schools among our clients, with a focus on STEM and business. She combines deep admissions data knowledge with her writing instruction background to help students position their strongest applications.
Kylie Kistner, MA
Head of Content & Marketing
Kylie is a former admissions officer at Willamette University. She has been a writing coach at three institutions and has worked with thousands of students on their writing. In her role as an academic consultant, Kylie has also supported neurodiverse students through writing, planning, and project management.
A writer herself, Kylie co-created a university-wide writing handbook standardized across 200+ undergraduate writing courses and used to teach writing in several countries. With her experience as an admissions counselor and writing coach, Kylie guides students seamlessly through the writing process, enabling them to craft exceptional essays that stand out.
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Irena Smith, PhD
Consulting Partner
Irena founded her college consulting practice 15 years ago, drawing on her experience as an admission officer at Stanford University, where she read and reviewed thousands of applications. Now, she works with Sierra Admissions students to find and celebrate their best stories as they navigate the application process.
Irena has a BA in English from UCLA and a PhD in Comparative Literature, also from UCLA, where she received a Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award and a Dissertation Year Fellowship.
Irena has taught literature and composition at UCLA and Stanford and has nearly 20 years of experience as a writer, editor, and teacher. Her memoir, The Golden Ticket, explores the college application process from the perspectives of a parent, college counselor, and admissions officer. She is a voracious reader, a fervent proponent of the serial comma, and a shameless consumer of Trader Joe’s chocolate-covered espresso beans.
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Alex, MA
Founder
Since founding Sierra in 2017, Alex has helped 500+ students get into the best schools in the country by crafting unforgettable applications.
Alex writes regularly about admissions, provides essay workshops for high schools in California and Washington, and moderates Reddit's r/ApplyingToCollege community, the largest admissions-focused community in the world. He is an experienced writing coach who believes that a strong essay strategy is at the heart of every successful application.