Who you are working with
One person reads every answer, checks every page, and puts their name on every report. Right now that person is me.
Bryan Hall
Everything runs in writing. You and your student fill in separate forms, I read both, and the report comes back to you together. If your student is 18 or older, they decide whether you receive it. There is no call your student has to get through and nothing they have to perform.
Why I built Overlap
When my son started thinking about life after high school, I found myself facing a mountain of research. I spent hours with him, trying to connect his interests, strengths, grades, potential career paths, college options, and the financial realities of it all. We managed to work through it, but I kept thinking there had to be a better way.
Professional college-prep counseling can cost thousands of dollars. That wasn’t something I was prepared or able to spend, and I knew plenty of other families were in the same position.
I started building Overlap because I believed families deserved access to thoughtful, personalized guidance without having to navigate the entire process alone or pay thousands of dollars for help.
My goal isn’t to tell students what they should do with their lives. It’s to help them understand their options, recognize possibilities they might have overlooked, weigh the practical and financial trade-offs, and figure out what makes sense for them.
At the end of the day, the path looks different for every student, and figuring it out shouldn’t have to be so overwhelming.
From the pilot
“They asked great questions from a parent perspective. The student details were left to the student, so I could just focus on my relationship with my son, how I see my son, and what I hope for him to accomplish.”
Parent of a student in our free pilot cohort. Published anonymously, at her request.
What Overlap is paid, and by whom
The only money Overlap receives is the $500 a family pays. No school, program or employer pays to appear on a list, and none of them pay me anything for putting them in front of you. The list your student gets is the list the evidence produced.
About the logo
Hikers navigate by blazes, small rectangles of paint on trees and rocks. One means you are on the trail, keep going. Two, offset, means a turn is coming. Three in an upward arrow, like this one, means this is where the trail begins.
That is what I want Overlap to be for a family. Not a map of the whole mountain, and not a promise about the summit. Just the first marker at the trailhead, put there by someone who already walked it, saying a route exists here and you are standing at the start of it.
The three blazes are three colours, and everywhere two of them cross they make the true mix of the two. The dark patch in the middle is where all three agree. My friends and family picked it from four designs.
Not sure if it was a happy accident or kismet, but the overlapped area forms a T. I built this originally for my son, whose first name begins with a T.