Three questions with Miss Porter’s Danielle da Silva  | Dean of College Counseling

With years of experience and a passion for empowering students, Danielle is dedicated to helping young minds navigate the path to their dreams. In this blog post, we sit down with her to get to know her better and explore her approach to college counseling.

Here are 3 questions to get to know her better:

1. What inspired you to become a college counselor, and what drives your passion for helping students achieve their higher education goals? 

I was a tour guide in college (yes, I am one of those people who can talk loudly while walking backward), which led to a summer job in the admissions office, which led to a career in college admissions. After spending many years working on college campuses, I realized that what I loved most about my job was getting to know applicants during the admissions process, and what I disliked most was that I didn’t get to see where their journeys took them. At that point, I switched to college counseling on the high school side and haven’t looked back. 

2. How do you approach the college search and application process with students, and what advice do you have for those just starting their journey? 

A few months ago, my kids and I went to see the new musical interpretation of Gatsby (with music by Florence Welch, of Florence and the Machine! – it’s great and coming to Broadway soon). It got me thinking a lot about how it’s not just the story that matters but the perspective it’s told. We all know the story of Gatsby, or at least we think we do, until you tilt it a bit, and it becomes an entirely different story. We all have unique stories and perspectives and the agency to construct them however we want. 

Probably the most important lesson I try to get across to students and families is that given the subjectivity of the college process, it is impossible to predict how a student’s application will “land” once it is evaluated by admissions. What one person loves, another will not love, and so I always lean toward being authentic. It’s your story. You get to create who you are, and it’s 100% okay not to know the last sentence of your story before you’ve written it. (I bet even F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t start with those boats against the current, being borne ceaselessly back into the past.) There are hundreds – thousands – of folks sharing advice about what worked for them, and that’s great, but if these highly selective colleges wanted one specific, elusive thing, and if it were possible to figure out what that thing was, well, there’d be no need to scour Tik Tok looking for solutions. So, essentially, be yourself. I find this works well for most things in life, too.

3. What sets Miss Porter’s School apart in terms of college counseling, and how do you see the school’s values and mission playing a role in the work you do with students?

I’m writing this on the heels of yet another opinion article that is making the rounds (my kids like to joke, “Oh no, mom read another article!”) about the transactional, end-game-focused nature of the college experience today. I think Porter’s students already challenge this dynamic every day. The interdisciplinary nature of our curriculum means learning to make authentic connections is second nature to our students. This comes across in their college applications, which don’t read like resumes but like artists’ statements about what it means to be a person in the world today and how they want to use what they have in front of them – or make an entirely new something – to create a better world. It’s really exciting and inspiring to be a part of a school culture that is willing to challenge institutionalized ideas about what education “should” be and instead focus on what it could be.