Richard Mayer

Richard Mayer came to admissions consulting from a career in theatre — and that background shows up in the work more than any credential on his resume. He ran two live performance theatres after graduating from Tulane with a degree in Theatre and a minor in History. He served as Executive Director of a performing arts center near New York City. He earned a master’s in Arts Administration from Columbia. And he still leads fundraising at a nonprofit theatre in Manhattan. The through-line is the same thing that makes him effective with high schoolers: he knows how to find the shape inside the material, build it for an audience, and make the person telling it believe it.

That skill translates directly. Richard works with students on the full arc — school list strategy, Common App and supplemental essays, extracurricular positioning, and the smaller strategic decisions that pile up between September and April. His feedback arrives in structured, detailed form, typically across four or five editing rounds per essay set, and it reads like a director’s notes: specific, constructive, and clear about what needs to change and why. He is especially strong with performing arts applicants, where his fluency with portfolio-based admissions and creative self-presentation gives students an advantage most consultants cannot offer. The firm’s leadership has specifically routed performing arts families to him on the strength of that expertise.

Richard works well with students who want encouragement and honesty in the same conversation — the ones who need someone patient enough to sit with a draft that is not working yet and precise enough to explain exactly where the argument thins out. He is equally comfortable with parents, and his communication style — structured, warm, and unhurried — tends to put families at ease early in the process.

He is not the loudest consultant on the roster. He is the one who checks in on a student during a wildfire evacuation, sends a Discovery Session planner before the first call, and treats every applicant’s story like it deserves the same care he would give a production he was directing. That is the instinct, and it is not something you teach.