Meilin Obinata: Senior College Admissions Counselor

Hi! I am Meilin Obinata. I love working with students because they keep my brain fresh – I am always learning from them as I encourage them in their adventures, whether traveling the landscape of open-source software or photography. 

The Bay Area is my home. My memories of Aptos High School include P.E. runs up and down the hills of campus in foggy mornings as well as entertaining my teachers with a BBC-inspired accent as I read passages aloud. I graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Mathematics and earned a J.D. from Mitchell Hamline in St. Paul, Minnesota. The generous full-tuition scholarship for all three years of law school enticed me there! In my pre-education life, I gained experience in tech, business incubation, government and nonprofits.  

My history of working with scientists, artists, lawyers, teachers, activists, engineers and entrepreneurs in high technology companies, social justice institutions and non-profits helps me build a vision for what my students can do with their futures as unique adults. This is very helpful when I work with students who are finding their strengths in 9th, 10th and 11th grades.  

I began working as a college consultant in late 2012, in the Bay Area which is how I became very familiar with local and international schools, such as Monta Vista, Lynbrook, Cupertino, Fremont, Gunn, Paly, Menlo Atherton, Valley Christian, Amador Valley, Dougherty, Lowell, St. Francis, Archbishop Mitty, King’s Academy, Harker, Carlmont, Crystal Springs Upland, Shanghai American (Puxi, Pudong), Taipei American, and Mount Madonna. Whether encouraging students to work on their applications with the promise of pizza, using a whiteboard to capture ideas for essays, or discussing college lists with families, I have found various ways to make the application process easier and am happy to share those methods with students and families.  

I believe education is a creative endeavor and that we are all in the process of constantly learning and growing, at all ages. I make a point to truly listen, paying close attention so that I can create a space that allows my students to consider new ideas for themselves so that they can see what is truly important and thus discover who they are.   

My students have been accepted into undergraduate, graduate and summer programs for engineering, business and other academic destinations, including: University of California (all nine undergraduate  campuses), California State University campuses, Oregon State University, University of Oregon, Pennsylvania State University, Michigan State University, Rutgers University, Arizona State University, The State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Arizona, Evergreen State University, UC Berkeley Global Management at Haas, Brown University, Boston University BS/MD, Case Western University, University of Chicago (undergraduate and MBA), Columbia, Cornell Engineering, Carnegie Mellon College of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Johns Hopkins University, Hampshire College, NYU Stern School of Business,  Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, University of Michigan, Rhode Island School of Design, Savannah College of Art and Design, Santa Clara University, Pitzer College, Colgate University, University of Southern California, USC Marshall School of Business (undergraduate and MBA), University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington Honors, Washington University at Saint Louis, Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program, Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, University of Chicago Research in the Biological Sciences and UC COSMOS.