Meilin Obinata

I’m Meilin Obinata, Senior College Admissions Counselor at Insight Education — and one of the few counselors you’ll meet who holds both a mathematics degree and a law degree!

That combination isn’t accidental. It reflects how I approach everything: rigorously and strategically, but always in service of the human story at the center. Numbers tell me what’s possible. Language tells me who a student actually is. My job is to help them bring both together into an application that is honest, compelling, and impossible to overlook.

I’ve been doing this work since 2012, and I came to college counseling through an unusual path — one I’m genuinely grateful for. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Mathematics, I built a career that took me across technology, business incubation, government, and nonprofits, working alongside scientists, artists, lawyers, teachers, activists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. That breadth wasn’t a detour. It gave me something I consider one of my greatest assets as a counselor: a real, firsthand understanding of how many remarkable lives a well-educated, curious person can build. When I sit with a student who isn’t yet sure what direction they want to go, I’m not guessing at the possibilities. I’ve seen them, lived alongside them, and I love helping students start to imagine their own.

I then earned my Juris Doctor from Mitchell Hamline School of Law on a full-tuition scholarship — an experience that sharpened my thinking and deepened my appreciation for careful, persuasive argument. It also reminded me what it feels like to be evaluated on your ability to make a compelling case for yourself. That’s exactly what a college application is, and I know how to help students make theirs.

Over the years, my students have earned admission to some of the most competitive programs in the country: Columbia University, Cornell University Engineering, Carnegie Mellon College of Computer Science, Brown University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley’s Global Management Program at Haas, NYU Stern, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, USC Marshall, the University of Michigan, UIUC, Purdue, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Washington Honors Program, and all nine UC undergraduate campuses, among many others. I’ve also guided students into wonderful fits at RISD, Savannah College of Art and Design, Hampshire College, and Pitzer — because the right school looks different for every student, and I take that seriously.

Beyond admissions, I love helping students build the kind of profiles that start opening doors well before senior year. My students have been accepted to the Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program (SIMR), UC COSMOS, the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, and the University of Chicago Research in the Biological Sciences, among others.

I know the Bay Area high school landscape deeply — including Monta Vista, Lynbrook, Cupertino, Saratoga, Gunn, Palo Alto, Mission San Jose, and many others across the region — which means I genuinely understand the academic environments, grading contexts, and competitive pressures your student lives with every day. That context matters, and I pay attention to it.

My approach starts with listening — really listening. I create space for students to think out loud, explore what they actually care about, and find the thread that connects who they are to where they want to go. I don’t believe in cookie-cutter applications, and I’ve never met a student who was as one-dimensional as their first draft tried to be.

Outside of work, I’m an avid photographer and a devoted open-source enthusiast — which probably tells you something about how I see the world. I like capturing things as they truly are, and I believe the best tools should be accessible to everyone. I’m also a proud Bay Area native with deep roots in the Santa Cruz area, and I’ll always have a soft spot for Aptos where it all started.

Your student has a story worth telling well. I’d love to help them tell it.