Cohort Session Scripts

The format they need to fit: four sessions, 90 minutes each, run weekly, to a room of up to ten families with both the parent and the student present together (company/strategy/business-plan.md §5.1). That parent-and-student-together format is deliberate, not incidental — the business plan is explicit that most of the friction between a parent and a university-bound student comes from mismatched expectations about how Canadian post-secondary actually works, and every session script needs to be written with that friction point in mind, not just written as a lecture aimed at whichever of the two happens to be listening more closely.

flowchart LR
    S1["Session 1<br/>What universities<br/>actually expect"] --> S2["Session 2<br/>How coursework<br/>really works"]
    S2 --> S3["Session 3<br/>Speaking the<br/>institution's language"]
    S3 --> S4["Session 4<br/>Decisions ahead<br/>(term plan written)"]

Session 1 — What Canadian universities actually expect, and what they never tell you

This is the founder’s core differentiator in session form: the institutional-insider knowledge described in company/brand/positioning.md, translated into something a room of parents can act on in the first ninety minutes. It needs to cover the gap between what a university’s marketing promises and how registration, advising capacity, and support services actually function day to day — grounded in specifics from having worked inside these institutions, not generic advice a family could find in a brochure. The script still needs to be written; what exists so far is the thesis it has to prove.

Session 2 — How your student’s time and coursework really work

Study strategy that survives first term. This session needs to move past generic study-skills content (which is widely available elsewhere and not the practice’s differentiator) into the specific, practical mechanics of a Canadian post-secondary term: how course load actually translates into weekly workload, where students commonly misjudge the ramp-up, and what a realistic first-term schedule looks like versus what a syllabus implies. The script still needs to be written.

Session 3 — Speaking the institution’s language

Email, office hours, asking for help without losing face. This session is explicitly about a skill many families new to the Canadian post-secondary system have never had modeled for them — how to ask an institution for help in the register and format that institution expects, without the request being read as either too informal or too high-stakes. The cultural-fluency angle matters here specifically, since what counts as an appropriately deferential or appropriately direct request for help varies by the family’s own cultural background, and part of the founder’s value is being able to bridge that explicitly rather than assuming one universal script works for every family in the room. The script still needs to be written.

Session 4 — Decisions ahead

Course loads, programs, work, and how to make them without panic. This is the session where the term plan each family leaves with (see consulting/curriculum/workbook.md) actually gets written, so its script needs to function partly as a facilitation guide for that in-session exercise, not purely as content to be delivered. The script still needs to be written.