Bio

Heather V McCowen, PhD

Heather McCowen, Ph.D., has spent more than three decades doing one thing exceptionally well: helping people find their place in the world of higher education. Her path has taken her from the audition rooms of Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts — where she began her admissions career straight out of Northwestern — to the hallways of the Longy School of Music at Bard in Cambridge, the stages of Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts, and finally to ChiArts, Chicago's beloved arts high school, where she built the college advising program from scratch in 2011 and guided more than 1,100 dancer-writer-musician-actor-artist humans toward their futures. She has evaluated talent, negotiated scholarships, demystified audition processes, and decoded financial aid packages across every art form imaginable — and a few that will surprise you. Today, she channels all of that into her own consulting company, College App Study Hall, because the college admissions process is genuinely bonkers, and someone needs to be honest about that.

What makes Heather different isn't just the Ph.D. or the title-after-title résumé — it's that she has been the arts student. A bassoonist trained at Northwestern's Bienen School of Music and a former member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, she has performed alongside the Dallas, Fort Worth, Shreveport, and Indian Hill Symphonies, served as Principal Bassoonist with the Symphony of Oak Park and River Forest, and currently plays in the Northshore Concert Band. She doesn't just advise arts students; she understands what it means to build a life and a career around something you love and cannot imagine giving up.

When she's not coaching students or wrangling college applications, Heather is fully and enthusiastically living her Chicago life. She and her husband Paul are raising their son Theo (8th grade, hockey player, full-time cool kid) and their Australian Cattle Dog, Clybourn, in the South Loop. She is a devoted Blackhawks fan who doesn't just watch hockey — she plays it, suiting up for the Chicago Frozen Snappers. In the quieter moments, you'll find her sewing her own wardrobe, crocheting various items of questionable necessity, or deep in a really good book. She has a lot of thoughts about all of it.

She also has a lot of thoughts about college admissions, which she shares freely and with zero sugarcoating on Instagram and TikTok at @heatherm_collegedoc. If you like real talk from someone who has seen this process from every angle — as an admissions dean, a high school counselor, and a consultant — you're in the right place.

Follow Heather: @heatherm_collegedoc on Instagram | @heatherm_collegedoc on TikTok

Education

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS
Ph.D. Higher Education Administration, Minor: Marketing

Harvard University
Coursework completed toward PhD and transferred to UNT

SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY
M.M. Bassoon Performance

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
B.M. Bassoon Performance

Activities & Affiliations
• IECA, Associate Member