Sanya was two years into her nonprofit career when she walked into my office, polished and prepared but carrying a question she couldn’t answer: “Is this all there is?”

She had ticked every box—top undergraduate program, prestigious fellowships, meaningful work. Yet she felt boxed in. “I don’t just want to keep doing good work. I want to shape the systems that decide what counts as good.”

We started not with schools, but with intention. I asked her to write three personal mission statements—each with a different lens: local impact, policy reform, and innovation. From those, we built a values map and used it to create a weighted decision-making matrix for graduate programs.

The matrix wasn’t just about rankings. It considered course flexibility, proximity to fieldwork, mentorship philosophy, and campus culture. She rated each, not with numbers, but with story fragments: “This place reminds me of why I started.”

To organize her process, we built a handcrafted Progress Tracker. Categories such as “SOP Drafts,” “Scholarship Essays,” and “Alumni Conversations” were displayed on a board by her desk. She added stickers—mood emojis—to reflect her feelings while completing each task. This subtle touch made the process personal.

When she received admits from two of her dream universities, the choice was no longer paralyzing. She picked the one that made her feel like a builder, not just a policy student.

“Before this,” she said, “I was navigating in someone else’s language. Now I’m writing my map.”