Chuck Hughes, The Road To College

 

92-171 Chuck Hughes

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Chuck Hughes,

 

Will Bachman  00:03

Hello, and welcome to The 92 Report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Chuck Hughes, who I remember cheering on when our class, when our team won the national championships in hockey, when we were freshmen. Chuck, welcome to the show.

 

Chuck Hughes  00:26

Well, thanks for that introduction, Will. And I guess it’s memory lane today.

 

Will Bachman  00:31

Yeah, so Chuck, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Chuck Hughes  00:37

Sure, you know it was an unexpected journey in many ways, but when I finished, I ended up playing a year of minor league hockey, and part of it was I had Olympic and professional aspirations, and yes, we were rather successful as a hockey program during, you know, my four years, but I think the interesting thing for me, for all the amazing things that Harvard provided, I was really intimidated by the recruiting process, so many of those who will listen will remember going through OCS and recruiting, and I did one info session with Proctor and Gamble, and my parents didn’t go to college. My dad, you know, was a Boston police officer. It scared the bejesus out of me, and so I didn’t do any more recruiting with any of the consulting firms, the financial services firms, and I said I’m going to be a hockey player, and ultimately my junior year at Harvard, I got my teaching certificate, which was great, because UTEP no longer exists, but there was a long period of time that the university had a program through the grad school of education that would get you teaching certification, and I ended up finishing that one year hockey, and I thought about playing another year, but I didn’t see a path to the NHL, unfortunately. And we have Harvard degrees. I wanted to put my degree to work, and so I ended up going back and teaching my old high school. Catholic Memorial opened up a middle school, so I got certified to teach social studies while I was at Harvard, and I went back to Catholic Memorial High School, and I taught math, science, and English. So, go figure. I was teaching outside my discipline along the way. I was then getting my master’s full time in political science at Boston College, and trying to figure out law school, maybe that’s the next path. And I remember Keith Light, he was a proctor in Canada, and I become friends with him at Harvard, playing squash once in a while, and he reached out to me. He said, “Hey, I’m going to be taking a job in Stanford Admissions, so I know there’s going to be a late opening at Harvard Admissions, and I think it’d be great for that opportunity. And so I put my name in, and ultimately, in 1995 was hired to work in admissions at Harvard, so I did that for five years. Great experience. Became a world traveler at the time. We did a lot of visits, so I’ve been to Alaska for admissions. I actually, the first thing somebody told me when I got assigned Alaska was, you have to go to North Pole High School, which it’s not at the North Pole, it’s about an hour west of Fairbanks, and there was no reason we were not going to get a kid in, although you know we’ve taken kids from Kodiak Island and Kotzebue, and really like rural communities with Native Alaskan, you know, applicants that have been great, but I went, did a college fair info session, sent a postcard back to admissions to say that I went to the North Pole, which was lots of fun. So, had a great experience, learned a lot about, you know, how the sausage is made in college admissions, and what we did at Harvard, and, you know, some of the great experiences. And I lived on campus for three years, so fair undergrad resident freshman year, but then two years in Hall Worthy, and then one year in Strauss A, and so had some great students in my dorms along the way, including BJ Novak, who was a producer of The Office, which was kind of cool to watch him go through his progression, but a lot of other great kids as well. When I finished, I like to use the line, when you work at Harvard, you can’t eat prestige. And so I was getting married, wanted to have a family, and I can’t even, like, fathom the salary I made at 29 years old as an admissions officer. So the unique opportunity came for me to go to monster.com and I spent three years as a product manager at Monster, trying to build out their high school and college businesses, and along the way I wrote my book about my college admissions experiences, called What It Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League and other highly selective colleges, and I had no plan to go into the path that I am currently in, which is education consulting, but I was getting hit up by so many people around Monster and Greater Boston saying people are going to want to know your story and they’re going to want to understand what elite college is looking for, so book comes out in 2003 and you know at that same time I decide I’m having my first child and I’m going to start up my own consulting business which was. Incredible, stressful, but incredible, and I’ve been running my practice for 23 years now. So, july 4 will start my 24th year company road to college that I’ve been mentoring and working with kids around the world, helping them think through this process, and I’m going to my second wedding of a former client slash now, friend, I’ve had one client who took a semester off from Harvard, who actually lived at my house for the summer while he was working for the New England Patriots. So, I’ve really built great friendships along the way. I’ve stayed at people’s homes when I’ve gone on vacation, so I’m not just helping and mentoring the process, but that’s my career path. I have two amazing daughters who are almost 20 and almost 23 was married in 99 divorced in 23 and that’s where I am. Well, that’s that’s my career arc.

 

Will Bachman  05:56

So you wrote a whole book about the topic, which we can go and read, but give us some of the insights into what it’s actually like as a Harvard admissions officer. A lot of us, well, all of us applied, and many of us have kids who have applied or plan to tell us a little bit about, you know, what surprised you being on the inside,

 

Chuck Hughes  06:22

just how hard it is to pick a class. I mean, you know, everybody has an opinion about the process, but you know when you get 40 to 50,000 applicants, and the reality is maybe 20,000 are good, but 10,000 are great. So, how do you get from 10,000 to the 2000 students that you’re choosing when you’re trying to accommodate all the competing interests from faculty member interests across disciplines to the arts that Harvard loves to support to the sports programs to other dynamic interests, right? I mean, we’re trying to bring in students who represent, look at this amazing group of people that we have in our class, who are leaders in government and leaders in entertainment and leaders in education and leaders in the business world, right. So it’s hard, and the future’s test, like, how do you predict how these 18 year olds may or may not represent the values of what Harvard hopes you know will will be part of their future, so to me that was really enlightening, and the other piece, like at least as you move it forward to today, because obviously I left admissions in 2000 the core tenets haven’t changed, you know what it takes to get in requires work and requires for many kids drive, not necessarily an insatiable drive that creates, you know, mental health issues for the kids, or even mental health issues for the parents along the way, but you know the reality is that these are really talented kids who you know keep engaged, keep active, and want to change the world, so for me it’s a little bit harder in some regards, because you know when we talk about our alumni network, many of us have done well financially and have an education, and the adage of to whom you know much is given, much is expected, and the threshold for a kid who comes from dirt poor poverty who’s found a way to achieve academically and get great test scores, probably isn’t the same, right? Because Harvard does social engineer, right? They want kids who are coming from, you know, the feel-good stories of abject poverty, you know, from homeless to Harvard, as it were, you know, when you think about, you know, that story, so, so, so, that to me, like, is probably a lesson for you know, aspiring Harvard parents who might hear this is that you know your kids have to be driven, and as parents we get blinded, and we want to drive our, our kids, but Harvard does a really good job of seeing kids who are self-motivated and directed versus the ones that are product of helicopter parents.

 

Will Bachman  09:01

Yeah, what do do you think Harvard is trying to optimize for with the class? So, and it may be multiple objectives. It seems that one natural objective would be, in terms of self preservation, would be to get a class where at least some members of the class they can project are going to be, you know, financially successful, like, okay, we have data and science to project, like, okay, this kind of profile they’re going to be financially successful, and the type of person that donates to Harvard, right, so there’s probably my guess is that there’s some of that it’s doesn’t seem to be like, oh, we want to purely optimize solely on like academic success for people, like we want to have a class full of like everyone being a professor. Is there some mix that they’re trying to get to? We want to have, you know, a certain number be like top-notch professors, we want. A certain number to be, you know, be people who are going to donate to Harvard. Certain people will be like successful in the arts, or, you know, terms of geographic background. Like, how are thinking about,

 

Chuck Hughes  10:11

I mean,

 

Speaker 1  10:12

that’s,

 

Chuck Hughes  10:12

but that’s why I say it’s hard will, and you know, it’s it’s overrated to talk about the money part, right? In the sense of, there are only a small number of people who can give at a level that a it makes that huge of a difference for the university and b that it has that much of an influence on the process and those people know who they are and but you know if you’re taking if you’re admitting 2000 kids to get to 1642 or 1650 whatever the number happens to be in a given year you know is that 50 kids, and do we know them? Probably right. People in circles know who those families are, but you can’t project whether the kids are going to give them money. It’s whether the parents, so I think we should move past that and say their targets can change, right? Priorities and objectives can change because Supreme Court makes a ruling, the Israel war comes, and there’s great backlash, right? Do you know education models change, right? Like, where are we going with computer science? So, you know, standard CS degree may not be what it was for the last 20 years, as AI, you know, makes many of those jobs disposable, right? So it’s always a moving target for that Dean, and Dean Fitzsimmons, who’s a legend, right? He admitted all of us. How many years does he have left? He’s in his early 80s, so does he have two years left? And so when he decides to step down with all the institutional knowledge that he has and the way he represents the priorities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, that will change potentially, right? So what I would say is they definitely want to have a class of 50% of the kids who get financial aid, that is pretty evident way that they do it, and the balancing act of, you know, are they kids who have household incomes less than 100 grand, or, you know, is it less than 200 because obviously the cost of living is going up, where Harvard and Princeton, Yale, and Amherst College are really doing a great job of supporting families financially who have household incomes less than 200,000 and even upwards of that. So, I think that’s one priority that will continue to be important to the university, but the rest of the makeup and mix is, yes, we want professors, and yes, we want hedge fund managers, and yes, we want actors, and you know, we, we want to fill all, like, we want education leaders, we want political leaders, and that’s that’s threading the needle of the Dean of Admissions, trying to cultivate a culture within admissions to say, look for kids who might be great in law, and look for kids who might be great as entrepreneurs, and look for, you know, kids who might be special in their theatrical drama, you know, interests. It’s hard. That’s why I love that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. I get to be part of watching teenagers grow and evolve and develop their goals and plan for a future.

 

Will Bachman  13:00

How does the university think about athletics and athletes? So, I think I saw something about how Harvard has one of the longest lists of varsity sports of any school. You probably know the details better than I do, but and they continue to add some, maybe lesser known or lesser, less popular,

 

Chuck Hughes  13:21

they added women’s rugby, and so 43 varsity sports. You know, that’s interesting. I mean, I think that’s something that’s periodically has to get considered. So sports is important in the context of Harvard’s mission, right? Like, how does Harvard maintain Division One athletic programs without sacrificing its academic standards and its educational goals, it’s tough, you know. Aaron McDermott has a tough job, in the sense of she’s got a limited budget. I would argue, I mean, so I’m chair of the Friends of Harvard Hockey, so I’m responsible for raising about 400,000 a year, and we’ve built, you know, any $9 million endowment that’ll be 11 five in the next three years, you know, over the last 12 years, and we had a $1 million endowment, and that money that we raised through Harvard Alumni is basically funding 23 to 25% of the men’s and women’s hockey budgets. Now you’re asking me from somebody who’s an outsider but an insider, in the sense of I don’t think Harvard across the river supports sports by any stretch of the imagination in a way that allows them to compete the way I would like them to compete at many of the sports at the Division One level. That said, coaches find success, and so, in part, you know, you gotta, those coaches have to work really hard at recruiting to identify the right talent to work closely with admissions to say these are the standards and these are this is what you have to bring in and then coaching these kids because I had a wonderful lunch yesterday with with Mason Langenbrunner, who’s the captain of Harvard, outgoing captain, and he’s doing a start. Up energy nutrition like protein bar for women with, you know, seven ingredients, and this is like a very competitive, you know, product business line, but he always talked about, like, when I came to the rink, and he’s hoping that this will work well, and he’s, they did their own seed funding, and he’s been working on this for two years, and they hit 50,000 in sales. I’m like, so he’s got a chance, right? This kind of energizes me. Why I stay involved with the friends of Harvard hockey, but he said, and this is what, like, you know, Harvard kids are. When I came to the rink, I was totally focused from two to 6pm that was everything to me. But when I left, I had other interests. I had friends who weren’t hockey players. I have this entrepreneurial instinct in business. I’ve been networking. I want to think about my future. So, when you talk about athletes like that, really is what we do, and probably the other Ivy Leagues do differently than the other Division One sports teams, but it’s hard. You need a very special kid, and the type of kid for those students to be excellent in athletics and still be that kind of kid that Mason Langenbrunner is, where you know he does well academically and he has a vision for a startup that he’s been cultivating the last two years of his college experience, while putting 30 hours a weekend to Division One hockey, that I think that’s what I find really interesting, and what I like about, you know, what I like extra coaches for some of these programs. What I like a little bit more funding support to, you know, pay the coaches a little bit better. What I, what I like the dining hall food to be better for athletes, but those, that’s not my bailiwick, right? Like, that’s just me. We won a national title, and I was drafted by the New Jersey Devil, so I always want better, and if I criticize, it’s our class in 92 right? All my friends talk about, you know, oh, everybody’s happy at Yale. Why are people at Harvard miserable? We’re not miserable, we just like to complain, like we like to hold our bosses accountable, right? Like, and to me, I think Harvard sometimes tries to be all things to all people, and it’s like, you know, what you should do, should be the best in the world at what you do, so if you have to cut from 41 sports to 28 now, by the way, this is just me, you cut, if you have to cut a few dance programs to make the dance programs you have amazing, like our dance programs are okay, there are a couple that are good, right, like, and no offense to anybody who’s listening, but you get my point, Will, the Crimson is like that’s a juggernaut, like that’s a phenomenal like organization, but the students drive, and not necessarily the university, so that’s just my philosophy. It’s like, let’s do it, let’s do it well, instead of be a dilettante, and kind of, you know, be less than average. That’s just my opinion.

 

Will Bachman  17:39

What does the admissions office know about how student athletes at Harvard end up in their career? Do they tend to be actually more financially successful or more successful in certain fields than not? I’m curious about that.

 

Chuck Hughes  17:59

So, I mean, I obviously I left in 2000 so I can’t tell you if they’ve done any longitudinal studies. I think a lot of it was anecdotal,

 

Will Bachman  18:06

yeah,

 

Chuck Hughes  18:06

right, in terms of like who gives the most money. All I can tell you is my program and my guys, we give, right? So, like, you know, I just told you what I’ve raised, I’ve raised, so that’s just that was the endowment, but you know, average 400,000 a year for the last, you know, 12 years.

 

Will Bachman  18:22

Wow.

 

Chuck Hughes  18:23

So, if I’m looking at, we’ve raised 12 to $15 million since 2014 for hockey, and that’s Harvard hockey alumni, men’s and women’s, to support these programs, and that doesn’t include, because I know some of these givers have given you know they give a quarter of a million to hockey, and they give a million across the river. So the argument was always that athletes give more. I don’t know if that’s true in other sports, because I know where, you know, lacrosse does great fundraising, hockey does great fundraising, and maybe a couple of other sports, but you know, I don’t know if people have looked at that, right? If people looked at, you know, do do blue collar kids give the most money? I think part of it is a tricky balance, right, saying because there are arguments that blue collar hungry kids, they look at money change in your life, right? I read, was it the 2000 I thought it was the 2024 maybe graduating survey, it was kind of this isn’t what admissions would be excited about 72% of the Harvard graduates wanted to go into consulting, finance, or IT, right? Go to go to Silicon Valley.

 

Will Bachman  19:30

Yeah,

 

Chuck Hughes  19:30

and that’s probably doesn’t surprise you, will, but we want more people going into service, right, running a nonprofit. We want more people going into education, we want people going into law, but one of the problems I think in the culture and the cost of living in America, especially in cities, that kids are being driven by money, and they’re told, like, “I gotta go work at Goldman” or “I gotta go to Microsoft” because I gotta make money in banks, so I can plan for my future, versus doing something that changes people’s lives,

 

Will Bachman  19:59

yeah. Yeah, what else surprised you about being in the admissions office that was different than what you expected?

 

Chuck Hughes  20:09

Honestly, like, I wouldn’t use the word surprise, I think eye-opening of how grateful I was to have that opportunity to fit a profile, not only was I, you know, a recruited athlete, which probably saved me, but I was also third in my class, and we called it NCBC, which is non-college blue collar, and I was like a Boston high school kid, and like Harvard has, when you talk about institutional priorities, I think like 20 or 25 kids got in from Cambridge and Latin last year, like Harvard pays attention to the relationship with the city of Boston and the city of Cambridge. This is a funny story, right, and it’s nothing that I can’t tell, but like in my third year of admissions, Harvard was buying all the Allston Brighton property, right, to develop everything the engineering labs, and at the time, Menino lost his mind, right, taking all this land off of tax rolls for Harvard, and his son and I went to high school together. So, I don’t know, well, I mean, Dean Fitzsimmons knew, but Joe O’Donnell was a big donor, was very close to the mayor, close to President Rudinstein at the time, so I had a meeting with, you know, Fitz President Rubenstein, Joe O’Donnell, and like the story was like Manina was asking O’Donnell, like I want, like I want Harvard needs to do something, he’s like, How much do you want, and Money was like, this much, like, puts his arms out, and one of the things he asked was for guaranteed admission for Boston High School, you know, students, and we didn’t do that, because Harvard would never do that, but, like, we committed to some programs to undergrad admissions and the Ed school to do, like, outreach initiatives, and, of course, like, we’ve always been sensitive, so that was kind of an interesting surprise, right? But, but Harvard doesn’t promise anything to anybody, right? Like, they want to keep this, these slots open to take the best candidates they possibly can.

 

Will Bachman  22:03

Yeah, tell us a bit about your journey as you know an entrepreneur running your own education consulting firm. Tell us about what your firm does.

 

Chuck Hughes  22:14

So basically, my firm is a mentoring and consulting program that tries to educate families on the process, and help, like, to me, I’ve never, like, I’m low key, people don’t know about me, unless, like, the Fight Club, right? Don’t talk about the Fight Club, I don’t charge crazy rates, I get to choose my families, and really, what I ask is, I want families to commit to exploring their children’s interest and supporting them on their path to what their goals are, and of course, many of them are trying to say, like, what do I have to do to get into an Ivy League school, and I say, well, you have to work, and things have to come together, because for these kids, this may be the first time they’re told no, right? They’re highly successful, they’re motivated, they’re becoming leaders of the, you know, the student government at school, they’re doing their theater, they’re playing their sports, and they’re win, win, win, right, and they’re getting great grades, and they’re getting great test scores, and they still might not get chosen, and so I’m trying to educate them a little bit about that, but you know, I kind of have to battle and work with the concept of how do you help a 16, you know, 17 year old find his or her interests and how do you help them doing in a way that’s meaningful and fulfilling to them that also may also be interesting to college admissions offices and that’s not always easy because some you know if you’re going to like computer science you can do computer science it’s hard to get into these places unless you’re like really really excellent at it, because everybody’s chasing engineering and computer science right now, so you know, talk a little bit about that. Also, try to calm people down and de-stress. It’s easy, right, because I’m not going through the process, and sometimes it’s hard to see the forest through the trees when you’re a stressed-out parent, and like you live in Manhattan, and you want to be able to tell everybody at a cocktail party that your daughter is at Columbia or at Harvard, right? Because that is a status symbol to some, but really, like for me, our work is you don’t have to meet with somebody every day in grades nine and 10 to have periodic conversations about are you working towards your goals. One of the things that I find really interesting is that motivated kids who are always on the go, like they just go and they just achieve, but some have to be more intentional, right? And sitting down and saying what’s important to you, and they’re only so many hours in a day after you’re done with school and you’re done with your homework. How do you want to use those hours, and are you okay with knowing you may have to grind a little bit more, you may have to cut some of the things out of your life, and some families are like, you know, what I think it’s really important for my kid to have downtime, and if this is what it takes, I’m not interested, or others are like, well, that’s just my personality, I like to be busy all the time, like I get in my own head if I’m not engaged with 17 activities. So it’s kind of working through that, and then the other part is the balancing act, which I’m sure many families who, or parents who will listen to this podcast, will know Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and honestly, might be one of the worst books for college admissions in the world, because what does he talk about? He talks about studies that say if you put 10,000 hours into something, you’ll be an expert, so, so you’ll be that expert flamenco guitarist who gets into Harvard. You’ll be that expert, you know, hockey player who gets into Harvard. You’ll be that expert, you know, computer scientist and engineer who develops something and gets into Harvard. And the truth is, like, we try to push our kids, but our kids are human beings, and they don’t always have the drive that we had to get into Harvard, and I, that I’ve learned that firsthand. My younger daughter is a hockey player at Hamilton. She had a good life. I’m not rich, but I’m not poor. She didn’t have the moxie in the dry. She’s awesome, she’s amazing. She’s playing hockey at Hamilton, but did I have a dream that someday she’d be playing hockey at Harvard? 100% But then you watch them go through the process in grades 910, and 11, and you’re like, you never give up on your kid, but then you’re like, yeah, she’s not me. And by the way, I say that because I see so many first-gen college and blue-collar Ivy League kids, right, are adults now, who they got there because of their grit, their moxie, their life stories, and they’re crushing it financially, and so their kids have all these luxuries, and you know, things that they didn’t have, and those kids don’t have the same drive. Some do. I’m not casting, you know, broad generalizations, but it’s just so easy to see when the kids kind of like, you know, whatever, I do whatever my parents tell me, or you know, I’m just not into it. I’d actually rather go to the beach, or you know, go to the salon, or you know, hang out with my bros, and you know, and those kids are not likely going to end up where we went, right, because they just don’t have that same hunger, and that’s okay, by the way.

 

Will Bachman  26:59

Best practice, when should, if a family was going to have their one of their kids work with you, what do you recommend as sort of like the ideal best practice time to start, and maybe that’s eighth grade, ninth grade, I don’t know, and then like what’s the sort of typical engagement look like, do you meet once a quarter in ninth grade and once a month in 10th grade, or like, what’s the sort of path, and, and what do you do in those sessions?

 

Chuck Hughes  27:32

So it’s actually, well, real, very different by each family. Some families, like, beget it, they have vision, their lives are their kids are active and engaged and happy, and they don’t need to meet me at all, or maybe they need one conversation to just understand the landscape and whether, like, what they’re doing works for what their goals are, because you know, not everybody has to go to Harvard, there might be kids who are trying to say, How do I, how do I end up at NYU, how do I end up at my local state institution? How, how do I go to a place that’s a good fit? So, like, are you on the right track, right? And so you also gotta understand your kids, like, I don’t, I will not meet with children in middle school, it’s like that to me, they’re not mature enough to understand what we’re talking about. And in New York City, for example, like that may happen with some consultancies, but it won’t be with me, but it only raises the anxiety that every decision a child makes is about college instead of growth, failing, picking yourself back up, intellectual curiosity, learning for the sake of learning, because then it becomes ends justifies the means, and it’s not right, like it’s not me, it’s not what I want to do, and I’ve been doing this 23 years, and I can do it another 20, I won’t, but I can do it another, you know, 10, and cut back my practice, and take on, you know, five or 10 families I like, instead of having to work with 40 to 50 kids a year, which is a high volume number, but I do it because I want to keep my rates reasonable, I had 15 kids applied to Harvard last year, 11 got in. Like, I know what I could charge for that kind of history, and I have a 50% admit rate over the last 20 years. Now, do I have a couple development cases here and there every year? Do I get up one athlete a year? Sure, but I get my awesome Chinese girl, two doctors in Austin, Texas, who was just amazing, and she got an MIT and Harvard, and she had no connections, right? So, like, for me, I just think doing an hour coaching session with a parent in eighth grade or ninth grade, if they’re anxious, is good. I won’t typically meet with the kids until the second semester of freshman year. Now, some. oh my god, that’s too late. We haven’t developed a hook. We have our kids not on a path to winning a USA Math Olympiad. Well, like that stuff.. like some of the foundations are actually happening in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, and I don’t want to be a social engineer and like determine like what your robotic child should be doing, right? For me, it’s like you let them grow and develop their passions, and then you try to cultivate it, and I kind of take the model of, in your first two years, a quarterly meeting is more than enough, you’re busy, right? You set three months worth of goals, did you achieve it or not, and then you reset, and then yes, like when I, when I get into, like, after sophomore year, we start getting into the college search, and then it picks up a little bit, and then right now, like, I’m about two, and I’m heading into the summer application work, right, where we’re working on essays and the apps, and like that’s really time consuming to helping kids think about their voice and telling their narrative, because at the private colleges and universities, like who you are and how you project and present yourself does matter.

 

Will Bachman  30:44

So, in what are the kinds of questions that you’re asking the kids in freshman or sophomore year?

 

Chuck Hughes  30:56

What do they love to learn on their own? Because look, busy school, especially at the level we’re talking about here, they’re academic institutions, first and foremost, so critical thinkers, kids who go down rabbit holes reading, trying to understand who kids read anymore, because with social media and reading, reading and writing and communication is still really important in this process, especially because there’s some correlation between the amount you read and how well you’ll do on your critical reading section of your SAT, or you know, the reading and English sections of the AC T. You can be at a real advantage if you actually like to read. So, trying to figure that out, do students have a vision of what discipline, broadly, humanities, social sciences, stem, right, like trying to get a sense of that, and then talking about ways, because some parents have a vision they can execute, but others are like, we don’t really know where we’re scientists, but our child wants law, right, our, you know, we’re, we’re, you know, working in finance, and you know, I was an economics major at Harvard, or wherever, and my kid wants to do biomedical engineering. We don’t know anybody who works in a biomedical research lab, so helping these families understand and develop plans of action to get engaged and explore those pieces early, like to me that’s important, and also like value judgments about, okay, like if you’re a dilettante and you do a little bit of everything. The unfortunate thing is that’s not great for succeeding at the top 20 colleges, unless you’re networked in, or you’re high enough level at three or four things that your school case, but that’s dangerous, like if you’re talking to an Ivy school, like to be that without having a network or being a recruited athlete, that’s not likely going to generate good outcomes, and trying to help these kids narrow down. What do you mean by network development cases, like, or, or if you’re not a development case, you’re best friends with a trustee, you know, on the board, right, and I will get some of those, you know, kids, and those kids can be, you know, in the Harvard world, like a 2322 or a 2332 we’re codes on the, you know, if you looked at the lawsuit, we gave things on a one to six level, like in a one is like an academic national, right, winning, you know, Intel Science and Engineering Fair, you know, for your state, or you know, getting published, or you know, some something like that, and a two is like really strong grades and test scores, and a bunch of fives in your AP, but there’s no next level of academic, and you know, research, development, you know, publishing in the Concord Review, things that are showing true scholarship, that’s what most of the kids at Harvard are, right? I’d say 15% or one, maybe 10% or one academics, and those kids, you know, USA Math Olympiad, and you know, they’ve won recognition for a patent that they established in some drug development, and those kids, they’re unicorns, right, and we know them. Most of the kids do two things, three things really well, and that’s that’s what I’m trying to help kids as they transition from sophomore to junior year, saying, look, the stakes are increasing, it’s AP IB time, it’s S A T A C T time, so you’ve got to put time into that, and like, what is your hook? What is your distinguishing excellence? And there are very few kids that have five distinguishing excellences, right? It might be three, right? Like, I can see a researcher who’s a musician who’s an exceptional leader at the high school, right? But it’s hard to do much more than that in those kids, right? They’re going to bed at, you know, midnight and getting up at six, and you know, I’m telling them to try to sleep more.

 

Will Bachman  34:48

Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  34:51

Let’s turn to some spot questions. What’s a, what’s a habit that you have intentionally developed? Sometime over the last five or 10 years that you would recommend.

 

Chuck Hughes  35:05

Oh boy, well, without being too TMI, I think post my divorce and in my midlife crisis, and thinking about who am I and who do I want to be, for me it’s it’s physical fitness, and yes, I was an athlete, but I raised children, and I worked a lot, and it’s easy to get caught up in that, and I’d say last three years for me it’s become exercise, whether it’s running, like I get up between 530 and six every morning, and I’ll have my coffee sometimes, but I will always work out, so for me, you know, like that’s the mental health release that I have. We’re all different personalities, but I get in my own head, as we are all want to do. About, I think you know, this is a little bit of an aside, but this is me, and for people who know me, who will listen to this video, yeah, this is Chuck, like I’m an overachiever, I got where I was because my dad pushed me, and I responded to that like out of fear of failure. Right, was I ever going to be good enough for my dad? And we had my dad had a tough life. My dad served in Vietnam, and I won’t tell you his story, other than when I was 10 years old as a Boston police officer, he killed a Vietnam vet in a line of self-defense. It was really hard on our family. Didn’t sleep for a year, he was in enough foster care, and he, so he was a provider, like, circle the wagons, like he’ll do anything for his family. But that also meant that I had, this is the classic, you know, like, you know, military strict dad who pushed and pushed and didn’t know when to let off the brakes and I think my own personal anxiety was, you know, whatever be good enough, that’s why I didn’t charge crazy rates, I wanted to be good enough for my clients, right, I want to be good enough for my children, and life never goes as you see it will, and so when I asked that question about at 55 like, and I’m working on that, like, am I good enough? I think I am, but the working out is the habit I’ve developed in the last five years. Now I need to work less. I haven’t figured that habit out yet, but we’ll get there eventually.

 

Will Bachman  37:13

What was your kind of exercise history post, you know, leaving professional and minor league hockey, did you kind of pause it for a while, and I’m curious, like, specifically, what, what’s your, what’s your current workout routine?

 

Chuck Hughes  37:31

So, so, will I’m built like a fire hydrant, right, I’m five, he probably five seven and a half, maybe five seven now, but don’t, don’t tell anybody that, so I big strong legs and love to lift weights, but I hated to run. I hated to run. Hockey players don’t have to run. It’s actually bad for your knees and your shins in the hockey world. So, your bike, right, you do like really intense interval training, right, assault bike type of stuff, and that’s the card you need to play a two hour game, but you also need to be strong, and I was a goalie, but you needed to be strong to handle physical contact in the sport. When I worked in admissions, actually I got hooked on running, but then it’s stopped. So we had a running group like Bob Claggett, Logan Powell, who’s now the dean of admissions at Brown, but they were like three or four of us, Bill Blood, we would, you know, because when you work in education, you get like an hour to an hour and a half lunch, right? Like now, like I’m eating while I’m working, but we run, and in 1997 I ran the Boston Marathon. That’s a big milestone for a guy who had two knee surgeries, only has 30% of his cartilage in my right knee, and I ran the marathon. So I did that while I worked in admissions at Harvard, and then when I transitioned to Monster, I had children, and that’s it, right? Like, I was jogging a little bit with a stroller, but I probably say launching my company, you know, from 2008 to like probably three years ago, like my running was sporadic, my working out was sporadic, and now like I work out a lot, not a lot. I get my 40 to one hour, 40 minutes to one hour workout in, and I know, like, I’m my best. I have two best men at my wedding, and one of my best men was the Iowa strength coach for 18 years, one of the five-time best strength coach of the year, highest paid, higher than Alabama, and it’s absurd what they make, but like, he’s really great on nutrition and performance, and so here I am at 55 and be 56 next month. I’m doing my creatine in the morning, you know, which is not just for strength, but also for like, there’s studies showing that it stays off dementia. So, for all of you, do your research on it. So, I take, you know, I should be taking four and a half milligrams, but digestively, like, I do, about three milligrams, so I’m doing creatine, glucosamine, chondroitin, vitamin D, which I think is really important along the way, turmeric, and ginger, and I’ll probably start introducing fish oil, so I do that, I balance a lot of foam roller. Work muscle stabilization, ground-based things that you know, as we get older, we don’t need to do, and I will run five days a week, three to five miles, and bike two to three days a week, rotating it right to get a 30 minute bike in, and look, it’s been slow but transformative. I was like a buck 82 and I’m 165 14 months later, and I don’t diet, I like to drink my cocktails too much, I just stay away from some, some carbs, not all the carbs, but just that I feel great

 

Will Bachman  40:33

for listeners who maybe have used to exercise, maybe they were athletes, it dropped off. What are your tips about getting back into it, about restarting that whole, you know, at our age?

 

Chuck Hughes  40:50

So, like, watch Forrest Gump, and when Jenny, you know, breaks up a forest and he starts running across the country. I mean, I’m joking, but everybody has different things, right? You have knee issues, you have, like, to me flexibility and core muscle stabilization is the core to everything before you get into the cardio, right? And they’re all different, like, like, I’m not a nutritionist or a strength coach, although I was Harvard’s field hockey and men’s hockey strength coach for two of the five years as a volunteer assistant, so I, I coached at Harvard for three years while I worked in admissions as a goalie coach. Last two years they moved me to strength coach because of all the people that I knew, but like what I know now, and like Angela Chamara Mancini, who’s my class, our class, she’s a doctor at UMass, her husband is like phenomenal at this, he’s actually my knee doctor who gave me gel injections, but we talk about, like, it’s like stability, strength, and so you start like flexibility, and stability is your ankle, and then you get to your, you know, knee, right, is like, so your then your your calf is strength, your knee is flexibility, your quad is strength, and that’s how your body works. You go up from your ankle up through your hips, and so that core strength that ends, you know, at your stomach, you have to work flexibility into those. And so I’m doing things like on full mats, where I’m closing my eyes and balancing on one foot, and it’s awesome to feel your muscles fire, so that as we age, we don’t slip on ice, right, and break our hip or tear our ACL because we now we’re so used to wearing shoes and having everything there that when something gets thrown off the terrain we roll our ankle right so so that was one thing that’s not helping me lose weight but it’s helping me have the flexibility right and and that’s why it doesn’t matter whether you do yoga or you do meditation or you do pilates, or you do cardio, you just gotta get 30 to 60 minutes of exercise in every day, like if you do that, you’re going to feel like a million bucks, regardless of what your habits are.

 

Will Bachman  42:51

Yeah, and your points about strength, I would say, for at least for me personally, and what I read about people our age, it’s it’s so important to start including some of that resistance weight training in there, you know. Maybe we’ve been running for a long time, but the aerobic is great, but particularly as you age, I’m hearing that it’s that strength training is helps with Alzheimer’s. It just, and it also helps, you know, avoid getting injured when you’re older, so

 

Chuck Hughes  43:22

yeah, I mean, honestly, like, I still don’t love to run, but I get that runner’s high to get out of my head, right? And I’m not, I don’t have, I’m a happy guy, but like, life’s complex, right? And so raising children makes it more challenging, and so when you think about the human nature of who we are, like, I don’t wear headsets, I have never worn a headset. People think that, like, that’s sacral. I’m like, no, I want to run through my day. I want to think about what I have to accomplish. I have to think about how I can be better, right? And that, that running biking pieces without anything, it’s been great for me. But that’s me, right? We, you all got to personalize it, and yes, I need to do more strength, and that’s what 2025 was, and 26 like, I’m not going to become a bodybuilder, but I want to make sure I do enough to, like, make sure I don’t have more muscle atrophy than I need to.

 

Will Bachman  44:14

Chuck, tell us about any courses or professors you had at Harvard, or any other activities that have continued to resonate with you in some way,

 

Chuck Hughes  44:24

so I remember taking Psychology of Law with Ellsworth first, and he was such a great man, he, like, would bring us to his home, just like cared for us, and I always feel like if you can be at Harvard, and I tell athletes this, like, you got to find one, like, professor that you build a relationship with, not for looking for recommendations for graduate school, maybe, but just to, like, gain some of that wisdom and experience, and especially the athletes, I want them to do it, so they can see something aside from what their side of the river has. So he was a really terrific professor, you know. Obviously, the concept of the hero in the Greek civilization, I won’t say out of respect for Greg Nash, Heroes for Zeros, but Greg was our house master, so he was like that, take his class, and then the Hammond, the housemaster, and you know, of course, like his wife Holly was renowned the socialite and courier house, so like those were the kinds of things that I really, really appreciated today. I’m the chair of the friends of Harvard Hockey, as I mentioned earlier, so I stay engaged with the university and with the kids, you know, as a lead, the lead fundraiser, I mean, development raises the money, but the truth is people want to, the Harvard hockey alum want to stay connected to the program, and they want to do it through somebody who was a hockey player, so development can do all the organization solicitation they want, but they want to hear from the coach, and they want to hear about the players, and so we built a board of people who are engaged in that, and that’s been something that I probably, you know, put in 2025 hours a year into to make sure we meet our goals.

 

Will Bachman  46:06

Chuck, where can listeners find you online, particularly people who have kids? They might want to get some support on the college journey.

 

Chuck Hughes  46:15

100% So, my company is Road to College. So, you go to Road to college.com to you can go through the contact us form and reach out, and then either myself or my office manager will get back to you. You know, I loved hearing from, you know, classmates and alumni. Be forewarned, I’m not like I’m going underground with, you know, so if you have a junior, you’re a little bit late. I don’t know what I can do, but I have a team, former Princeton admissions officer, former WashU admissions officer, and so, like, I’d be happy to hear from any of my classmates, of course. But generally, the sweet spot for people to get in touch with me is, like, you know, spring and ninth grade through the spring of sophomore year to see how I can help. I’m not a fit for everybody, right? Like, what? Listen to this: I’m outspoken, I’m passionate, I have fire, and so, like, I’m a little bit much sometimes, but it’s because I’m so passionate about life and what kids can do, and where we are in our lives, and like, make no bones about it, I bleed crimson. Harvard changed my life, and I’m forever grateful for it, even like I said at the beginning. If we like to be critical of the things we don’t love about what the university is doing.

 

Will Bachman  47:29

Chuck, it was great speaking with you. Thanks for joining.

 

Chuck Hughes  47:32

Thank you. Will appreciate it.

 

47:33

Bye.