Upperhand Counselling Calgary Review and Alternative
Upperhand High School & Post-Secondary Counselling is a two-person Calgary practice run by a pair of career teachers and counsellors with more than fifty years between them, and one of the few consultancies in the country that puts its prices on the website. If you are searching for them, you are probably a Calgary family trying to work out whether a $100-an-hour counsellor is worth it, or what they do and do not cover. This is what Upperhand offers, what it costs, and why the one thing it leaves out, rehearsing the interview and the timed written answer, is the thing AcceptMe was built for.
What Upperhand is
Upperhand is Wayne Bobrosky and Lawrence Lemieux. Their about page lists Bobrosky with a BA, a BSW and an MBA and more than twenty years as a teacher, social worker and academic coach, and Lemieux with a BA and a BEd and more than thirty years as a teacher and academic counsellor. That is the whole team, which is the practice’s strength: you are dealing with the two people whose names are on the door, both of whom spent their careers inside Alberta schools. Google lists the business as seven-plus years old with a 5.0 rating from five reviews, and the site carries six testimonials, one from a student who went on to Mount Royal nursing.
The services are planning services, in the school-counsellor sense of the word:
- High-school advising, Grades 9 to 12: course planning, IB, AP, CTS and dual-credit choices, and navigating the Alberta diploma system.
- Post-secondary guidance, Grades 10 to 12: values and interests, choosing among Canadian institutions, application support, scholarships and gap-year planning.
- Adult upgrading and support for school counsellors.
What is not on the list matters as much as what is. Nowhere on the site is there essay coaching, supplementary-application help or interview preparation of any kind. Upperhand helps you decide where to apply and get the transcript in shape to be admitted. It does not help you perform on the day. The way in is a free 15-minute phone consultation.
What Upperhand costs
Published, which puts Upperhand ahead of nearly every competitor on this site. From their fees page (checked 12 September 2026):
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Comprehensive Intake Session (transcript review, planning document, one-hour meeting) | $150 |
| Subsequent sessions | $100 an hour |
| Initial phone consultation (15 minutes) | Free |
Those are modest numbers. An intake plus three follow-up hours across a Grade 12 year is $450, and there is no package to buy and no sales call to sit through. We think that is exactly how a planning consultancy should price itself.
AcceptMe, with unlimited timed on-camera interview practice plus the essay coach and the Story Bank, is C$49 a month, and you cancel the month you submit. That is half of one Upperhand hour, for the half of the application Upperhand does not touch.
What planning can and cannot do for the interview
Pay Upperhand for the things that need judgement from someone who has watched the Alberta system from the inside for decades. Which diploma courses to carry, whether IB or AP is worth it for your target, which Canadian institutions fit the student in front of them, what the scholarship calendar looks like, whether a gap year makes sense. Two career counsellors at $100 an hour is a good deal for that, and there is no equivalent in a piece of software.
But planning ends where the assessment begins. If your target is a program with a video interview, a timed written answer or a supplementary essay, the part that decides the outcome once your grades clear the bar is a performance, and it is the part Upperhand does not offer. The skill being tested is whether you can produce a structured, specific answer under a clock, on camera, on the first take. It is built the way any performance skill is built: by doing it, reviewing the recording, and doing it again. Nobody gets there from a planning document, however good the plan.
The research is unusually clear on this. In the studies on our research page, an unguided practice run before a recorded video interview changed nothing, tips videos changed nothing, and the group that improved was the one that practiced with an automated interviewer and then read feedback on their own recording. A counsellor can tell you which program to aim at. Only reps get you through its interview.
Upperhand versus AcceptMe
| Upperhand | AcceptMe | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Two-person high-school and post-secondary counselling practice, Calgary, hourly | Self-serve AI coach for interviews, stories and essays |
| Price | $150 intake session, then $100 an hour, published | C$49 a month, cancel any time; free tier with no card |
| Interview practice | Not offered | Unlimited timed on-camera runs with a prep window and hard answer clock; transcript and coach’s notes on every answer; timings you set to match your program |
| Essays | Not offered | Unlimited essay reviews: a verdict and notes pinned to each sentence, tagged works, tighten or fix; it comments, never rewrites |
| School selection, course planning, Alberta diploma strategy | Yes, this is their core business | No |
| Program-specific formats | Not covered | Free guides with practice questions for UBC Sauder, Queen’s Health Sciences and Nursing and every Ontario program with a supplementary |
| Availability | Booked sessions with one of two counsellors | Whenever you open the laptop |
Where fifty years in Alberta schools beats a tool
Two people who spent their careers as teachers and counsellors can do things AcceptMe cannot: sit across from your child and read how they are actually doing, and give judgement on courses, programs and how the Alberta system works. We are honest about both, and we would add that Upperhand’s choice to publish its prices and sell hours rather than packages is the model the rest of the industry should copy. What a counsellor cannot sell is reps, and the skill a timed interview or a timed written answer tests is built by doing it many times with feedback each time. This is a complementary pair rather than a rivalry: they plan, AcceptMe rehearses. The founder’s account of why we built AcceptMe is the argument in full.
Who should hire Upperhand
- Calgary families with a Grade 9, 10 or 11 who want an experienced counsellor to plan the diploma courses, IB or AP choices and dual-credit options with the end goal in view.
- Grade 12s who have not settled on a program or a province and want a values-and-interests conversation with someone who knows the Canadian institutions, at a published $100 an hour with no package to buy.
- Adults returning to upgrade, and school counsellors who want a second pair of hands, both of which Upperhand serves and almost nobody else does.
Who should use AcceptMe instead, or as well
- Students whose target program includes a video interview, a timed written answer or a supplementary essay, at any school in any country, who know where they are applying and need to get good at the assessment itself, which Upperhand does not cover.
- Anyone who wants feedback on a recording rather than advice about one. The coach reads the transcript of every timed answer and leaves notes; a planning session cannot.
- Clients of Upperhand, or any consultant, who want to arrive at each paid hour having already recorded and reviewed their answers, so the hour goes on judgement rather than on rehearsal.
If you’re in Grade 12 and only need the dates, the University of Calgary application deadlines and the University of Alberta application deadlines are free pages of ours, kept current from each university’s site. If an interview is on your calendar, the one-week interview prep checklist is the schedule to run the reps on, and parents who want to help without taking over should read how to help your child prepare for a university interview. Our comparison of Canadian admissions coaching puts Upperhand beside the bigger firms, and the guide to admissions consultant costs in Canada shows how rare a published $100 an hour is. KVP Educational Consulting is the other Calgary consultancy, with a $197 essay course and no published hourly rate; the consultants-by-city guide maps both against the national firms. Then open AcceptMe and record your first timed answer tonight, for free.
Keep reading
- University Interview Prep Checklist: The Week Before A day-by-day checklist from seven days out to the morning of: stories, timers, setup, dress rehearsal, plus a 48-hour version and what not to do.
- How to Help Your Child Prepare for a University Interview For parents: what a recorded, timed interview is, the three things that help and three that hurt, how to tell prep is working, and what it should cost.
- How Much Do University Admissions Consultants Cost in Canada? Every Canadian undergraduate coaching price, published or reported, with sources; what a season costs by route; what is worth paying for.