COLLEGE ADMISSIONS  RESULTS AND CASE STUDIES

When we met Jane, we recognized that she had a strong GPA, decent SAT score, and was passionate about her interest in writing. However, we also realized that she had few extracurricular activities and community service involvement outside of writing, because they didn’t interest her and she didn’t want to “just do it for college.” 

 

We wanted to help Jane stay true to her passions, so we didn't push additional activities that she didn't have a genuine interest in. Instead, she continued to focus on her independent writing project. Despite being a very strong creative writer, Jane had difficulty writing about herself. 

 

We empowered Jane to share her vulnerabilities and real-life challenges of defying her family's wishes to pursue her passion for writing. We also encouraged her to build relationships with admissions representatives at her schools.

 

​Jane will be attending Dartmouth College.

Michael was the top student at his high school with a perfect 4.0 unweighted GPA. He also had strong scores, but acknowledged readily as a junior when we met him that he had little interest in extracurricular activities, as he preferred to spend his time at home instead. Michael wanted to study computer science, but he also needed a school to offer him a large merit scholarship since his family would qualify for little financial aid, but really couldn’t afford to pay full price. 

 

Since Michael did not want to participate in extracurricular activities, we encouraged him to really work on building relationships with his teachers and counselor as well as his regional representatives from the colleges he was interested in. We also helped him pick schools that would value his academic achievements. Michael also took the opportunity to include an additional information statement that discussed his role in taking on family responsibilities at home as a reason for his “light” resume, since he knew he could always participate in activities in college and that family was very important to him. 

 

Michael ended up attending Northeastern with a sizable merit scholarship that made his family happy too.

Aria came to us as a senior who had spent all summer struggling on her personal essay. Aria had strong grades and scores, but had a light resume, because she had moved during high school and taken some time to adjust to leaving her old life behind. Aria also struggled with a lack of confidence although she had strong scores and had won a few competitions before. 

 

While Aria originally thought of writing about her one main activity, we encouraged Aria to save that for supplemental essays since that is a common topic. Instead, we encouraged Aria to use her quirky personality in her writing as much as possible as she wrote a liberating essay in which she realized that her parents' desires of her weren’t expectations so much as they were expressing their love. We also worked with Aria to balance out her list of schools to select appropriate targets and find her schools that had strong programs for her major and would offer her merit scholarships, since money was a large concern for them. 

 

Aria will be attending Vanderbilt University.