We thought we’d introduce ourselves to those of you who are new here. Hi! We’re a boutique college counseling service. We provide individualized college planning tailored to each of our students. We help our clients match with excellent schools that fit their personalities, passions, and objectives in life.
The Landscape
The college admissions process has become seriously competitive. This year, Harvard accepted just 3.4% of applicants for the class of 2027, Columbia accepted 3.9%, and Yale accepted 4.35%, its lowest ever. And the Ivies aren’t the only schools that are insanely hard to get into. USC’s acceptance rate was 9.9% and Northwestern’s was just 7%. You get the picture.
Even students with perfect GPAs and test scores aren’t making the cut. The reason for this is because schools benefit from having really low acceptance rates, so they are expanding their marketing to more and more applicants who might help drive it down.
Our Strategy
Our goal when working with students is to help them stand out amongst a sea of applicants. To start, we learn about what our students are passionate about in order to help them develop a unique application with personality. Universities don’t want to admit students who are generalists. They want to cultivate classes of experts in really niche areas who will go on to be the top professionals in their respective fields. We help our students develop a well-defined academic brand over the course of high school. We find this is their unique leverage, in addition to stellar grades and scores. (We help with that, too!)
Creating an Action Plan
Our method is rigorous, but we like to get started early so students can spread the work out across the last three years of high school. Junior year is stressful enough. There’s no reason students can’t start planning early to lessen the burden down the line and increase their chances of success. We also work with our clients to really hone in on extracurriculars that fit in with their passions and their academic niche and coach them on how to pursue leadership positions and projects that impress. We also help them with every piece of writing they submit to each school, from resume to essays, and the applications themselves.
Choosing a School
We also spend time helping our students develop a college list with targets, reaches, and safeties. We want our students to end up somewhere they’ll be happy, challenged, and accepted for who they are. We work on figuring out what it is they’re interested in: a big school vs. a small school, a school that’s on another coast or close to home, a liberal arts college or a big public school, etc. It seems like a no-brainer, but we find that our students have a greater chance of success in the admissions process if they’re actually excited about the schools they’re applying to and if they, themselves, are a good personality fit for those schools. Each application is a representation of a school’s own culture and vibe, so a student is most likely to succeed when it’s a natural fit.
Our customized approach works for our clients. Each year, over 90% percent of our students got into one of their top three choices. And it doesn’t need to be difficult. Getting started early is the best way to ensure success down the road and also, minimal stress in what can feel like a daunting process.
Interested in signing up for counseling services? Call us. We’re experts at helping students match with their perfect school.