Case Study

Meet Agnes…

We first started working with Agnes when she was beginning sophomore year in high school. She was already a strong student (3.8/4.0 GPA), and she was interested in pursuing computer science, ideally at Cornell’s College of Engineering since it’s an Ivy League university, it’s located in her home state of New York, and it has one of the best engineering programs in the country. But while she was a strong STEM student, she lacked any impressive extracurriculars in the STEM space, so that’s where we initially focused our attention.

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#1: Summer programs…

The first thing we did was help Agnes identify some excellent pre-college summer programs. The benefit of a good summer program is that it allows students to explore an advanced area of interest that they couldn’t study in high school, such as cryptology or data science or quantum mechanics. Plus, it gives them a taste of college life, and introduces them to top professors and ambitious students from all around the globe. Simply participating in a summer program is not enough to get you into a top university. But it demonstrates intellectual vitality, it can open doors to unique research opportunities, and it’s an important part of all overall branding strategy.

#2: Application help…

Admission to many of the best summer programs is quite competitive, so we helped Agnes prepare applications for five different programs which ranged from extremely competitive to moderately competitive. Some of the top programs like RSI (Research Science Institute at MIT) have less than a 5% acceptance rate — which is basically like applying to Harvard. Most programs require letters of recommendations, an updated résumé, and several essay questions, so it’s best to start planning in December (most apps are due in Feb/March). We spent considerable time helping Agnes focus her personal narrative — who she is and what she hopes to study — plus strengthening her essays. In the end, she chose to attend Summer@Brown, an immersive four-week program at Brown University where she had the chance to study Fluid Mechanics Through Hovercraft Physics, plus work on team projects, and meet new friends.

#3: Course selection…

We also helped Agnes choose her courses for the rest of her high school career. Specifically, we encouraged her to take all AP courses in science and math, so that she could demonstrate proficiency in core STEM subjects. And we made sure that she included courses in both physics and chemistry, since they are requirements for Cornell Engineering. Since she was struggling a bit in Spanish, and didn’t love languages, we told her that it was okay to take standard Spanish instead of AP Spanish. That would free up her study time to focus on her more important STEM subjects, and keep her GPA close to the 4.0 level. And because Cornell recommends taking computer science (which was not offered at her high school), we helped her enroll in a dual-enrollment CS course at a local university, where she received course credit (and a glowing teacher recommendation).

#4: SAT prep…

Since Agnes wanted to pursue STEM in college, she knew that she needed a high score on her SAT. And while many universities are technically test-optional, for students who want to study math, science, computer science or engineering, a strong showing on the math portion of the SAT or ACT is imperative. Furthermore, for the Class of 2026, 60% of students who were accepted to Cornell submitted either their SAT (43%) or ACT (17%). And this figure is even higher at other top schools like Northwestern (78%), Princeton (85%) and Stanford (72%). The simple fact is that the vast majority of accepted students to these elite schools (about 4 out of 5) submit their test scores, and you should too.

Agnes signed up for our one-on-one SAT tutoring program where she received 18 hours of personalized Zoom instruction spread out over the course of three months. Unlike most SAT prep programs, we were able to schedule our sessions around her busy schedule, and she never had to leave her home. Before our first session, she took a timed practice test and scored a 1380 (720 Math, 660 Verbal). That’s a fairly strong score for many students, but it’s well below the 1550 threshold you want for top universities. Towards the end of our test prep program, she was regularly scoring between 1530 and 1580 on her practice tests. For her official test, she scored 1560 (800 Math, 760 Verbal), an excellent score by any measure.

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#5: Research experience…

These days, top STEM candidates are all doing some kind of research while still in high school. Either they’re joining an existing research project at a top university, or they’re devising their own independent research project, which often involves finding a mentor, such as a published professor or graduate student. In recent years, this has become an integral part of gaining admissions to top college programs.

We helped Agnes join a nonprofit called Women In Data, a global organization that helps young women connect with professional female mentors to explore careers in data and technology. Through one of their symposiums, Agnes connected with a female professor at UC Berkeley who was leading a new research project on racial and gender biases in large language models like ChatGPT. Agnes joined the research team as the sole high school student, working (remotely) alongside Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students, and their paper is pending publication in a top scientific journal.

#6 College Applications…

After two years of candidacy building, Agnes was ready to apply to college. She signed up for our comprehensive 15-College Essay Coaching package in May before her senior year, and we helped her generate a strategic list of 15 reach, target and safety schools; compose her activities and honors lists; refine her personal narrative; solicit glowing teacher and mentor recommendations; prep for college interviews; and edit all of her application essays, including her personal statement and supplemental essays.

While her final college list included an assortment of top-tier universities like MIT, Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, Case Western and Purdue, she decided to apply Early Decision to Cornell to take advantage of the much better admissions odds. (Cornell’s Regular Decision acceptance rate is only 5%, but its Early Decision acceptance rate is closer to 20%.)

And instead of applying directly to Cornell’s College of Engineering — which is extremely difficult to get into for even the best students — she opted to apply to the more flexible, and slightly less competitive, CS program within the College of Arts and Sciences. This would enable her to take all of the same computer science courses, plus pursue a double major in Economics. She was accepted Early Decision.