Full-service Application Strategy
1:1 Service. 100% you.
The Full-Service Application Strategy is a 1:1, fully-tailored mentorship designed to encourage a trusting rapport between the student and the essay specialist—one rooted in the shared goal of acceptance to elite universities and programs across the United States and internationally.
The Full-Service strategy comprises our complete range of application services, offering each student our specialized skillset in a tailored format and on a tailored schedule.
We are not college counselors but writing specialists; the focus of our work is always the written aspects of the application. While we work briefly with students to solidify their school selections and intended majors, we work with highly self-motivated students, most of whom have done this thinking on their own or with a college counselor at their school.
Luckily, the lesser-known fact of the matter is that writing constitutes the bulk of the application work. Except for the admission interview, the essays an applicant writes are a school’s only way to garner personal insight about the student; all other submitted materials fall to numerics, the opinions of others, and, if applicable, portfolio materials. Affixed to the skeletal structure of an application, essays—whether the Personal Essay, the Supplementals, or other optional essays—are the muscles, the meat. Their tone allows a student to shine.
Features of the full-service application strategy
One-on-one identifying Interview of the student
It’s important for us to connect with each student and understand their aspirations, values, and perspective on themselves, the world around them, and their place in it. This shared knowledge then becomes a goldmine for brainstorming ideas for essays and allows their more honest conception and production. Most interviews last two hours, allowing us to dig deep and identify a fruitful list of possible topics, imagery, and sources of inspiration.
Introduce students to the common application and individual institutional applications
The Common Application has gradually become the most frequently used universal application for US schools. Each student is guided through the common application with a personalized tutorial on its contents: the Personal Essay, the Activities page, the optional essays, and the academic résumé.
Some schools do not use the Common Application at all, like MIT and Georgetown, relying instead on individualized apps designed by their admission teams. We will also review these primary applications so that students are familiar with expectations and confident in their answers to essay prompts.
Within the Common Application, there are numerous other embedded applications to be filled out, one for each school. Within these, most schools require essays wholly separate from the Personal Essay of the Common App. These school-specific essays are called Supplementals and become the primary focus of students throughout the fall semester of their senior year. Students need time to acclimate to each school’s application and its requirements, deadlines, and peculiarities, although student learning curves become more efficient as the fall semester proceeds.
guide students through the complex landscape of scholarships
Many students seek the option of scholarships to help pay tuition costs. We will explain the scholarship landscape, advise students on how to identify legitimate scholarship sources, and work with students on scholarship essays. Usually, this process happens over their junior- or senior-year summers or in late winter/early spring when the application process draws to a close.
Selection of schools and isolation of possible majors/minors
We offer students assistance in finding and selecting an exciting and appropriate list of schools ranging from target/reach schools, to 50/50s, to safeties. This strategy ensures a student admission to college while encouraging them to work hard, write well, and seek acceptance to their dream schools.
We also work to refine majors. Colleges have numerous options and often complicated academic structuring. We work to help students understand their own aspirations and then match their goals to a school’s offerings.
Perfect the personal essay and activities page
The Personal Essay and Activities page are the primary vehicles whereby schools glean the character traits, academic strengths, and extracurricular assets of students.
Unlike the essays a student may be accustomed to writing in school, the Personal Essay is not an argument. It is also not an enumeration of skills and accomplishments. It is a narrative. Every student’s college application is rife with skills and accomplishments, but not every student’s story is yours.
The essay is also not feasible in a single draft. It is completely normal for a student to spend weeks refining their angle.
The Personal Essay is complimented by the Activities page to paint a cohesive portrait of the student. As with the academic résumé, the Activities page requires sharp and distinctive language. While both the Personal Essay and the Activities page exist to represent the student in a multifaceted, individualized, compelling way, each has their own “flavor,” and students must understand this flavor to make the best impression and coordinate their written responses in a complimentary fashion.
conduct mock interviews
For any student required to interview at a smaller liberal arts college or invited to interview by an Ivy, MIT, or Stanford, we offer the opportunity to perfect their presentation style in practice sessions. We will devise strategies for dealing with interview anxiety, prepare answers to typical interview questions, and forge useful reciprocating questions for your student to engage their interviewer.
Assist students with teacher recommendation requests & forms
All students must request teachers write recommendations for them for schools. We assist students in selecting appropriate teachers, wrangling those teachers to act in a timely manner, and filling out their teachers’ Student Questionnaires. We polish student responses, giving teachers plenty of useful and insightful material so that their Teacher Recommendations are lush and complimentary.
strategize application & writing schedules
We arrange a writing schedule for students according to their chosen schools’ deadlines as well as their ease with the application-writing process. Some students need more rigorous oversight than others. We always consider Early Decision and Early Action options for admission. We exert and maintain the pressure needed to keep your student on track, removing as much stress as we can from your family dynamic.
A student’s writing schedule is determined with their individual needs in mind. Sessions focus on perfecting students’ approach, sharpening their content, and editing their drafts. Each session strives to finish a longer essay or a smaller series of essays for an individual school or consortium of associated schools. The larger personal essays of the Common Application and the Coalition Application almost always require multiple sessions. Sessions are scheduled for two hours throughout the summer and early fall, but fees are prorated to reflect the actual time used. We do not limit the number of schools to which a student applies nor the number of essays worked on, but the numbers will be reflected in the number of sessions a student needs (a student applying to twenty-seven schools will certainly need more time than a student applying to one, and we’ve worked with students at both these extremes). As the fall proceeds, students become more efficient; nonetheless, their schedules often get unwieldy around the deadlines, so sessions are generally reduced to one hour, but students may request more of them in a given week.
Tackle letters of continued interest if a student is waitlisted
If a student is waitlisted by a desired school, we will write an update to each school lauding the student’s accomplishments since applying, underscoring the student’s special strengths and appropriateness for the given school, and highlighting the student’s desire to attend.
The Full-Service Application Strategy is intended to help students with the entire body of work that is college applications. However, in reflection of each student’s individuality and corresponding individualized needs, it does not function as a fixed-rate ‘package’ in the way other writing consultancies understand the term. All work is done on an hourly basis in order to afford families the most choice and students the most autonomy in their application processes.
Be aware, once you schedule an interview, you are engaging the Full-Service option for the entire application season. Each family reserves the ability to determine how many sessions their student requires.
To inquire about availability for the Full-Service Application Strategy in the 2023-2024 year, please complete the contact form.
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