Elite Expertise, Tailored to Each Unique Student

About Our Students

• 50% live in the United States, and 50% live outside of the United States, including in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.

• Our students usually target top 100 universities, including the Ivy League, liberal arts colleges, private & public universities, law/business/graduate schools, and UK universities. Recent acceptances include Harvard, Stanford, Emory, Michigan, Pomona College, University of Texas at Austin, Yale Law School, Georgetown, and the London School of Economics.

• Our students range in age from students entering high school to working professionals applying to graduate and PhD programs.

Achieving High SAT Test Scores

What one student needs in order to achieve their best score on the SAT is often quite different from what another student needs. They come to the SAT with different strengths, tendencies, and ways of thinking through problems, developed over several years. This is why the approach we use to prepare students for the SAT is highly individualized.

Our method allows us to pinpoint where a student’s approach is sound, where it requires adjustment, and precisely what adjustment is called for. Two students may get the same question wrong for different reasons, and our discussion with them should be tailored to their particular reasons. Perhaps one student indulged a bad habit of trying to do math in their head that they should do on paper, while another student didn’t understand one of the math concepts that the problem was testing. Both issues can be solved but only by a highly skilled coach who diagnoses what the issue is and then trains the student accordingly.

Students also approach the SAT with unique psychologies. Some students feel nervous when taking the test but feel embarrassed to say so until late in their preparations or even after they have already taken the test – we tease out information like that from them early, so that we can start teaching them ways of thinking about the test that fortify their mindset and embolden them. Other students rush during the test because they have difficulty managing their adrenaline – we teach them how to manage their adrenaline and thereby increase their accuracy.

We combine extraordinarily individualized attention with a systematic approach. Hence, we help students learn to recognize the many question types that appear on the SAT and we habituate our students to using structured problem-solving techniques. The techniques that we develop in partnership with each student are customized not only to particular types of questions that appear on the SAT but also to the student’s particular strengths, tendencies, and ways of thinking.

College Essays that Stand Out

The Deans of Admissions at top universities read literally thousands of college essays every year. They openly share their opinion that the overwhelming majority of college essays are unimpressive and indistinguishable from one another. A small fraction of the college essays they read are truly unique and captivating.

So, what is the key to producing college essays that set a student apart?

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Understandably, students (and their families) are not expert judges of what will set them apart from thousands of other students: often, aspects of a student’s life which they wouldn’t even think to mention provide brilliant material for a college essay.

We help students to efficiently sift through the entirety of their life for material, identify the most promising parts, elaborate those parts in detail, and make creative linkages between them. Once we've helped a student amass their most effective material, we help the student sculpt that material into a carefully thought-out and elegantly worded essay in which not a single word is wasted but, rather, every phrase adds a rich sensation, connotation, or idea that draws the reader in deeper and deeper.

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Our record of acceptances – to universities such as Stanford, Harvard and the London School of Economics – demonstrates our success helping students stand out.

Beyond SAT Scores & College Essays

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SAT scores and College Essays are two major factors in deciding where a student is accepted, but there are other major factors as well. One of these major factors is a student’s extracurricular and summer activities. Here, just like with college essays, it is critical to stand out. But how does a student do that when all students seem to be choosing from the same limited set of extracurricular activities?

We specialize in helping students identify extra-curricular activities that arouse their passions and set them apart. One of our students operated a food truck for the summer, while another founded a club that created fermented beverages. Still another student developed a soccer program for the students at a school in a developing country, while another supports HIV/AIDS researchers in Asia. Even commonplace extracurricular activities – like Debate, Sports, and Music – can help a student stand out if the student engages with the activity in a particularly thoughtful way.

Planning ahead is key. By starting early, we help our students identify a few different extracurriculars to explore that intrigue them, so that by the time they’re applying to colleges, they have one or two that set them apart from thousands of other students.

We bring this creativity and forethought to the other major factors that decide where our students are accepted, including their academic performance in high school, their college interviews, and more. For example, we help students select interesting academic courses to take during high school and we set academic goals with them. If a student needs help reaching their academic goals, we are available to work with them. We even offer one-on-one courses for subjects that the student is interested in but which are not offered at the student’s school (e.g., Arabic, Hieroglyphics, Political Philosophy, Literary Theory), which demonstrate to colleges the student’s academic curiosity, independence, and initiative.

Law, Business, and Graduate Schools

Law

Our founder is an alumnus of Stanford Law School, where he was awarded Class Honors in Legal Research and Writing. He believes that most test preparation providers teach the LSAT in a way that lacks rigor and, as a result, robs students of valuable points on their LSAT score.

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Compared to undergraduate colleges, law schools expect a dramatically higher caliber of writing on application essays and resumes for admission. We’ve helped our students earn admission to Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and other top law schools.

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Business

Soul and depth are missing from too many business school applications. Whether you work in a traditional pre-business school field (e.g., consulting, finance, tech) or something off the beaten path, your best application will communicate your richness as a human being – struggles, motivations, formative influences, etc. We help you bring that out and articulate it with nuance, substance, and a bracing effect on the reader, while also preparing you for the gauntlet of interviews with each school (including team-based exercises), excelling on the GMAT, and eliciting letters of recommendation that help build your application’s narrative.

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Graduate

Your graduate school applications are meant to demonstrate your intellectual prowess in your chosen field of study. While this may sound straightforward, it requires sophistication and substance in execution. To begin with, when crafting each part of your application – your statement of purpose, writing samples, and research proposals – view them as opportunities to articulate a clear, compelling lens through which you view your field. This includes casting significant questions and issues from your field in an intriguing, new light, while being careful not to appear ignorant of the depth and rationales animating current leaders in your field. It calls for providing real insight not just into the areas you know best but, also, into texts and topics that schools understand you’ve had less opportunity to engage.  Finally, it requires speaking in a manner that exhibits your skill discussing complex material in simple, engaging language.

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We’ve helped our students earn admission into some of the most selective graduate programs in the world, drawing on our experience as accomplished researchers and writers at elite universities.  We equip our students to excel on the GRE exam, in addition to every other step of the graduate school application process.

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