Your child holds within her the very talents and abilities that are most desirable to today’s colleges. She will simply need to recognize her most unique talent and then create and implement a small-scale personal project or initiative. Once a plan has been developed, most students relish the idea and move quickly to realize their own vision.

Admissions readers and committees WANT this sense of purpose.

Once that purpose is located, the writing process is easily directed. We guide students through a series of brainstorming sessions designed to bring forth each student’s intellectual and deep-thinking abilities. With our professional guidance, teenagers are easily able to access their personal voice and reveal the purpose that colleges recruit.

It may seem like a big hurdle at first, but remember that an effective application is not built in one full-on-attack in the month of November of senior year; but rather, it is carefully crafted over the months leading up to application season. The beauty of the process is shown in each small success.

Rachel: When I started College Prep Consulting LLC as an application development group twenty-two years ago, I hadn’t yet joined the admissions teams at Berkeley and Stanford. We knew that 29,000 high schools in America meant 29,000 Valedictorians, which meant 29,000 salutatorians, which meant 29,000 chief-editor of the school newspaper.

We believed we were in the business of helping students to improve their college applications and essays to somehow compete with everyone else. That made sense. That’s what everyone was doing… and they still are.

But now, it is abundantly clear to me that there is something very different at play in admissions. We are helping students take full advantage of this change and realize their dreams.