Jimmy was a Japanese high school student who wanted to go to university in the United States, but encountered enormous obstacles from friends and even his teachers. Not only were his teachers reluctant to write him recommendation letters so he could apply to schools abroad, but some of them also gave him misinformation, declaring that the quality of education in the US was terrible. Still, Jimmy was determined to see what the world had to offer. He wanted a more global university experience than he thought he would be able to get in Japan.

We started working with Jimmy from early on in his process, about a year and half before he submitted his applications. At first, we held many discussions to figure out what Jimmy wanted to achieve and learn in university, and what kinds of schools he would be most comfortable in.

He was also grateful to have a mentor who had recently experienced American colleges and could tell him about the joys and challenges of being in an American university firsthand, as well as insight on adapting and excelling as he made the transition from Asia’s culture. It became clear he needed to be in a major city, with a cosmopolitan vision and a strong international population. He wanted to encounter as many different points of view as possible and meet people with backgrounds that were very different from his. For these reasons, he became especially interested in New York University, since it epitomized the cosmopolitan university.

Although Jimmy was a strong student, we couldn’t expect great recommendation letters from his teachers, given that few of them were supportive of his interest in studying abroad. That was probably going to be the weakest part in his application, so the challenge was to figure out a way to turn that weakness into a competitive edge. Otherwise, his test scores and GPA put him right in the middle of the average student admitted to NYU, so tipping the odds of admission in his favor would mostly come down to the essays.

Jimmy was fascinated by theater. He wasn’t sure if that was what he wanted to study, but he knew he wanted to take some classes in the arts and enjoy New York City’s world-class theatre scene. As he started writing drafts of his essays, the essays he wrote in response to the different prompts were scattered, failing to tell a coherent narrative. But we also discovered that Jimmy was a talented writer; most of the time it would come through as a beautiful sentence here or there, but sometimes he would craft outright fantastic stories, even though he was writing in his second language. We honed in on these and guided him to focus on the stories where he was able to produce his most powerful writing – which turned out to be rather dramatic, theatrical stories about the complex experiences of identity in a global era. It became clear what our strategy should be. Each of his essays became a piece of a larger story Jimmy was telling across the entire NYU application, about the tensions that came with belonging to a local community in a globalized world. This was how we turned his weak recommendation letters into a strength, subtly addressing the obstacles he faced due to the teachers who wanted him to stay and go to a Japanese university. Jimmy demonstrated his worldliness despite the provincialism that surrounded him, while simultaneously showcasing his potential as a screenwriter through his excellent stories. We believe these elements made him an irresistible candidate for NYU, where he now studies.