Stephanie is an American student whose first choice was Yale. Stephanie was a challenge because she was reaching for a highly selective school but her quantitative metrics were lower than the average Yale admit. Both her SAT scores and GPA were right around the lower threshold for the 25-75% admitted student range.
Even in high school, Stephanie was already an ambitious innovator, focusing on biotechnology. She was driven by her entrepreneurial spirit and had a plethora of extracurricular experience – internships in science labs, with doctors, leadership positions in local entrepreneurial clubs, student government and so on – but the problem was that it was not focused. It was quantity over quality and it risked looking like the typical high-achieving high school student who does everything possible to build a resume, but doesn’t demonstrate exceptional talent or focus in any area.
As painful as it was for Stephanie, we actually had to start her application by cutting her resume down. She simply had too many experiences for it all to fit, not to mention that listing everything would overwhelm her readers with information. It was hard for her to have to let go of experiences she had invested so much time into, but it was the first step in sharpening her application and giving it focus.
We realized that the key problem to solve in Stephanie’s application was how to showcase her talent despite her less- than-stellar test scores and grades; we needed to demonstrate that those metrics could not capture Stephanie’s exceptional abilities. The essay became our central focus, since by senior year it’s the aspect of the application that offers the strongest opportunity to turn a typical applicant into a standout. But we hit another roadblock – Stephanie was a bad writer! She had a very common problem faced by most high school students – her applications were asking her to do something she was not used to doing: to write about herself. Combined with the limited life experience most high school students have, many students tend to sound hyperbolic and unsure about themselves (or naively overconfident). Luckily, we started working with her early in the application process and we had enough time to help her develop her writing skills, through extensive essay drafting and the writing exercises we’ve refined over years of working with students in similar situations. We won’t say we made her an amazing writer, but her essays improved dramatically. Stephanie applied early action to Yale and was deferred. This shook her confidence, but we were confident in her and we developed a plan of action. We used our detailed knowledge about Yale to create a tailored list of resources at Yale that were of great interest for Stephanie, and were also representative of the areas that Yale itself wants to strengthen, such as interdisciplinarity and connection between the sciences and the humanities. Stephanie used this research to create a succinct and strong letter that she sent to the admissions office, describing exactly why she thought she was a perfect fit for Yale, how she would contribute and take advantage of Yale’s resources, all of it grounded by her interdisciplinary thinking and entrepreneurial drive. Stephanie is now at Yale.