College admissions is hard, and gets more difficult and competitive with each admissions cycle. This leads parents to look for help; guidance on the long and treacherous path to college acceptance. We’ve previously covered why parents hire educational consultants, and what they can gain by doing so. In this article, we’ll explore what Ivy Scholars offers, and why we believe we’re uniquely suited to help students on their collegiate journey.
There are myriad college consulting companies, each claiming to have mastered the secrets of admissions. We’ll cover the facts and truth of these claims, and give you a look behind the curtain at how Ivy Scholars operates. We believe transparency is the best way to engender trust, so we’re laying all our cards on the table. Let’s get started!
Our Core Approach: Human Centered Consulting
At its core, all of our services come back to building a solid relationship between mentors and students. This is our human-centered approach, because we have found that it does the best job of getting our students where they need to be. Here’s how it works in detail:
- We begin by determining where our students are; their educational, personal, and emotional baseline. This allows us to meet them there, and build upon their existing strengths.
- We work to build rapport with students. The role of a mentor is both coach and guide, and we want students to know we’re in their corner.
- We help students find and pursue genuine passions. They shouldn’t alter who they are based on the belief that it will make them more appealing to admissions officers. Finding and exploring genuine passions allows students to become the best version of themselves, and to display the authenticity that colleges want from applicants.
In later sections, we’ll go through how this works for our various services, but first we want to include a brief note on the use of technology. We use various technical applications to help our students, to meet with them, and to keep them organized. This is true of many college consulting companies.
There is a trend among some companies, however, to try to use technology to solve and streamline every problem and process, to make engagements as simple as possible to manage. While this does allow them to serve more students, it takes away from the human element. While technology is a useful tool, it is nothing more than that, and is no more adept than the one who wields it. While technical tools can help students as they prepare for college, they can never supplant the benefits that come from building a strong mentor-student relationship.
Ivy Scholars Candidacy Building
Candidacy Building is how we help students grow and learn prior to beginning the college application process itself. This can start as early as middle school, or as late as the middle of junior year, but most often begins with students in ninth grade. Whenever students begin working with us, we take the same approach.
Our goal is to help students build authentic passions, and to find what they’re interested in. This has two benefits; first, and most importantly, it helps students grow and thrive as people. High school is a time to discover what your passions are, and we enjoy helping students in this process.
The second reason is that this makes the student more appealing to selective colleges. Colleges want to see students with clear and burning passions, which they have explored fully. These demonstrate that the students care about something, that they have intellectual curiosity, and that they are willing to devote their time and energy to a project over a long duration.
To do this, we begin by getting to know the student, and what they currently care about. Not all students come to us knowing what they want (though some do), so we support them through a process of exploration and experimentation. We know they won’t necessarily find what they want right away, but with guidance a passing interest can become a lifelong involvement.
We have a network of resources we connect students with, and help them further network on their own, building connections with professionals, securing internships, and finding opportunities to pursue research. This elevates their passions to the next level, showing not just that they care about a subject, but that they are willing to go to the next level when pursuing it.
A Candidacy Building Story
One student we worked with doing Candidacy Building, A, has a story that demonstrates how our process works. She came to us in her sophomore year, with general ideas about what she wanted to pursue. She was interested in the legal field, but had no real idea how to get involved.
We helped her find an internship with a law firm, working on their blog. While this began as an unpaid opportunity, it eventually expanded into a paid role. The internship allowed her to research and explore different areas of law, and get practical experience talking with lawyers. While student A won’t be applying to law school for a while, the interest they found in immigration law for refugees allowed them to get involved with refugee aid organizations.
College Applications Coaching
All of our services are, in the end, aimed at this. We help students prepare for standardized tests, learn to manage their time, and explore their passions. These are all valuable in their own right, but as a whole, they are all building to a crescendo of helping students when it comes time to apply to college.
We begin with this in the spring of junior year, but work with students starting as late as a week before deadlines. Many parents and students worry they have begun the process too late, and we wrote an article on timing to help assuage those fears.
Our process with College Coaching is to meet students where they are, and help them find the best college for them. This begins simply: we determine who students are, and what they care about when it comes to colleges. Every student is unique, and has their own priorities for their college experience.
Thus, we begin by building a college list (as we discuss in our college list article), which reflects what the student wants and needs from college. The mix of reach, target and safety schools will vary; but we encourage all our students to aim for great colleges.
From there, we support students as they write their activities list, compose resumes, and fill out application portals. These are minor tasks, but we want to help students complete them early, so that they aren’t left to try and finalize them as deadlines draw near. We can help students at the last minute, but it’s better for everyone’s peace of mind and stress levels to get these pieces done early.
With that done, we turn to the essays. These are the most stressful part of college applications, and the one we spend the longest time on with students. Crafting the perfect personal statement and supplemental essays is about helping students find their voice and tell their story. We help our students with brainstorming, writing, and editing their essays, but their words and stories are their own. This authenticity is what colleges are looking for.
Every essay is reviewed multiple times, by both the student’s individual mentor, and by editors. This ensures that colleges always get the best possible essay the student can write, and see the best side of the student.
We further offer students support applying to scholarships, preparing for interviews, researching special programs at colleges, and dealing with the stress that often comes with applying to colleges. We work to make sure each student who comes to us works with the mentor best suited to support their specific needs.
A College Apps Story
Student M came to us as a gifted athlete in a niche sport, with a unique story to tell about it. She was academically gifted as well, and was interested in the Ivy Leagues. She had received recruitment offers, and wanted guidance navigating the admissions landscape in light of that.
We helped student M determine which of the colleges reaching out to her would be the best fit, and worked to craft essays which displayed her leadership skills and love for learning. She applied REA to Harvard, and was accepted as an athletic recruit.
For more examples of our successes, check out our case studies.
Final Thoughts
Applying to college is hard. Parents and students often feel overwhelmed by the scope of the task in front of them, buried under the stress and racing to meet looming deadlines. We’re here to tell you that you don’t have to do it alone, and explain why we think Ivy Scholars is uniquely suited to help you succeed.
If you want to learn more about us, and hear how we can help you with your particular situation, schedule a free consultation today. If you want to check out our other free resources, check out our website for articles, downloadable guides, and longer pieces explaining every aspect of the admissions process. If you are concerned with your ability to pay for our services, check out our pro bono program. Our goal is to help outstanding students get into the colleges that will best enable them to succeed, now and in the future.
