Case study: Ilena’s acceptance to NYU
Context: Ilena is the oldest daughter of immigrants, who both went to community college. Neither of them applied to an out-of-state college. Both her parents were pretty hands off during high school.
Student profile: Academically, Ilena was a solid student. She had a 3.94 GPA unweighted, and submitted a 34 on the ACT. She took 18 APs and IB tests. She did not do as well as she hoped. She did not get any 5s. She got two 4s, and the rest were 3s. In terms of extracurriculars, she tried her best to find out what she liked to do in high school. She quickly found out that she really enjoyed almost everything: cheer, dance, lacrosse, tennis, figure skating. She volunteered at a nonprofit preschool, and worked 3 part-time jobs and did an architectural internship. Awards-wise, she attended a few national competitions for figure skating.
Why Ilena joined Cohort: she worked for 5 months on her essay before joining Cohort, and was never satisfied with the output. She thought she could do the college process independently, but quickly realized she wanted support. She had no idea what she was doing, and needed a place to ask questions.
How Cohort helped: Cohort gave her 1) holistic, repeated reviews of her entire application 2) many perspectives stemming from the flexibility of having different mentors.
The continuous, holistic review of her entire application really helped Ilena refine what she wanted to say. She knew, from all her collective feedback, what were very prominent weak points. She also knew that she was not always ready to listen to feedback, so it helped to hear the same feedback over and over again.
Having flexibility in which mentors looked over her application was really beneficial to Ilena because she could get different opinions on the same part of her application. Overlapping feedback also convinced her that she needed to listen to certain feedback, even if she did not want to. Talking to multiple mentors also helped her remain grounded during the process, and she felt that the process was more humane because of it.
Prior to joining Cohort, she had writer’s block all the time, as it felt insane that so much of her future depended on these few essays. She felt that her essays helped her stand out in spite of a less-than-stellar academic foundation and her somewhat disorganized group of extracurricular activities. Thanks to Cohort, she got into NYU!
