Case study: Jim’s acceptance to Claremont McKenna

Context: Jim identifies as a first generation Asian American male with two parents who both have masters. His parents worked long hours, and were relatively hands-off, but expected a lot from him as the first child. He had a lot of family responsibilities and a lot of experience working to support his family.

Student profile: Academically, Jim was a relatively good student, and had a 3.8 unweighted GPA. He noted that as an Asian American male, he understood that his GPA was  on the low side. He said he really started thinking about college the summer of his sophomore year. As a result, a lot of his grades his first two years of high school were not very good. He also did not have an excellent SAT score – he said he had a bad day when his test date rolled around. He says he wished he had shaped up his science and math grades in retrospect. 

In terms of extracurriculars, Jim did not feel that he did anything “insane”. Instead, he focused on things he valued and loved. For him, that was music, politics, and sports. The majority of his application was about music, as he was a symphony singer. He also spoke a lot about his experience as a political organizer, as well as his love for baseball as a mentally challenging and psychologically-intense game.

Why Jim joined Cohort: Jim understood the stakes of getting into college, but didn’t know what he was doing. He knew that because he had started thinking about college late (summer of sophomore year) he had missed opportunities to control what happened to his academics earlier in high school. He was also aware that his school - an arts school- was rigorous, but did little to prepare him for the college application process.

How Cohort helped:  Cohort 1) organized his application process with its timeline so that he was ahead of the curve 2) developed his essays so that admissions officers could appreciate what he offered as an entire human being, rather than another Asian-American male statistic.

Cohort organized his application process with its timeline: Jim was really able to get on track with Cohort’s timeline. He really believed in Cohort’s process and ran with it. He built out his common app, identified strengths, researched schools, and learned how to utilize different college resources to his application’s advantage. He said when he got rejected from Harvard, he didn’t feel as bad, as he knew he could not have done better as an applicant. For him, the most helpful thing hands-down the Cohort team gave him was the college application tracker, the “CAT“. Jim said: “As someone who couldn’t manipulate spreadsheets, this was an amazing resource. It had all my scholarships, all [college-specific resource] websites, linked, all in one document. It has single-handedly helped me keep track of financial aid and essays.”

Cohort helped develop his essays so that admissions officers could appreciate that he was a human rather than a statistic: because Jim understood he would not stand out as an Asian American male applicant with his grades and statistics, he focused on writing excellent essays. Specifically, he dug deep to avoid cliché essay topics. He needed his essays to be as authentic as possible. He utilized every resource available to him, especially his mentors, other Cohort students as second opinions, and Cohort’s essay banks. He ended up writing about his experience as a leadership figure in the SF school board recall, how it was very much in line with his values, and how he grew from the experience.

Jim followed Cohort’s timeline so well that he had finished applying to all his schools by December of senior year. Jim encourages all students from public schools who weren’t given the greatest career or college guidance to do the Cohort program. 

In Jim’s words: “Cohort has single-handedly given me the opportunity to study at Claremont McKenna.”