Karelina Chitambara is a Graduate Coach completing her MEng in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London with First Class standing through her third year. Her engineering training is paired with eight years of hands-on experience advising students through competitive university applications, work she has done since founding and running her own private tutoring practice in 2018.
Through her tutoring practice, Karelina has worked one-on-one with mentees on university selection, application strategy, and personal statements, helping students gain places at highly selective UK universities including the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, while improving her students’ academic performance by an average of two full grades. She has also worked as a part-time Graduate Admissions Mentor with MIM Prep, advising students on positioning and strategy for competitive graduate programs and helping one student secure offers from both of their top-two choices, including a globally second-ranked university. Alongside this counseling work, she has built a substantial STEM track record of her own: she led a funded engineering research project at Imperial, directed three student teams through the end-to-end design and build of a biomechatronic system, and completed an automation engineering internship with a product-development firm in Yokohama, Japan.
Having gone through Imperial’s own highly competitive admissions process and the demands of an integrated engineering masters, Karelina brings a first-hand, practical understanding of what makes an application stand out, particularly for STEM applicants weighing technical depth against a compelling personal narrative. She works closely with each student on the specifics of their own application rather than general advice, draws on her engineering background to help STEM-track students present their research and projects clearly, and speaks English and Finnish at a near-native level.
