Before I was a graduate coach, I was a public school teacher. I’ve also taught in independent schools, in international schools, in a school where tuition alone could cover a state school education twice over — and the gap between those rooms never stopped being visible to me. Not in ability. In access. The kids in the public school classroom were every bit as sharp, as curious, as ready to be somebody’s dream applicant as the kids down the road with a private counselor and a summer program on a Swiss lake. What differed was who had someone in their corner translating ambition into an application.
That gap is not shrinking. Every cycle, the top 30 schools get more competitive, and every cycle, the students who can afford one-on-one counseling pull further ahead of the students who can’t — not because they’re better prepared to succeed at those schools, but because they’re better prepared to be legible to the people making the decisions. Admissions is, among other things, a literacy. And literacy has always been something you can buy more of, if you have the money.
This is the part of the work I think about the most, and it’s why our pro bono program matters to me in a way that goes beyond good corporate citizenship. To the best of my knowledge, no other company in our industry runs anything like it — a genuine, structured, no-cost version of the same process our paying families receive, extended to students who would otherwise never sit across a Zoom screen from a former admissions officer. Twice a year we partner with Harlem Lacrosse to run live office hours: students rotate through breakout rooms in twenty-minute increments, some arriving with a full essay draft, some arriving with nothing but a vague sense that they’re supposed to be doing something called the Common App and no idea where to begin. You meet them exactly where they are, because there is no time to do otherwise, and because meeting a kid where he is happens to be the entire job of being a teacher, dressed up in different clothes.
Alongside those office hours, we run a longer commitment: a handful of students matched with two counselors apiece, receiving the real architecture of our service — three one-on-one sessions to build an activities list, develop a personal statement, and workshop supplemental essays for a school of their choice, then a full second-counselor review of one completed application before it goes out. The scheduling emails go out the same way they do for our paying families. The Command Center gets shared the same way. I’ve sent enough of those first emails now — Congratulations! You have been accepted into InGenius Prep’s pro bono program — that I know them by heart, and I mean every word of them every time, because I know what it is for a student to receive that sentence and realize, maybe for the first time, that someone with real expertise is choosing to spend real hours on his future for no other reason than that he deserves it.
What I’ve learned, doing this work, is that so little of it is really about essays. A first-generation student doesn’t need me to explain metaphor. He needs someone to tell him, plainly, that it’s allowed — that the personal statement isn’t a confession booth or a resume in paragraph form, that he’s permitted to write about what actually happened to him instead of what he imagines a college wants to hear. That kind of permission isn’t a technical skill I’m teaching. It’s the same thing I gave a struggling ninth-grade reader years ago in a public school classroom: the conviction that he was never behind, only never yet told the rules of the room he was trying to enter.
I don’t think pro bono work closes the gap I saw as a teacher. One program, a few students a cycle, is not going to undo what money does to an application process every single year. But I think it matters enormously that InGenius Prep is willing to run it anyway — that we call ourselves an education company and then actually behave like one, extending our knowledge to students who could never pay for it, instead of treating that knowledge as a product available only to the families who can. That’s the whole of what I got denied at seventeen, applying with no one in my corner, and it’s the whole of what I get to hand someone else now: not a guarantee, but a fighting chance, built by people who know exactly what the gates look like from the other side.
If your school, nonprofit, or community organization works with students who could use that same fighting chance, we’d love to hear from you.