IN PERSON EVENT: How to Get Accepted to Top Universities!
We have spoken to thousands of students and families about their higher education goals. Below, we have answered the most Frequently Asked Questions.
Dual-Mentor System
With InGenius Prep, students get to work with two counselors—a Former Admissions Officer and a Graduate Coach. Our students benefit from the insights and feedback from counselors with different strengths.
Our Team of 150+ Former Admissions Officers
We have the largest team of Former Admissions Officers in the world. These members of our team have been carefully vetted, selected, and trained in our cutting-edge curriculum. They work under the direct supervision of our Chief Education Officer and education team members. There are several reasons why having the largest team of Former Admissions Officers in the world is important:
Our Educational Philosophy
Founded at Yale, our leadership team has been educated at the most competitive universities in the world. Our counseling team is made up of people who have dedicated their lives to education and helping students—counselors who worked in admissions for years, graduates from the most competitive universities, teachers, and professional mentors. Our approach emphasizes independence and leadership, creative thinking and entrepreneurialism, diversity and self-reflection. It is our goal to help students achieve their goals, and to become more accomplished, successful, educated, and happy people along the way. From top to bottom, we are confident that there is not a team out there that works harder than we do.
Our Academic Resources
At InGenius Prep, we understand that in order to get accepted, you have to stand out. You have to go above and beyond to explore your academic interests and codify your passions. We have developed customized programs to help our students explore their academic and extracurricular interests at the highest level.
Our Results
Our system works; we have the results to prove it. Click here for a comprehensive view of our results.
Selecting a company and team to help you throughout the admissions process is an important family decision, as there are many routes to take and options to consider: some choose to go at it alone, some choose companies that employ current students or graduates of top undergraduate schools, and others choose the company with Former Admissions Officers and top graduate students. Which one would you choose?
For the hard-working, qualified, and independent student, embarking on the application journey alone may seem doable. However, even the brightest or most self-reliant students have no idea what qualities, experiences, and values admissions officers are looking for in applicants, or just how rigorous the admissions process really is. Having a team help you throughout the process makes everything much less stressful! You’ll have someone guide you, keep you on track, and make sure that you are producing your best work. For parents, hiring counselors to stay on top of your child means that you don’t have to!
Working with a college student from a top school may sound appealing, but in reality, these students generally have no idea why they got in and offer no ability or understanding to replicate their success for you or your child. College students are also less mature and their teaching ability, especially in writing, is untested.
Imagine that you could work with anyone on your college or graduate school applications. What would their qualifications and experiences be? They would be intimately familiar with admissions, personally know the process at each school you or your child is applying to, and understand the specific preferences of each school. But they would not be restricted by school policies from actually sharing these insights candidly.
By working with a Former Admissions Officer—someone who literally sat in the admissions office, read thousands of applications, debated over applicants with his or her colleagues, and ultimately decided whether students were accepted or rejected—you get to strategize, build, and perfect your candidacy and application directly with the people who shaped classes at top schools. You put yourself in the position to tailor your application to individual schools, based on the advice of someone who actually worked there. There is no one else more qualified to best help you or your child, no one else with these admissions insights, no one else who understands the process as it actually runs—no one else you should work with!
InGenius Prep is peerless in the market. There is objectively no other organization in the world that has counselors with the same experiences and qualifications as those of InGenius Prep counselors. Likewise, there is objectively no other organization in the world that has as many Former Admissions Officers. Having the world’s largest team of Former Admissions Officers from the world’s best schools is not just a marketing point… it is core to the InGenius philosophy and is pedagogically important for two reasons: (1) InGenius Prep can provide a systematic overview of the process at each school, which can vary, and offer admissions insights and strategy at each individual selective school or program. (2) InGenius Prep boasts a low student-to-Former Admissions Officer ratio in order to ensure highly personalized and customized mentoring attention to its students and families.
Current admissions officers cannot divulge inside information on the university’s processes and decisions. If you attend admissions events or information sessions, you have the opportunity to listen to and speak with current admissions officers. You will quickly notice that current admissions officers are restricted in what they can and cannot say. They want to be helpful, but have to ensure that internal policies are kept, well, internal. On the other hand, Former Admissions Officers are not limited in terms of the information they can disclose, which is why they are the best possible source for inside information on admissions.
99% of our students have been admitted to one of the schools on their target school list. Every year, we get more and more students into their reach schools. Last cycle, we had more than 80 Ivy League acceptances. You can find more detailed information on our admissions results here.
However, the more important question to ask is what we specifically did to help students rather than just where they ended up. You should look at how we achieved these results—the actual impact we made on students and their applications, or how we took a student from point A to point B. Our case studies, which you can see here, detail the unique challenges that individual students faced and how our counselors overcame those challenges in innovative ways.
At InGenius, we work with students from all backgrounds and academic levels, not just the ones who want to go to top schools. Our goal is to help students get into better schools than they would have gotten into without our help, and to help them accomplish their individual goals, whatever they may be.
We use a team approach to counseling students on how to build their candidacy and applications for US universities. When students sign up for our services, they will be assigned an admissions team, comprised of a Former Admissions Officer and a Graduate Coach. This means that our students benefit from the insights and experiences of two counselors, who have different skills and strengths.
By working directly with Former Admissions Officers, our students get insight into admissions processes and decisions at top US universities. Our Former Admissions Officers specialize in developing the high level strategy of our students’ applications. Using their admissions experience, they help our students market themselves to the admissions office in a way that makes them stand out, identify strengths and weaknesses and how to address them, tailor their application to specific schools, oversee the creation of all application materials, and perform a Final Review on every application to make sure it is as strong as possible.
By working with a Graduate Coach—a trained writer and editor from a top school—you get to work with someone who has succeeded through application cycles themselves. Our Graduate Coaches, who are carefully vetted and trained under our rigorous curriculum, are expert editors. They also know, from experience, what it is like to attend the top schools in the US—what the classes, professors, campus, culture, food, dorms, and students are actually like—and can provide our students with up-to-date information on the landscapes at different schools.
By working with a Former Admissions Officer and a Graduate Coach, both of whom have different strengths, experiences, perspectives, and roles, our students get the best of both worlds.
By conducting our services through video chat, our students gain access to our team of over 150 Former Admissions Officers, 150 Graduate Coaches, mentors, teachers, and more—all from their very own home. We have found that our students and parents love the technology aspect of our service. They don’t have to sit in traffic to get to an office only to wait in line to speak to their counselor or make appointments weeks in advance; rather, they get personalized, efficient one-on-one or two-on-one attention from their laptop. Parents—your children are busy enough as it is! The internet also allows students to work with us over summers—which are crucial times for Candidacy Building™ and Application Counseling—or when they travel without missing a beat. We are literally at your fingertips whenever you want!
In order to ensure that our students stay on track and that there are no lapses in service, we have a number of systems in place. Our Education Team oversees all service, making sure that our students (and counselors) are held accountable and that we progress according to our educational curriculum. We also use a Google Group system for all of our counseling work. When students get started with us, we create a custom Google email group that includes all members of the team so that everyone is on the same page throughout our work together.
Our packages are based on deliverables. For Application Counseling, this means that we will help you with every single component of your application under your selected package until it has reached its full potential. Whether that be 10 drafts of your essay or 20, for example, we will be there every step of the way. We know that every student is different. With that, the work that needs to be done and the time it takes to do it can be different. As educators, we have developed our packages to accommodate for the unique needs of all students and to make sure that they are getting the maximum level of service. Look around. You’ll find that in our industry, this is rare.
We work with all students, regardless of standardized test scores, GPA, university ambitions, and career goals. Our only requirements are that the student and family have realistic expectations, and that our students work hard and engage in the process with us.
Only working with top students, or being selective about students we work with, directly contradicts our company goal of increasing educational access. While other companies pad their admissions results by helping only the best students or by strictly limiting school lists, we encourage families to look at what we actually did with our students—the process, the academic and personal growth, and yes, the results, too. While we can stand toe-to-toe with anyone on results, we are most proud of how those results were achieved.
At InGenius Prep, we are just as proud of the students at the bottom of their classes who outperform the odds to get into top 100 schools as the students who get into the Ivy League.
When families sign up to work with us, they will receive a Welcome Packet that outlines parental involvement, student expectations, and the counseling process. Our counselors make sure sure that our students stay on track and progress according to our curriculum. They are also responsible sending meeting reports to parents, ensuring that all lines of communication are open, and resolving any issues that arise quickly. Applying and attending university is a big family decision that we respect and treat with the utmost compassion, care, and attention.
We work with all types of students—the passionate and appropriately focused student, the passionate and unfocused student, the passionate and too focused student, the student with many interests but no passion, and the student without any interests at all. Believe it or not, most students, especially younger students in the beginning of high school, do not know what they are passionate about and don’t have specific or strong interests. We see this a lot!
It is our job to help students identify their interests and ambitions, turn these into tangible accomplishments, and to then help them stand out. This process is extremely different and highly customized for every student, but the goal is to find something that truly inspires the student—whatever it might be.
To do this, we recommend that our students adopt an evolutionary and experimental attitude to their interests. We start them off small with simple ideas to try out like reading a book or article, watching a documentary on a given topic, visiting a museum or exhibit, joining a student group, or attending a lecture or class outside of school. The sole purpose of this exercise is to see if the student is interested in learning more about the specific topic.
Many students feel a pressure that they have to commit early on to a particular field, become “passionate” about it, and invest in becoming an expert in it, even when they are unsure if they are going to like it or continue to like it. An evolutionary approach removes that pressure!
When we speak with families, we conduct comprehensive evaluations to gather as much information about their academic and personal background and goals as possible. We use this information to pair students with counselors who will be a good match for their university goals, interests, and personalities. If students and families have specific requests, we do our best to accommodate them. That being said, we know our counselors’ backgrounds, experiences, and personalities best and carefully manage availability and student-to-counselor ratio. Our counselor assignment process is tested and proven every single day.
It’s incredibly important to us that our students have a great experience and that they bond with their counselors. We have found that students produce their best work when they like who they’re working with. This relationship, connection, and trust does not develop overnight. It takes a lot of time to get to know each other, dig into a student’s life and persona, and craft a strong candidacy or application. We try our best not to undo any of this work by prematurely switching counselors. It’s rare that students don’t like their counselors, but in the event that the pairing does not work well, we will certainly make the switch. Students value their relationship with their counselors so much that, in many cases, they continue to talk even post-acceptance.
Do we guarantee that students have the best chance of getting accepted by using our services? Absolutely. We have the results to prove it. Do we guarantee that students will get admitted? Absolutely not. Guaranteeing admission is unethical, as we cannot control what goes on in the admissions office. Any company that does so is not guaranteeing that you will, in fact, get into your dream school; they are purely guaranteeing that you will get a refund if you don’t. What we do guarantee is that students who engage with their counselors and our curriculum, will leave this process with a better understanding of who they are, what they hope to accomplish, and how to succeed in school and beyond.
Yes, we are a member of NACAC, the National Association of College Admissions Counseling. As a member, InGenius is committed to continuing professional and counseling development for our education team. We follow the association’s code of ethics and professional practices, and we advocate for equal access to higher education for all students.
In addition to centralizing the collective knowledge from our 200+ Former Admissions Officers, being a part of NACAC allows our company to continually expand our admissions knowledge, remain up to date on admissions trends, and provide our students with the best advice out there.
The earlier the better! When students come to us right before it is time to apply to college or graduate school, there is only so much we can do with the experiences, credentials, and academic profile given to us. We can certainly help these students strategize and craft as compelling of applications as possible, but we are given experiences and data points that cannot be altered.
When students come to us early in their educational careers, we pair them with a counseling team to help them develop as applicants, students, and people early on. In our Candidacy Building™ Program, we help students strategize early, build their profiles, and stand out from their peers. In this innovative program, our counselors help students explore and develop their academic interests, engage in unique and meaningful extracurricular activities, strengthen their personal qualities and leadership skills, and ultimately, position them to get into the best schools possible. Plus, students are 10% more likely to get into a top-ranked school with every additional year of Candidacy Building™.
Students who work with us early in their academic careers have the ability to partake in our unique programs: Academic Mentorships, Leadership & Innovation Lab, Writing Classes, Soft Skills Courses, and Guaranteed Internships.
It takes A LOT of hard work, strategy, determination, and self-reflection to get into the school of your dreams. At InGenius Prep, we are here, every step of the way, to help you get there.
Contact our Enrollment Team to learn more about our services and how we can lead your admissions journey.