College Application

The college application process can be complex and daunting, and the admissions race is becoming more fiercely competitive with each year. How we envy our parents, who used to think of UCLA as the “surfer school,” in the bygone days before it was flooded with 100,000 applications a year.

Today, the minimum requirements for an application to a good university are a strong GPA, an impressive extracurricular résumé, outstanding SAT scores, and just about the best essay you’ve ever written on that most difficult of topics: yourself. Even if you have the right stuff, the business of getting it all documented and organized, and of representing yourself in one thousand words or less, may drive you crazy with anxiety.

So how do you make the right choices — out of four years of high school and fourteen more of life behind it, what do you highlight? What do you say, and how do you say it? These are questions that we Study Hut tutors have had to answer on our own applications, and which we have helped our students to answer for themselves, year after year.

If you’re like most teenagers on Earth, you have only a vague sense of who you really are. Yet even if you are fortunate enough to know yourself inside and out, without a trace of doubt, you’ll still have to go through the process of translating so that someone else will understand. If you’re at all uncertain about the logistics of applying, we can help. With a series of coaching sessions during the autumn of your senior year, we’ll help you get the minute matters out of the way (including how to structure the personal essay) so that you can focus on the really important part, the heart and essence of your application: the elusive you.