Why ninth and tenth grade
Ninth and tenth grade is where most of our families start, and it is the right window. There is time to decide what the application will eventually say rather than only how it says it, which is worth considerably more.
By the autumn of senior year an application is largely a reporting exercise. The grades exist, the activities exist, and the work left is presentation. That work matters and it has a ceiling. College admissions planning for ninth graders and tenth graders happens before the ceiling is set.
Starting earlier: sixth to eighth grade
A smaller number of families come to us in middle school, and that is a different engagement rather than a longer version of the same one. At that stage the work is foundational: course trajectory, which school to attend in the first place, and the early shape of an interest that may become something.
It is also when boarding school applications are decided, since those close in January of eighth grade. For families considering Andover, Exeter, St Paul’s or Groton, sixth and seventh grade is the planning window and ninth is already too late.
Extracurricular planning for college admissions
The usual pattern is ten activities and no story. Student council, a sport, a service club, an instrument, a summer programme. Each is defensible and together they say nothing, because an officer reading 55,000 files cannot hold a list in mind.
Extracurricular planning means choosing early what the one thing is going to be, cutting the rest back to what the student actually enjoys, and giving the one thing two or three years to produce a result. That is the Hook Program.
Course selection and academic positioning
Course choices made in tenth grade determine which courses are available in twelfth, and committees read the transcript against what the school offered. A student who did not take the hardest available path cannot explain that away later.
Summer program application consulting
Selective summer programmes apply in the winter, more than a year before the application they are meant to strengthen. We work from our own database rather than a public list, and apply to the ones that actually move an admissions outcome rather than the ones that market hardest.
Early decision application consulting
The early round is where the best odds are, and the school list should be built around it from the start rather than assembled in senior autumn. Which university gets that single early card is a decision worth making in tenth grade and revisiting every term. The policies differ sharply by university.
Research starts early too
Independent research with a Ph.D. or professor takes a year or more to reach publication. Started in tenth grade it appears on the application as published work; started in twelfth it appears as an intention. How the research mentorship works.