Emma
Emma’s Story
Emma came to Oriel Admissions in her sophomore year with a goal of developing a cohesive story for her applications but more importantly, to discover opportunities for growth and personal development.
Emma was already fairly involved in school but she was not sure if she was utilizing her time wisely. Already a mature and motivated student, she was looking for direction and a better understanding of how to prioritize her time and what other opportunities she was missing. Emma was academically strong and she enjoyed more of her studies but she did not have a clear favorite area of study. Additionally, she felt that she was at a disadvantage because she was coming from a high school with some oddities to their curriculum and they did not typically send students to Ivy league institutions, a point that she was particularly concerned about.
Preliminary College List
- University of Virginia
- University of Michigan
- Barnard College
- Mount Holyoke College
- Cornell University
- Brown University
- Purdue University
- Wesleyan University
Oriel Admission’ Impact
We began with a multi-prong approach to helping Emma to develop a compelling narrative for her college applications.
We explored her current activities, those that she enjoyed and those where she felt like she was not able to make an impact. We helped her to drop two school clubs that were taking up a significant portion of her time but would not be beneficial to her over the long-term.
We brainstormed ways in which Emma could build up leadership experience and what she might do to take her involvement to the next level. She was motivated to gain additional experience in public speaking and she wanted to make an impact within her school community. We found a local organization that was dedicated towards helping youth to build their communication skills and Emma got involved in their program, providing her with multiple opportunities to practice speaking about different topics and to varied groups of people over the course of her sophomore year. By the end of the year, she was more confident in her speaking abilities, so much so that she decided to run for a Student Council leadership position and she was happily elected into that role.
Emma considered herself to be an entrepreneurial thinker and as a Student Council leader, she had many ideas that she wanted to implement. Together, we discussed the viability of those ideas and identified several that would be most likely to succeed. We also helped Emma to think through different fundraising initiatives that she wanted to implement. Over the course of the year, she led multiple different experiences in her high school, and learned a lot about herself through the process.
She began to work with a Career Coach in order to pinpoint her interest. They went through several strength and skill assessments to identify her strengths and then we took those learnings and put them into action with target searches of relevant summer programs. Through this process, Emma identified psychology and neuroscience as her primary area of interest.
Emma took part in the Oriel Ignite Research Program during her junior year. She worked with a PhD mentor to complete a project in psychology. Emma was already interested in how high school students cope with mental health challenges. Together with her mentor she identified a strategy for completing the project that involved conducting a survey among students and implementing the results into her research.
We began to identify colleges that would be a good fit for Emma at an early stage. Knowing that her high school did not have a track record of sending students to highly selective colleges, she made an effort to go much more in depth with her research. This is something that was only possible to do because she had decided upon her intended major and she had started the college research process early enough. One of the steps that she took was to look very closely at the psychology and neuroscience departments and the curriculum that they were offering and to determine the difference between the programs. She reached out to departmental administrators to learn more about courses and communicated with admissions officers to ask thought-out questions about the colleges.
Emma was ultimately accepted to multiple colleges including Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and Mount Holyoke College. She chose to attend Cornell University.
