Service

College Advising

Our college advising program, Great Minds Advising, provides a high-end, ultra-specialized approach to helping students stand out in today’s hypercompetitive college admissions landscape.

For the 2022–23 application cycle, 100% of our students applied under an early decision plan and gained admission. Over the past three years, our advising program has helped applicants earn admission to colleges such as Columbia, Yale, Stanford, Penn, Duke, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, WashU, UC-Berkeley, Michigan, UVA, NYU, Tufts, Wake Forest, Boston College, Boston University, McGill, Wesleyan, Northeastern, Villanova, and University of Rochester. Our students are admitted to the Ivy League at a rate of 11x the national average (with 83% acceptance rate applying EA/ED) and have also received over $1M in scholarships (including a full merit scholarship to Duke University) since 2020.

Each cycle, our team supports a limited number of students and families—specifically, those who are prepared to match the extraordinary amount of thought, strategy, detail, creativity, and expertise we invest in their college success.

student and teacher

The sooner we get to meet and begin advising our students, the greater the impact we can have helping them discover and pursue their academic interests and other extracurricular passions. At times, we may help students pursue, complete, and package scientific research; team up with a programming engineer to develop a semester- or year-long coding project; gain enrollment in nontraditional, specialized courses and programs; design and develop domestic or international student groups; establish and operate nonprofits, businesses, or other organizations; connect with university professors and other relevant professionals; or explore a variety of other high-value pursuits.

As the second half of junior year approaches and the admissions cycle picks up, our students get a significant head-start on crafting extremely personal, nuanced application essays, supplements, resumes, and portfolios that each illuminate a facet of their collective admissions narrative, while calibrating to the particular ethos, evaluation process, and desired student profile that each college on their list uniquely bears.

Prospective families can inquire using the form below and will then submit a thorough student background and schedule a time to chat directly with a member of our advising team. From there, we’ll provide next steps, including a detailed advising proposal tailored to each student case.

student in library
westchester prep logo
Groups

Application Bootcamps

Each summer, our advising team offers a series of College Application Bootcamps, bringing the deepest-dive strategic approach to the application process you’ll find anywhere. Including approximately 12 hours of live instruction from our advising program’s directors over the course of a little more than a week—and accompanied by individualized assignments—students will learn how to uniquely position their candidacies, admissions stories, and interests, while avoiding the mistakes so many applicants commit, from writing cliche and irrelevant essays to making suboptimal school and major selections.

student in classroom

Each Bootcamp day will follow a dynamic lecture-style format accompanied by numerous examples and exercises. Students will then be tasked with applying the information from each day to a component of their own case and will complete fully-private, individualized assignments that will be subsequently reviewed, revised, and returned by our advising team to each student throughout Bootcamp. Ultimately, students can expect to leave their Bootcamp with the following items:

School List

Decision Plan

  • A recommendation of whether the student should apply Early Decision, Early Action, etc. for each school

Major Selection/Strategic Positioning

  • Determining academic areas that will be most advantageous for the student to apply for given their candidacy and interests

Common Application Personal Essay

  • Topic selection, brainstorming/outlining, and an initial draft with advisor edits

Supplementary Essays

  • Students learn to research/write effective responses to common topics, such as the “Why School,” “Why Major,” and other prompts, with initial drafts for a top-choice school

Common Application Activities/Honors List

  • Students learn to convey their resume in a way that is maximally compelling and aligns with their overarching admissions story, major selections, and unique strengths, with an initial draft

Meet our advising team to discuss our approach in detail

Between September and November, please allow up to 2 weeks for a response

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