The Road to Elite Colleges: What Black Families Need to Know Now

Join Prepory Coach Imani I. as she shares her insider knowledge on:

• How elite colleges are approaching diversity and evaluating applications in today’s admissions landscape
• How to authentically highlight leadership, community impact, and cultural identity
• Build a highly selective college list based on your family’s specific goals
• Guidance for families on timelines, resources, and key steps to stay ahead
• A live Q&A to address your specific questions

DANIEL: First, I want to get started by introducing a little bit about myself, and I’d love to give Imani an opportunity to introduce herself before we jump in. My name’s Daniel. I’m a member of the leadership team here at Prepory. I’m the CEO of this company and really excited about hosting tonight’s webinar. I’ve wanted to do something like this for quite some time now, and timing just worked out to do it right now. So really, really excited. I want to share a little bit more about my professional background and maybe more about my cultural background. I’ve been working in the college admission space for the last 13 years.

Ultimately, just really obsessed with admissions, obsessed with this work, obsessed with looking to deeply getting to know students and developing a team that’s got that same passion. In terms of a tiny bit about me, I’m Afro-Latino. My family’s originally from the Dominican Republic, and my story of the college admissions process I think is a story that really is a big part of why we started this firm and why we’ve been doing this work for 13 years, because my parents were new from this country and I generally went to a non-competitive high school where the population was about 70, 75-ish percent Black. Just my experience with the college admissions process is really different than that of our Prepory students with just how much collaboration and intentionality goes behind the work that we do. And that experience is what really inspired me to do this work and to launch this company over a decade ago. And since then, we’ve grown to support students in 70 different countries, work with over 14,000 students, and now we’re proud to say that it’s not a scientific metric, but been in the space for a while to be home to the most diverse college admissions counseling team in our space. It’s something we’re really excited about. So that’s a tiny bit about me and my background. I’d love to turn it over to Imani, who’s co-hosting with me tonight. And with that, Imani, go ahead.

IMANI: Yes. Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining. My name is Imani Ifedi. I’m super excited to be here as well. So a bit about me. I’m a Duke University graduate, and I immediately got into this space right after college because I wanted to close some information gaps. I’m a first generation American from Nigerian parents, so similar to Daniel coming from an immigrant background, and although my parents super value education, they both have PhDs, got those PhDs in America, they were still so confused about the undergraduate admissions process, and so it was a struggle to say the least. And so that’s part of why I’m so, so passionate about this work. I realized that there’s so much information to provide to families that typically get left behind for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s immigrant families, sometimes it’s because of color, resources, status, whatever it is. I want to help close those gaps. So yeah, I’m really excited to get started here.

DANIEL: Awesome. Before we jump in, for anyone who, this is maybe your first time hearing about Prepory or anyone who’s maybe just not exactly sure who we are in our space, we wanted to give you a little bit more about who we are as an organization. Go ahead, Imani. So just a tidbit on us, I already mentioned this, but since our inception we’ve worked with over 14,000 students. Some other statistics is that 94% of our students are admitted to one or more of their top five schools. And last admission cycle, our students were 3.4 times more likely to get into any school with an acceptance rate below 15%. And with how competitive the college admissions landscape has gotten in the last few years, it feels like virtually every school in the U.S. got an acceptance rate below 15%.

What you’ll see on the next slide is sort of a smattering of a bunch of different logos where our students were admitted last cycle. Ivy League institutions like Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Yale, large public state schools like UCLA, UC Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, of course, Imani’s alma mater, Duke, and some smaller liberal arts colleges like Amherst. We work with students across the entire gamut. So some of our students are interested in these, many of our students are interested in these super selective Ivy League institutions. Others are interested in large state schools. We’re really about meeting families where they’re at and getting a sense of what your goals are and helping students actualize that. One piece I forgot to mention that I like to mention before Imani takes the reins here is that we do have an open Q&A. If at any point you have any questions about something that Imani is talking about or I’m talking about, feel free to drop that in our Q&A. We will be answering live as the webinar is going, but we’ll also save more time for Q&A towards the end of our presentation this evening.

IMANI: Great. So this webinar is all about what Black families need to know. Some of it might sound familiar, some of it might be very new, but really I’m just trying to provide a whole host of information, especially from the last couple of years with reversal of affirmative action and then things that have happened this year as well. We have the insider look on how these things are shaping college admissions, college essays, so on and so forth. And we want to provide information on what you need to know to stand out, continue communicating who you are as a person and be competitive in this increasingly competitive and quite frankly, complicated ever-changing space. So we’re going to talk about the new admissions landscape, how you can provide insight on your leadership, community impact, and cultural identity and your application, how to build an intentional college list as opposed to just looking at the top 10 list. There’s many other factors besides ranking. And then talk about the Prepory difference, what makes us stand out.

So the new admissions landscape. First and foremost, I want you to take a look at this slide. You might notice something a little bit alarming. The Black student population for incoming freshmen in 2023, 11%, 7%, 14%, 20%, 14%, 7.3% for a lot of these top schools, and then you see a dramatic shift in the incoming freshmen for 2024. As you may guess, a lot of this has to do with the reversal of affirmative action by the Supreme Court in 2023. And the assumption might be that, oh, well affirmative action must have meant that Black students were only getting in because they’re Black, and that is an assumption that I’m going to bust and talk about here in a bit. But, I also wanted to take a look at the slide at the Prepory advantage. Clearly, even with the change of affirmative action, Prepory has been able to stay on top of our game and have more admissions 6.76 times for Amherst, 6.2 times for NYU than the general population. Daniel, is there anything more you’d want to say on that?

DANIEL: No, I think that was great. Imani, we can go ahead.

IMANI: Perfect. So as I mentioned, there was the end of race-based affirmative action in 2023, and as you saw on the last slide, there was indeed a smaller percentage of Black students now enrolling at top schools. So, even while affirmative action was happening, Black students, and this has been studied, kind of felt afraid to apply to certain schools. They felt like it might not be for them, especially those PWIs, those predominantly white institutions. And then even after, that continued more so they felt more unqualified to apply thinking that it was because they are not qualified enough, they are not smart enough, they don’t have enough activities, they don’t have enough fill in the blank. But really, there are some aspects of affirmative action that did equate to colleges wanting to see what the cultural background of their students are because at the end of the day, universities know that it’s important to have a diverse population on campus and diverse perspectives.

However, that was only one of many factors in admissions. So the idea that being Black or being of any race or background is enough to get you in is absolutely false. It was false then, and it’s still false now. But at the same time, colleges still are looking for that diversity and we’ll get to that in a bit. Additionally, a lot of Black students just did not apply as much. Some colleges reported that not only did they have lower admissions, but they also had lower applications in the first place. So that’s something that not a lot of people talk about, but is also true. And at the end of the day, before and now, Black students often have less access to the same resources, the same information, the same networks as their peers, which is what affirmative action was looking to solve. So that problem doesn’t go away once you reverse race-based affirmative action, of course, and that’s a part of what Prepory hopes to fill, providing more of that insider information to families from a variety of backgrounds.

So that was affirmative action. And now I want to get to what has happened this year, just a brief little history lesson if you’re not in tune with what’s going on. So, the Department of Education released a letter this February and essentially stated that the school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars or other cues as a means of determining or predicting the student’s race and favoring or disfavor such students. Obviously, that is a hard hitter for the undergraduate application process because there are so many cues that can indicate where a student’s background is from. So that letter was struck down by the federal court, however, it still had lasting impacts on colleges and how they are presenting their applications. Another example of this is the Office of Attorney General memo, just this July, which prohibits cultural competence requirements at federally funded universities and also prohibited words like overcoming obstacles, narratives, diversity statements.

As you can see here, they specifically said a federally funded program, which are most top colleges and universities, requires applicants to describe obstacles they have overcome or submit a diversity statement in a manner that advantages those who discussed experiences intrinsically tied to protected characteristics using the narrative as a proxy for advantaging that protected characteristic in providing benefits. So essentially, what they’re saying is you can’t evaluate the diversity of your applicants in order to make application decisions. That’s kind of scary, especially because diversity statements and diversity essay prompts became a bigger deal after affirmative action was reversed in 2023. So colleges were like, “What are we supposed to do now? We want this diverse population. We want to know more about our students, but we’re scared of not getting funded.” So here are some examples of three different colleges that made changes to their diversity-centric essay prompts, and I want to show you how this looks different for different colleges.

So with UVA, they had a prompt in 2024–2025 asking about background, perspective, past experience, upbringing, race. As you can see, these words are the exact words that these memos and all of the government letters this year flagged and said, “You should not put,” so UVA decided to remove their essay entirely. Several schools did this. Columbia, on the other hand, showed that they still want to prioritize lived experience. So they took out words like equitable, inclusive community, oh, excuse me. They took out words like diverse, that was a big one that a lot of colleges are kind of afraid of right now, but they still said, “We want to know about aspects of your life so far or your lived experience that is important to you, describing how it shaped the way you learn, how you will make Columbia multidimensional.”

So in a way, they’re kind of asking for the same thing. They still want to know any aspect of your identity that is important to you and that has shaped who you are, and they still care about having a diverse and collaborative community. They just took the word out. Harvard is similar. They still prioritize diversity as well. This one was very interesting. In 2024, they said that they care about enrolling a diverse student body. But the 2025 essay prompt said, “Enrolling a student body with a diversity of perspectives and experiences,” so that the government can’t say, “Oh, you’re looking for diversity in terms of race or cultural background.” They’re just looking for diversity in terms of perspectives and experiences, which often comes from race and cultural background. So these are just the tiny ways in which colleges have changed their essays. So the consequence, as you’ve seen, is that there are fewer explicit questions about diversity, cultural competence, identity, so on and so forth due to legal and governmental pressure.

But the myth, just like there was a myth after affirmative action changes, there was a myth here, too, that colleges no longer value or want to prioritize diversity. And again, the reality is that’s not true. They’re making these changes simply due to legal and political risk, and they have found new ways to ask about community, background, culture without getting flagged and potentially losing funding, but they still want to know about you. And now, it’s even more important to know what to look for, how to evaluate these essay prompts, when it’s appropriate to talk about your culture and your background versus when they might be looking for something else. It’s kind of like a puzzle, and of course that makes things even more complicated, but I think we’re pretty good at figuring out how to read these essays, essay prompts to decide when to best talk about these ideas. So now we’re going to talk—oh.

DANIEL: Sorry, before you jump into that, I also wanted even to further dispel what you were saying there, that it’s not only that colleges still very much care about this, but they probably care about it more than ever because now they need to work harder because they don’t have things like race available to be able to make these decisions. So, admissions officers have to do a bit more work to understand what a student’s cultural heritage might be or where they might be from in order to holistically evaluate applicants, and I think that puts the onus then more on the applicant, more on the student to really highlight these pieces. And of course, admissions committees and deans at these universities are still looking for really creative ways to analyze the pool of applicants. And there’s a lot of pressure from currently enrolled students. Students at Brown who are currently enrolled in that institution exert a lot of pressure on their community, their admissions team, to look for a more diverse pool of applicants. And this is a lot of the rhetoric that you see at these, especially those more selective institutions.

IMANI: Absolutely, a hundred percent agree. Perfect. So now we’re going to look into all the different ways in which you can convey not only your cultural background, but also your community impact, your leadership, and all of these other factors and values that matter to colleges to help you continue to stand out. So first, I want to talk about essays. This one is particularly important to me in my heart because you might’ve thought when I said, “Oh, I have Nigerian parents, they had no idea what to do,” “How did she even get into Duke?” A lot of people when I got into Duke said, “Oh, she must have gotten in because she was Black.” And honestly, that kind of hurt. But when I got onto Duke’s campus, I actually got a chance to meet the admissions officer that was on the team of people admitting my class and he said, “I remember you and I know why we admitted you. Honestly we were a bit on the fence, but your personal statement stood out so much.”

My personal statement, funny enough, had actually nothing to do with me being Black. It had everything to do with who I am, how I think, and what I value. So that really got me thinking, wow, essays matter a lot more than I think a lot of people recognize. It’s not even just about being a good writer and a competent writer. It’s about all these things that I put on the slide, showing who you are, being authentic, standing out, because at the end of the day, psychologically we remember things about people not from a list of activities, but from their story, their overall narrative. Colleges also care about this because there’s a culture to each college and they want to make sure that you’re a cultural fit. It’s funny because they talk about wanting to have diverse perspectives. So what do I mean by cultural fit? Well, maybe they really care about people who are innovative thinkers or maybe they care about people that come from a different background than just America, or maybe they care about people who are more creative types and can create new ideas. It depends on what the college is, but they’ll get a sense of that through your essays. And then we have Common App essays, which is what I was referring to, the personal statement, but there’s also supplemental essays, so I want to give you an idea of what those look like.

So for the MIT supplemental essay question, this is a really good example of a supplemental essay question that doesn’t really have anything to do with cultural background on the surface, but you can integrate even aspects of your cultural background in an essay like this. So the essay is, “How did you manage a situation or challenge that you didn’t expect? What did you learn from it?” That could be about anything. Here, I want to read this to you because I think it’s super interesting to see. This was John’s response. We changed the name for privacy, but this is John’s response. “It is inevitable that debate partners argue, and this argument got pretty tense. ‘John, in terms of wealth, you’re effectively…white,’ quipped my white debate partner. I was in shock. Rejecting the thought, I considered, what does my Blackness mean? Is it having my intelligence doubted because of my skin? Spending hours detangling coils? Smelling greasy cornbread at family cookouts? My Blackness runs through my veins: it’s inextricable from my experiences.”

And then he goes on to say, “Despite my strong emotions, I wanted to understand his perspective. Uncharacteristically, my debate partner and I didn’t debate; we talked. As we talked, we learned from one another. I learned that his Russian heritage doesn’t emphasize skin color like mine does, shaping his perception of race in the United States. I learned how my strong feelings about my Blackness aren’t going to be clear to everyone, and that’s fine. Cultural pride means different things to different people.” And then he goes on to talk about what he learned and the value of emotions. So as you can see, there’s so much that a college can learn from this one supplemental essay response. Not only do they learn, well, he’s Black, but they also learn that he wants to communicate with people that are different from him, that he knows how to have an intellectual conversation without getting overly heated, that he values debate and discussion and coming to common ground, which are super important now, especially in this political landscape, let’s be honest. So colleges are looking out for that as well. So this says a lot. So that’s essays.

What about extracurricular activities? So, I want to give you just a few insights into extracurricular activities in general and then talk about how you might integrate cultural background and identity in your extracurriculars as well. So one big myth about extracurriculars is that you have to have many, many, many of them, and the more you have, the better. Colleges are looking for a long, long list of activities. When in reality, for the Common App, which is a tool that many top colleges use for the application process, you’re only allowed to list 10. So really, the depth of the activity, the leadership that you show, the impact that you have in those activities, whether it’s you become captain of your team or you become president of your debate club or you win awards in your competition club, that matters so much more than just having a bunch of different activities and going from different activities one year to the next.

Which leads me to my next point, that commitment is also something that colleges value a lot and is a bit undervalued. Of course, they know that maybe going into high school you might not stick to everything that you do, but showing commitment long term, year after year is just important. It shows that you know who you are and you care about what you’re doing, and that can be even more impressive than again, just having a bunch of things that you think are impressive but don’t really have a cohesive picture for who you are and what you value. Which again, leads me to my next point of theme. Theme is really important, too. They want to see someone that is well-rounded and has a bit of a variety, but also seeing repeated themes like there was a student I worked with who is actually going to be a STEM major, but she really cares about equity for women.

So she made a STEM club for women, for example, and then also works at a women’s shelter. So those are multiple activities that show what she values and have a theme that makes her stand out from other STEM applicants. And then we have passion projects, which essentially are independent projects outside of any club or organization that you might be a part of that you have started yourself. You’ve taken the initiative to maybe fix an issue or create something that you care about. This is one of the biggest ways in which you can show your cultural identity. We had a student, I think this was last year, who was a Black student and he went through a lot of stereotypes transitioning from a predominantly Black high school to a predominantly white one, and he was even told that he couldn’t join the advanced math classes even though he was qualified for it, which is ridiculous and makes my blood boil, but instead of just being upset about it, he ended up creating a tutoring club for young Black students because that was the way in which he wanted to push back against these stereotypes and show that he cares about his community.

This student ended up getting into, I believe it was every Ivy besides Cornell and also non-Ivy top schools like Caltech and MIT, and now he’s attending Harvard. So, that was just one example, of course, of his wonderful profile, but it obviously shows, and we see time and time again, that doing something that you care about is going to be important and stand out for admission officers.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think the one thing I want to add here, Imani, on the extracurricular piece is you talked a little bit about this, on sort of the importance of theme and depth, but a few years ago you would hear terms like “colleges want a well-rounded student.” And what I want families to know is that that is not the case anymore. Colleges do not want a well-rounded student. What they want is what we call a well-rounded class. So for the entire class of 2030, the class of students that they’re going to be admitting this admission cycle, they want to make sure that they’ve got a lot of different cultural backgrounds, identities represented, academic interests, artistic talent represented in the pool of applicants. But they want each individual applicant to have one or two interests that they’re really narrowly focused on. And admissions committees are really looking towards prioritizing students who have a pretty specific academic or career focus that’s validated in, of course, the classes that they take. If you want to be a computer science major, you’ve hopefully taken AP Computer Science and AP Physics by the time you apply and you’ve done an internship coding for a startup.

IMANI: Absolutely. That’s a really good point, Daniel. So the last piece that I want to talk about, I mean, again, there are many other pieces to the application process, but for the sake of time, the last big one I want to talk about is the impact of research and having that hands-on experience. This one is also particularly important for this webinar because historically, I don’t know if I mentioned this, I’ve been working in this space for 10 years and I’ve seen so many students who have the potential to do research, but they just don’t know how important it is. Their schools aren’t advocating for it or they don’t have the resources to start a huge research project. But any type of research is important, especially for those STEM majors, but even for liberal arts majors. It’s important for the admissions offices to see that you care enough about an issue that you want to go a little bit more in depth, that you understand and value research because a lot of these are research institutions.

So, there are many different ways to do this. Maybe you have some local college connections to be able to get your foot in the door through some contacts. Maybe you can start your own independent research project by reaching out to a teacher and seeing if they could advise you. I often work a lot with students on sending out emails to professors at their local colleges, and it doesn’t have to be a name-brand college. It could be just the college that is closest to you and has professors that are doing research that you’re interested in. That’s all that matters. So sending those cold emails, reaching out, and just trying to get your foot in the door to have some experience is super important and I wanted to make that very clear on this webinar specifically.

DANIEL: Yeah, and I think the last piece, Imani, you talked about how important it is to have this conversation now is on those summer programs. Summer programs are a huge opportunity for research, doing things like UC’s COSMOS program or doing things like Stanford’s medical immersion program or the Georgia Tech Research Institute internship. I think a lot of times when families hear “summer,” their brain, it sounds like, “Oh, well this is like a March me or an April me problem.” But at this stage, these programs have gotten so competitive, especially the research-specific summer programs, that a lot of these applications are already open. They opened in November and they are going to close in January or February. So, it’s really important that students are thinking about their summer program, their summer plan, and especially if you are a sophomore or a junior in high school, because these two summers are going to be the two most important summers of your college admissions process and for our juniors, probably our last time to get what you’re sort of focusing on this particular slide, which is that hands-on real-world experience in your academic or career area of interest.

IMANI: Yes, absolutely.

DANIEL: Cool. I want to talk a little bit about this. So what you’re seeing on these slides are just some reviews from families that we’ve worked with in the past. And so, every family here was a family of a Prepory student that we worked with. Some of them we started with as early as 9th grade. Others we started a bit later in 11th grade or 12th grade. Every family here is a Black family and obviously was really happy with the caliber and the quality of service that we provided. This family here is actually one of our families of the one that Imani took that story that she told about that student who got into seven of the eight Ivy League institutions.

IMANI: Perfect. So how do you build an intentional college list? There’s a lot that goes into it, of course, but the goal is to make aligned college choices. And so, there’s many different factors, the academics, their personality, family priorities. So, how I like to work with students is that I ask them, “What is your why?”, “What do you see in your future?”, “Where do you actually want to be in 5, 10, 15 years?” And of course, I already know what some of you are thinking: “How am I supposed to know that if I’m only 14 or 15 or 16?” That’s a part of the process. You start planting those questions and I work with students on how to reflect, understand themselves, and then make goals for their future so that they can understand their “why.” So that’s where we start even before building the college list, but then we go from there. We look at what that career might be, what a major might be that fits that career, and then what schools would be great for that major.

Then we add in other aspects of where do you want to be location wise? Do you want to go to a big school or small school? What is the cost? What is the campus vibe? Do you want to be near a city? Do you want to be in a rural area where the campus might be more intimate? So on and so forth. Those are just a few of the many questions we might ask. And then, we balance that list. We want to make sure that they’re applying to a good amount of reach schools, which means that the average student that attends that school has a high academic profile or higher than what their academic profile is. And when I say academic profile, I mean grades, test scores, those sort of factors. And then 40% target where their academic profile matches that student population and then likely, where their academic profile is higher.

And so, that we are adjusting by risk tolerance. So to make sure that all the schools that they end up applying to are schools that they want to go to, not just the reach and they’re not just applying to the likely because just to get it over with. I make sure that they would be happy with all of them, but then they’re happy with whether they get into two reach schools and four targets and three likelys, for example. And then, we also have to filter for fit. I want to mention the DEI landscape here as well because of the policy changes, you want to look at, okay, which schools are completely removing their DEI policies and initiatives, what is the staff representation like? Because me, as someone who went to a predominantly white institution, it was important for me to have at least some professors that look like me.

It was important to have these groups like Black Student Alliances where I could feel like I could talk about these things that were important to me and that shaped who I am with people who understood. So, that is an important part of choosing your college as well. You may even end up wanting to look into HBCUs as well. Maybe you add that to your college list. And then we look at, as I said, environment, size setting, program strengths. Some schools have specific honors programs that stand out to students, internships, research opportunities, and then that financial piece as well. For lower-income families, that’s huge. Seeing if a college meets 100% of need-based aid, while for families that have more financial resources, a lot of times they’re like, “I want to apply to schools with some merit aid opportunities because we’re probably not going to get any need-based financial aid.” So working through what sort of financial considerations you and your family need is something that is important as well. And then we reassess that annually. What they might want sophomore year might change junior year, might change senior year, depending on what opportunities they’ve taken advantage of, what other career opportunities they’re interested in, their academic profile, so on and so forth.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think the one piece, there’s maybe actually two things I want to add on the fit piece. I think a lot of times fit is hard to understand because it sounds like flowery, intangible language. I think one thing I usually talk about with fit is that one of the misconceptions around fit is that it’s sort of to guarantee that you’re going to be happy at that school if you’re admitted, and of course, that’s important. You’re going to live there for four years. That really matters. But fit is also a really important admission strategy. Virtually at this stage, every school that a student applies to is going to ask you a version of “Why us?” If as an applicant, you don’t know about their campus culture, you don’t know what’s the go-to restaurant after parties in freshman year, you don’t know who teaches what courses at this school, you’re probably not going to be a competitive applicant for that school.

Another thing is that each of these schools are looking for slightly different things, right? I think we can talk a little bit about the example you gave earlier, Imani. We had one student who was admitted to Brown but was also admitted to MIT. What MIT is looking for in an applicant is almost the total opposite of what Brown is looking for in an applicant. MIT likes hyper one-dimensional applicants. They want you to only care about STEM. Your entire profile has to read hyper STEM-focused. Brown wants the total opposite of that. They have an open curriculum for a reason. They want to see that you’ve got a lot of different interests. And as an applicant, if you’re not strategically presenting yourself to each of these schools, while of course still being authentic and honest to who you are, you’re also not going to be a winner. And so, that intentionality is really important, not just so that you’re of course happy once you’re there and actually a student, but so that you can be a more competitive applicant in the admissions process.

IMANI: Absolutely love that. So now let’s talk about the admissions timeline. What does this actually look like? So if you’re starting in 9th and 10th grade, a lot of times people think, “Oh gosh, that’s so early to be talking about college.” But really, it’s just about exploring your interests, starting to understand what activities that you really want to delve into for your high school career, building those good relationships with teachers, which is going to be helpful for your recommendations later. So, what we do is I’ll start asking these big why reflective questions. “What are some of the things that you value?”, “What do you like to do in your free time?”, “How do you feel about math?”, “What are your favorite classes?” It’s just a time to start understanding who you are and what you like because that will be so helpful for figuring out how you want to spend your time for the rest of your high school career.

And then, as Daniel mentioned, especially with 10th grade and 11th grade, you might want to start looking at those summer programs as well. And then, in 11th grade you test plan, which means that you’re looking at your PSAT and then you figure out, “Okay, when am I going to take the SAT?”, “When am I going to take the ACT?”, “Which of these tests should I take?”, “When should I take them?” So on and so forth. You also have to go deeper in your extracurriculars. This is when we want to start seeing some leadership involved. We want to start seeing you take initiative. We want to start seeing you maybe creating your own, as I mentioned, passion project or independent research. We also start working on researching schools. You might have a better idea of how you see your future, what career you want to go into.

So then we can backwards track and see what majors are appealing to you and then backwards track what colleges might be appealing to you, and then do all of the campus fit things that we just talked about. And then, leading into 12th grade, we’re going to finalize that list. Maybe this is a good time for you to visit some colleges. We’re going to start drafting essays as well. Throughout this, I particularly, because I love the writing and the essays, I will start working on writing as early as 9th grade, even if it’s like “write about your day.” But, when it comes to the summer before 12th grade, we’re going to start drafting the essays that come out for colleges. Some colleges release their supplemental essays as early as June and July, so let’s get started on those because the earlier you get them out of the way, the less stressed out you’ll be when it comes November, December, and January.

Maybe you’ll start looking at some personal statement topics as well. Start brainstorming, “What are these big moments in my life that have been pivotal to who I am?”, “What has changed me?”, “What has made me grow?”, “What are these big lessons?” And we’ll just start writing them down and collecting, forming this narrative and this profile for you. And then, we also want to secure these recommendations. Recommendations are really important. So, start thinking about which teachers would be best, who you know the most. And also add some strategy to it as well. Sometimes we select teachers based on the major that you’re applying into. So, if you’re applying as a biomedical engineer, we don’t want to have an English and a history teacher. We want to make sure that it’s strategic in that way as well. As you can see, there’s kind of strategy in everything.

And then there’s also that Early Decision, Early Action strategy. Some schools allow you to apply early and there are some regulations and stipulations with these early decision applications. So, we help you figure out what is your top choice school? Is it worth it to apply to that school? If it means that if you get in, you must go, what will that look like? What other schools would you want to apply to early? Is it possible to apply to multiple of these schools early because of all of the different guidelines and regulations? We help you sort through all of that. It changes every year. It’s very complicated. I’m just the messenger, don’t shoot me. But that’s just how it is. And then, finally in the fall of 12th grade, this is when you start submitting those early apps. We’re reviewing financial aid forms, making sure that they’re in on time. Again, different colleges might have different deadlines for financial aid. The deadlines for financial aid might be different than the application deadlines. You might have a different application deadline if you want to have merit scholarship opportunities versus if you don’t. All of these things we sort out to make sure that you’re on the right path and you’re not missing any of these deadlines. And then, you also submit your regular applications as well. So that’s kind of the baseline trajectory and then you throw in a bunch of other things depending on the particular student.

DANIEL: Yeah. Awesome. Imani, I think that was a really helpful timeline. I think one sort of way that I really help families think about the college application process, because a lot of times I think families feel like the college application process starts in 12th grade, but what I typically let families know is the college application process ends in 12th grade. At this stage, many schools have deadlines as early as October 1st and October 15th, and with school starting in late August, early September, we’re talking about a month into senior year. So really, 9th grade through 11th grade is everything of what an admissions committee is going to be seeing to make a decision on your profile. They’re going to see extremely little, but in most cases, nothing that you’ve done in 12th grade to evaluate you as an applicant. So what I want to say to the sort of families in the audience is that if you are a 9th grader at this stage, you are halfway through one-third of everything that an admissions committee is going to look at to decide whether or not you’re a competitive applicant.

And if you’re a sophomore, it’s halfway through 10th grade; you only have 50% ahead of you left of what an admissions officer is going to look at to decide on whether or not you’re going to be a competitive applicant. And I think then the onus is then more on the student to sort of say, “Right now, am I competitive?”, “Do I have the profile to get into the school that I want to get into?”, “What can I do with the 50% time I have left?” Or for our juniors, “the maybe less than 12 months I have left to develop a winning profile for the caliber of school that I’m looking at?”

IMANI: Absolutely. And then I think if you start earlier, you make decisions that are more authentic as well, as opposed to last-minute decisions, “Let me just join this club because I have nothing on my activities list” sort of thing. So I completely agree. The earlier the start, kind of the better.

DANIEL: Yeah. So with that, I want to share a little bit more about Prepory. This is actually a really beautiful video from one of our students from last admission cycle and her dream school was University of Miami, and this is her opening up her Early Action application with her mom last cycle. These are the best videos to get from students. You can go ahead, Imani. And so I want to talk a little bit, and coincidentally, this is actually her college admissions coach here at Prepory, her name’s Guerdi, and she actually worked in admissions for eight years at University of Miami, so she had the best person she could have supporting her throughout this process.

I want to, before we sort of jump into our Q&A—I already see some questions popping into the Q&A—share a little bit more about how we support students throughout this admissions process. What do our programs include? What do they entail? And while it depends on grade level, whether you’re a sophomore, your needs are different than if you were a junior and of course if you’re a freshman. But generally speaking, every program at Prepory includes hour-long one-on-one advising sessions throughout the year. We’re meeting with students one-on-one to strategize on, of course, with our freshmen, developing an intentional extracurricular profile. Our sophomores, launching passion projects. Our juniors at this stage, we are actively working on summer applications. Of course, every student works with a dedicated college admissions coach. Imani is actually a coach herself. She works with students day in and day out throughout this admissions process, and she’s worked with some of these kids already for two years.

She knows their name, their parents’ names, their dog’s name, their best friend at school’s name. That relationship that you develop with a student just goes such a long way to getting their buy-in, their skin in the game around this process and ultimately being a more competitive applicant. Parent check-ins. So, of course, students are the ones applying to college, but parents have a vested interest in this. You want to stay in the loop. You want to know how your student’s doing. So about once a month, we’ll be hosting a parent check-in to share an update on how your student’s doing in the admissions process, share updates, and answer any questions you might have. “Hey, I heard this at school. Is this true?”, “I heard this from someone in the PTA, how can I implement this across my kid’s profile?” We can answer those questions. Another thing that we do, which is really special, is that Prepory delivers a mock admission-style Committee Review for students across every single grade level in high school.

We are the only admissions consultancy in the world, I think, that delivers these admissions committee-style reviews to even 9th graders and 10th graders where essentially, we bring together a team of former admissions officers and coaches who are not working directly with that student to offer an objective third-party perspective on how, for our freshmen and sophomores, that student’s profile is developing and offer more suggestions on how they could sort of long-form plan to continue to develop their profile. And of course for our seniors, real tangible suggestions on their real applications before they hit submit on the real thing. And every program at Prepory includes unlimited essay editing throughout their time with us. So for our freshmen and sophomores, this means more so for summer applications or competitive extracurriculars at their school. And for our seniors, of course, these are on real college application materials. And what you’ll find is that at Prepory, you don’t just have help from your coach in this process, but we’ve got an entire team here in place from our Committee Review team to our Writing Specialists, to our Interview Specialists. There’s an entire army of people who are working to make your student the best applicant they can be and represent or present their best self in their admissions process. So that’s a tiny bit on sort of what our programs entail. I’ll share one more piece and then we’ll get into our Q&A.

You want to go ahead, Imani? So with that, this sort of brings us to the very end of our webinar. I want to say to everyone who’s here, thank you so much for joining us. I had a really great time. Thank you for just giving us the opportunity to do this. I shared early on that this is something I’ve always wanted to do and I’m so excited that we were finally able to do it. If you felt like you really enjoyed this webinar and you took a lot away, but you want to understand, “How does this impact my family?”, “How can you support my kid?”, “Can you help me understand what my kid’s doing that’s making them competitive and how they could improve?” The best thing that you can do is scan this QR code. Rebekah, who’s in the backend, also just dropped the link where you can actually schedule an initial consultation with our Enrollment team where we can learn more about your student and walk you through how we can support them through this admissions process. So, if you’d love to get that one-on-one support, learn more specifically what we’re doing with our students and how we can specifically help your kid, go ahead and scan that QR code to schedule an initial consultation with our team, or you can click on the link that we just dropped in the chat, Prepory.com/book-now, to schedule that initial consultation with our team. We’ll be hanging out for a few minutes here for our Q&A, but thank you so much for everyone who joined us. We had a great time.

Imani, thank you so much for hosting this.

IMANI: Yes, thank you. Thank you everyone for joining.

DANIEL: Yeah, so we’re actually going to go through our Q&A live. I think our first one is from Deidre. The question is regarding extracurricular activities and letters of recommendation. “Do you have a preference or percentage for how many should be within school versus outside in the community?” I typically react to these questions that there’s not a hard and fast answer for this type of stuff. Us understanding the relationship you have with each person who could write each letter is important, but generally speaking, in-school letters are more important than those out-of-school letters. But, the relationship you have with those individuals—if you don’t know your art club teacher that well, but you know your church youth group leader much better—then I’d opt for the group leader. But if they’re sort of on the same playing field in terms of how well they know you, I’d probably opt in for one of the teachers at school. Imani, would you agree? Anything you want to add to that?

IMANI: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, different colleges have different requirements about it as well. So when you’re actually applying, you might see a college that says two teacher recommendations, and by teacher recommendations they mean teachers within the school. So you have to follow that guideline, but then they’ll have other recommendations. Some may say one is optional, some may say two are optional, some might say one is required and one is optional. But that “other” is where you can add those types of recommendations. And I always recommend doing that. If you have a really good relationship with someone outside of the school and a college that you’re applying to has that other recommendation option, go for it. For sure.

DANIEL: Yeah, I agree. I think the one place, another one I want to address is one of these questions around elite schools. So the person who asked that, you’re right, that a lot of the focus on today’s conversation was about elite schools, but we do support students who are interested in HBCUs. It sounds like you need some advice on what you’re going to do next. So again, my response to that is if you’ve got a specific question, you want to understand how we can support you specifically, go ahead and schedule an initial consultation with our team. They’ll be able to get a better sense of what you’re looking for in terms of what questions you have, and we can really support that. But generally speaking, we do support HBCUs and I think we support a much larger or much more diverse population of clients because of the makeup of our team and how much representation we have in the staff who work here like myself, like Imani, and many other folks on our team. I think we’ve got one more, Imani, which is on fly-ins. I can take it and then you can supplement before we drop off.

IMANI: Okay, sounds good.

DANIEL: So on fly-ins, for anyone who’s in the audience and doesn’t know what a fly-in program is, it’s essentially a program where a school will pay for a student to come visit them. It typically happens at the very beginning of senior year or before the start of that school year. And this is again a way for schools to actually drive diversity on their campus. They can typically find fly-in programs are for folks from particular sections of the country or particular identities. So it’s a way for them to sort of sell their school to those in-students so that they can hopefully apply and ultimately enroll because they’ve been there, they’ve been at that school. So, if your student has the opportunity to go to a fly-in program, it’s usually paid for by the school. It’s a great opportunity and it does make them a more competitive applicant to that school. So, I highly encourage them to consider it.

IMANI: And we also have some insight into which schools care more or less about something called demonstrated interest. So, if a school cares a lot about demonstrated interest, then it’s even more of a good opportunity. But if not, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good opportunity because any opportunity to learn more about the school, especially being there, is wonderful if you have the opportunity to do so.

DANIEL: Yeah. Awesome. I think with that, we ended right on time, which we’re one minute over, which we hardly do, but for everyone who is here, again, thank you so, so much. If you’ve got more questions, if you want to continue the conversation with us, please scan that initial consultation QR code, or click on the link that our team member has dropped a few times in our chat to schedule your meeting where you can meet with one of our Enrollment team members, where we’ll learn more about your family and walk you through how we could support you through the admissions process. Thank you again, everyone, for joining us and hope that you took a lot away from this.

IMANI: Thank you.