The college application process takes a student’s entire high school career and distills it into a packet of papers that admissions officers will read for a matter of minutes. Your window for making an impression is small, so it’s important to have a focused message that stands out.

For top schools, applications won’t even be looked at closely if you don’t have the Academic Index (SAT/ACT scores + GPA) that they’re looking for, so of course, the student’s academic achievement matters here. But unfortunately, scores are not enough. There are plenty of students with perfect SAT or ACT scores that get rejected from top schools, primarily because they don’t have a focused message or sufficient extracurricular activities. This is where having an Admissions Angle can help.

For students who work with us in our Mentorship Services, the Admissions Angle strategy has been premeditated for years, so senior year is all about the execution and visibility of the applications. For anyone coming to us by the end of junior or senior year for college admissions consulting, the process becomes a bit more urgent and less organic.

The best way to craft an Angle later on in the game is to reverse engineer it based on the student’s existing extracurricular profile. This may mean suggesting that the student applies for a major that they don’t necessarily want to apply for because their academics and extracurricular involvement just don’t support it. In the end, the major choice is the student’s but he/she should remember that for most institutions, it’s not that difficult to change majors, and if it is difficult, it’s worth the extra effort later on. An Admissions Angle is a strategy to give them the best admissions outcome possible.