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| Rajkamal Rao, MD, Rao Advisors LLC |
Since 2014, Rao Advisors has guided families through the complex college admissions process. We are proud to remain a Google 5‑star small business for seven consecutive years.
For the Class of 2026, many of our 136 clients earned admission to top institutions including Cornell, Rice, Vanderbilt, WashU, USC, Northeastern, Berkeley, and several direct MD/DO programs. Many also got into leading public universities such as UT Austin, UCLA, Georgia Tech, UIUC, UC San Diego, Michigan, Purdue, Texas A&M, Indiana, Florida, and Virginia.
As the Class of 2027 begins its college admissions journey, I want to share what to expect over the next few months.
The Four Components of Your Student’s Brand
If you have been a client of ours for some time, recall that we helped build your student’s brand using our 4‑year roadmap approach. As your student enters the 12th grade, we now help you market that brand to colleges. Think of these components as four cylinders of a finely tuned engine:
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| BMW X3 |
Cylinder 2, College Admission Tests: Tests validate GPA in an era of grade inflation. The PSAT‑11, SAT, ACT, and AP exams are independent, merit‑based assessments.
Test‑optional policies are disappearing; many top colleges, including UT Austin, now require scores. For test‑optional schools, we will decide together whether to submit scores.
We also offer last‑minute SAT/ACT tutoring bursts for the summer test dates, ideal for students making a final push before applications open. Our rates are among the lowest in the industry, starting at $69/hr. For the latest rates, please contact us.
Cylinder 4, Volunteering: Selective colleges value students who demonstrate compassion and service.
The summer before 12th grade is especially important for strengthening extracurriculars. We’ve expanded our list of summer opportunities. Please visit our post here.
How We Market Your Student’s Brand
Your admissions journey begins with a mid‑June counseling session.
The U.S. Department of Education publishes detailed admissions metrics for ~500 selective institutions, including SAT/ACT percentiles and yield statistics.
Colleges also publish the Common Data Set, where box C11 shows unweighted GPA bands — a key tool for determining admission chances.
We leverage both of these resources when we share our proprietary, updated College Selection Toolkit with you.
What Happens in the First Counseling Meeting
During this 1–1.5 hour session, we will:
Review your student’s academics and test scores
Discuss strategy across in‑state, out‑of‑state, and private schools, including bucketing schools into Early Decision, ED2, Early Action, and Restrictive Early Action groups.
Share our proprietary College Selection Toolkit, which includes:
Admissions Milestones project plan
Early Decision analysis tool
Campus visit checklist
Essay status tracker
Expanded‑form resume template
An automated reminder‑email script that alerts families when key deadlines approach
Build an initial list of Dream, Core, and Safe schools
You will then refine the list on your own, considering factors such as reputation, cost, location, majors, clubs, internships, housing, and financial aid. We can join your discussions by Zoom if needed.
A key step is comparing your student’s unweighted GPA to the school’s median GPA in box C11. For Texas public colleges, this step is not generally necessary as Texas institutions rely heavily on your class rank and SAT/ACT scores, where applicable.
During this session, we will schedule a Checkpoint call schedule to review future progress. Emergency sessions are always available.
Once the college list is finalized, we ask families to create a WhatsApp group with us for fast, secure communication. We typically respond within minutes, 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. We use WhatsApp to alert you about the status of essay and resume reviews, so the group is integral to our model.
Essay Reviews: The Most Critical Component
I personally oversee essay operations, drawing on my experience as a columnist and management consultant. I currently serve on the editorial board of tippinsights and have published over 600 articles at various publications including The Hindu BusinessLine, Times of India, ETV Bharat, and the Hindustan Times. You can follow my work on Substack.
Our essay review team is comprised of 6-8 members. We only hire strong creative writers affiliated with institutions such as Stanford, Penn, Brown, Villanova, and Duke.
For the Class of 2026, we reviewed 565 essays between Aug 1 and Oct 31. Our students have been interviewed at MIT, Caltech, Yale, Columbia, CMU, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Rice, and WashU.
Our Proprietary First Pass and Second Pass Model
We do both a first pass review (creative critique, including feedback on story clarity and voice) and a second pass finalization (professional editing for originality, completeness, engagement, delivery, and plagiarism checks) for one low price.
First Pass: We will provide you with genuine
feedback on the creative and intellectual structure of your essay. Essays should be
deeply personal experiences, with specific and concrete instances supporting your narrative. A good essay should reflect
- meaning it should show what you learned and how you intend to apply
your experiences, even if subtle. Duke University says that its
admissions officers review submissions “primarily to understand the
student’s lived experience." We will provide you with pointed,
actionable tips and comments so that your essay enlivens your personal
story.
Two creative writers will review your essay during the first pass to replicate the environment of a college admissions team. [An exception is the resume review which only includes one final pass].
Standard time for first pass: 48 hours.
Second Pass: You will send us your revised essay after incorporating our first pass comments to
professionally edit and finalize for submission to college portals. We do an end-to-end review of every
word and punctuation, checking your essay for
correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery - and for the
all-important plagiarism checks.
We will, however, not provide a creative critique of your essay's underlying idea during the second pass. We will also not validate or check that our first pass feedback was incorporated into the revised essay
submission. Forcing students to accept our input would be tantamount to
our ghostwriting the essay.
We respect our clients' creative spirit. Our rules are so strict here that our second-pass reviewers never see the feedback from the first-pass comments, so they don't have to make any judgments about how much of the first pass review feedback was accepted. This step enhances the independence of the review process because the second-pass reviewer accepts a green essay with no comments, redlines, or markups when an essay is submitted for second-pass review.
Our Active Engagement
After the college list is set, we begin:
Reviewing resumes and Common App activity lists
Reviewing essays
Finalizing recommendation letter and transcript requests
Determining score‑send strategy
Providing financial planning guidance
Essay reviews occur offline through Google Drive, email, and WhatsApp updates. If your student needs help choosing topics, we can schedule a short ideation session.
We also offer mock interviews, support for H‑1B families, help with petitions to schools, and guidance on choosing the best offer of admission.
Cost
Fees
Our hybrid model includes:
Free advice via our website, Facebook page, and seminars
Pay‑by‑the‑hour counseling
We remain among the lowest‑priced counseling firms in the U.S.
Estimate Your Essay Review Cost
Download our multi‑essay calculator to estimate your total cost based on the official word count for each essay. When you click the link, Google will create your own editable copy for use on your computer.
This tool allows you to:
Enter all of your essay requirements in one place
Automatically calculate units and estimated cost for each essay
Track the status of every essay through our two‑pass review cycle
Stay organized with a clean, color‑coded workflow
It’s the easiest way to understand your total essay workload and plan your review budget.
Order Your Essay
You may order your essay from our essay shopping cart page.
Submit Your Essay
We only accept submissions through Google Docs for secure, real‑time collaboration. We do not accept Word documents or .pdfs.
Submit your essay using this form: https://forms.gle/rBRGUuJnyqXhYJ7Q8
Example: Full Counseling Estimate For Texas Public Universities
My daughter wants to apply to UT Austin, Texas A&M, UT Dallas, and the University of Houston only. How much should I budget in total?Answer: Click here for a graphic and see below for the explanation.
- Assume four hours of counseling. At $199 per hour, this would be $796.
- The resume review is $189.
- UT Austin and Texas A&M are two universities with demanding essay requirements. UT Austin accepts the Common App #7 (650 words). This would cost $377.
- Texas A&M only accepts the ApplyTex Topic A essay (750 words) although it uses the Common App platform. This would cost: $435.
- UT Austin has two supplements of 300 words each. Total cost: $348
- Texas A&M has two main supplements of 250 words each. Total cost: $290
- Texas A&M also has plus five stealth scholarship supplements, totaling 750 words. Total cost: $435.
UTD and the University of Houston do not require platform essays, but we recommend submitting the Common App essay anyway since you would have already paid for it. Submitting Common App essays to these last two schools increases your chances of obtaining an institutional scholarship, like the UTD AES.
In the above example, your total budget would be $2,870. We remain among the lowest-priced counseling firms in the United States.
Next Steps
ApplyTex opens July 1
Common App and Coalition App open Aug 1
Review our essay review page
Reserve your spot early using our online calendar
As always, we will pause services for younger grades between Sep 1 and Nov 1, the busiest period of the admissions season. If you have a younger one needing help, we ask you to book appointments outside this window.
I look forward to working with your student. Good luck!Rajkamal Rao
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website. But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.
Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee. Please contact us for more information.
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