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| Rajkamal Rao, MD, Rao Advisors LLC |
I wanted to take a few moments to outline what to expect for your teenager during the next few months.
Since 2014, Rao Advisors has advised high school student families in navigating the complicated process of securing admission to choice colleges. If you came to us when your student was in the younger grades, we helped you build your teenager's brand using our 4-year roadmap. As your student completes the 11th grade, we stand ready to help you market their brand to colleges.
What are the four components of your student's brand?
Developing a high school student's profile is similar to building a modern automobile's four-cylinder engine - although a lot more complex because it involves a teenager's likes and dislikes - as each well-oiled cylinder functions flawlessly and independently while working well with the other cylinders. As we do in our 4-year roadmap, let us review these four cylinders.
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| BMW X3 |
Cylinder 1, Core academics: The foundation of a high school student's profile is formed by the cumulative end-of-11th grade credentials (WGPA, class rank, and special certificates such as the AP Capstone Diploma). Please review our post: What colleges look for in high school students.
Cylinder 2, College admission tests: Tests are crucial because they help confirm the legitimacy of your high school GPA. High school grades alone are not as accurate a predictor of college success because of issues like grade inflation that make it difficult to assess a student’s work.
Cylinder 2, College admission tests: Tests are crucial because they help confirm the legitimacy of your high school GPA. High school grades alone are not as accurate a predictor of college success because of issues like grade inflation that make it difficult to assess a student’s work.
The PSAT-11, SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement tests are designed, conducted, and evaluated by independent educators who don't know your student. Merit alone matters in these tests. Review our post here about preparing for the SAT/ACT if you are taking it for the first time or retaking it.
In 2024, test-optional policies at many colleges instituted during Covid finally came to an end. Colleges are beginning to realize after four years of experimentation with student admissions and performance that test scores better help predict students’ college grades, and their chances of graduation and post-college success. Many top colleges, including UT Austin, now require the SAT/ACT. The California universities will continue to be test blind. Fairtest.org maintains a list of test-optional schools. We can decide on your score submission strategy when we meet.
In 2024, test-optional policies at many colleges instituted during Covid finally came to an end. Colleges are beginning to realize after four years of experimentation with student admissions and performance that test scores better help predict students’ college grades, and their chances of graduation and post-college success. Many top colleges, including UT Austin, now require the SAT/ACT. The California universities will continue to be test blind. Fairtest.org maintains a list of test-optional schools. We can decide on your score submission strategy when we meet.
Cylinder 3, Extracurricular Activities that build a student's skills and talents: We like to classify any activity that helps build a student's skills as a Cylinder 3 item, including school-based activities like clubs, sports, and the arts, or any advanced or college-level course, or internship, job, hands-on capstone project, or research. Review our post about how crucial extracurricular development is to a student's brand.
Cylinder 4, Volunteering: As colleges become more selective, students who demonstrate compassion by caring for the less privileged are likely to score better.
The summer between the 11th and 12th grade can be crucial to strengthening the extracurricular section of your student's resume. Please visit our post here - we have significantly expanded the list of summer opportunities.
How we help market your student's brand to colleges
Cylinder 4, Volunteering: As colleges become more selective, students who demonstrate compassion by caring for the less privileged are likely to score better.
The summer between the 11th and 12th grade can be crucial to strengthening the extracurricular section of your student's resume. Please visit our post here - we have significantly expanded the list of summer opportunities.
How we help market your student's brand to colleges
Your college admissions journey ideally starts with a counseling session in mid-June or a date soon after. By then, the U.S. Department of Education would have finalized college admission metrics for about 500 selective institutions, including publishing SAT cutoffs for the 25th and 75th percentiles and selectivity and yield statistics, which will help us determine the best college matches for you, including the all-important Early Decision school.
During this 1 to 1½ hour session, we will share our proprietary College Selection Toolkit which contains a detailed "Admissions Milestones" project plan detailing a comprehensive list of activities bucketed into four distinct milestones. It also includes our Early Decision analysis tool, a campus visit checklist, and a simple essay status tracker. We will also share our long-form (expanded form) resume template.
At the end of the first session, assuming that you have shared your SAT scores with us, we should have an example list of Dream, Core, and Safe schools, ideally containing at least one college of each type as relevant - public institutions (in-state and out-of-state) as well as private schools.
Of course, the selection of institutions is an iterative exercise, so you will have to do some homework to finalize the list on your own. This process may take a few days of dinner-table conversations with your student. You will be considering numerous factors - the institution's reputation, cost, location, proximity to home, major and alternate major choices, course offerings, college clubs, student body demographics, placement statistics for internship and employment, housing, local transportation, and opportunities for financial aid. We can join your deliberations by Zoom if you wish, but we recognize and respect that this step to finalize the college list reflects your student's deeply personal choices in a life-determining decision.
To complete the selection sheet, we ask that you populate key details for each institution, such as if it is an ED or ED2 school, whether it is a Dream, Core, or Safe school, whether you would ultimately apply to the school or it is a placeholder, the deadline for admission (Early Action, Regular Decision), and the platform (Common App, UCal, Coalition, ApplyTex). Each field helps us determine the priority for action - ED schools obviously rank first, followed by EA schools and RD institutions.
[If your list of schools is short, we can accomplish this entire exercise during one additional session].
Excellent coordination is essential and a crucial success factor during the college admissions campaign, a point that we emphasize during our first session. We require that families create a WhatsApp group with us for easy, secure, and prompt communication. We are responsive on WhatsApp, often within minutes, for nearly 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Once the list of schools is finalized, our active engagement to complete the task list items begins - reviewing the resume and Common App activity list, reviewing essays, finalizing recommendation letter and score-send strategies (test-optional, both SAT and ACT scores, all scores, individual test scores, only the SAT or ACT score), a discussion regarding college financial planning, requesting high school transcripts and submitting recommendation letters.
During this 1 to 1½ hour session, we will share our proprietary College Selection Toolkit which contains a detailed "Admissions Milestones" project plan detailing a comprehensive list of activities bucketed into four distinct milestones. It also includes our Early Decision analysis tool, a campus visit checklist, and a simple essay status tracker. We will also share our long-form (expanded form) resume template.
At the end of the first session, assuming that you have shared your SAT scores with us, we should have an example list of Dream, Core, and Safe schools, ideally containing at least one college of each type as relevant - public institutions (in-state and out-of-state) as well as private schools.
Of course, the selection of institutions is an iterative exercise, so you will have to do some homework to finalize the list on your own. This process may take a few days of dinner-table conversations with your student. You will be considering numerous factors - the institution's reputation, cost, location, proximity to home, major and alternate major choices, course offerings, college clubs, student body demographics, placement statistics for internship and employment, housing, local transportation, and opportunities for financial aid. We can join your deliberations by Zoom if you wish, but we recognize and respect that this step to finalize the college list reflects your student's deeply personal choices in a life-determining decision.
To complete the selection sheet, we ask that you populate key details for each institution, such as if it is an ED or ED2 school, whether it is a Dream, Core, or Safe school, whether you would ultimately apply to the school or it is a placeholder, the deadline for admission (Early Action, Regular Decision), and the platform (Common App, UCal, Coalition, ApplyTex). Each field helps us determine the priority for action - ED schools obviously rank first, followed by EA schools and RD institutions.
[If your list of schools is short, we can accomplish this entire exercise during one additional session].
Excellent coordination is essential and a crucial success factor during the college admissions campaign, a point that we emphasize during our first session. We require that families create a WhatsApp group with us for easy, secure, and prompt communication. We are responsive on WhatsApp, often within minutes, for nearly 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Once the list of schools is finalized, our active engagement to complete the task list items begins - reviewing the resume and Common App activity list, reviewing essays, finalizing recommendation letter and score-send strategies (test-optional, both SAT and ACT scores, all scores, individual test scores, only the SAT or ACT score), a discussion regarding college financial planning, requesting high school transcripts and submitting recommendation letters.
The resume and essay reviews are primarily conducted offline using our Essays Shopping Cart, meaning no counseling sessions are required. [If your student wants to have an "ideation" meeting to decide which essay topic to choose or what to write about, we can hold a short session]. All reviews will occur through Google Drive document shares in the secure cloud, emails, and backup communication through WhatsApp, informing the family about the first and second-pass review status. As I said before, excellent coordination is a crucial success factor.
Please check out our other services, including mock interview support, advice to H-1B families, assistance in petitioning high school or college administrations to handle extraordinary situations, such as requesting in-state classification for tuition, credit transfer, visa issues, or other exceptions, and deciding on which offer of admission is the best, using our structured, analytical approach. We are an A-Z provider in the world of college counseling.
During the very first session, we will have mutually decided on the date and time for the following "Checkpoint" call to review progress. As you begin marking off items on our project plan, please let us know the progress your student is making. We can always schedule an "emergency" session if needed.
Essays: Your student's college essays will remain the most critical part of the application package. Please sit with your teenager to review our primer on essays. We replicate the process that colleges employ, such as each essay being reviewed by two reviewers.
All of our essay reviews can now be ordered from a simple menu-driven product list resembling an online store. You prepay for our service using a fixed-price model and get full buyer protection from PayPal.
Each essay goes through a two-pass review. On our team are strong creative writers affiliated with institutions such as Stanford, Penn, and Duke. Our second-pass review examines every word and punctuation mark for correctness, clarity, engagement, delivery, final presentation, and plagiarism. During the peak of the 2025 college essay review season (Aug 1 - Oct 31), we reviewed 565 essays.
Please check out our other services, including mock interview support, advice to H-1B families, assistance in petitioning high school or college administrations to handle extraordinary situations, such as requesting in-state classification for tuition, credit transfer, visa issues, or other exceptions, and deciding on which offer of admission is the best, using our structured, analytical approach. We are an A-Z provider in the world of college counseling.
During the very first session, we will have mutually decided on the date and time for the following "Checkpoint" call to review progress. As you begin marking off items on our project plan, please let us know the progress your student is making. We can always schedule an "emergency" session if needed.
Essays: Your student's college essays will remain the most critical part of the application package. Please sit with your teenager to review our primer on essays. We replicate the process that colleges employ, such as each essay being reviewed by two reviewers.
All of our essay reviews can now be ordered from a simple menu-driven product list resembling an online store. You prepay for our service using a fixed-price model and get full buyer protection from PayPal.
Each essay goes through a two-pass review. On our team are strong creative writers affiliated with institutions such as Stanford, Penn, and Duke. Our second-pass review examines every word and punctuation mark for correctness, clarity, engagement, delivery, final presentation, and plagiarism. During the peak of the 2025 college essay review season (Aug 1 - Oct 31), we reviewed 565 essays.
I use my years of experience as a columnist
and 17-years of
management consulting experience to oversee essay review operations. I currently serve on the editorial board of tippinsights, from America's most accurate pollster, writing 3-4 editorials and op-ed columns a week. More than 600 articles of mine have already appeared across various media outlets including TIPP Insights and The Hindu.
Results: Several clients during the last season were interviewed at the best schools, including MIT, Caltech, Yale, Columbia, CMU, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Cornell, CMU, and Johns Hopkins. During the Early Decision cycle, students got confirmed admissions to Stanford, Rice, Johns Hopkins, and Wash U. Many clients reported getting into some of the best public Ivies. UT Austin, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois-Urban-Champaign, UCLA, the University of Michigan, Purdue, the University of Virginia, and the College of William and Mary repeatedly made the list. Clients also got into Texas A&M, Arizona State, the University of Washington, the University of Pittsburgh, and Virginia Tech.
Our clients have continued to acknowledge our work through their public reviews - we have been a Google 5-star small business for six years in a row.
Fees
Our fees structure follows a hybrid model - significant free advice via our popular posts on this website, Facebook page, and public
seminars; a variable pay-by-the-hour counseling component, and a fixed-price offering for essay and resume reviews.
We are especially proud of our free offerings - our library of nearly 100 original posts dedicated to every aspect of high school readiness. Our Facebook Business Page, operational since 2013, contains a treasure-trove of posts about all things college.
Please review our latest Fees page. To estimate how much you should budget for engaging with us, add up the fees for all the individual counseling hours (typically 4-5 hours for the entire college admissions cycle) to the fees for the number of essays you want us to review. Our essays shopping cart gives you multiple ideas about how to group essays so that you can optimize each essay order.
Example: 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: Assume four hours of counseling. The resume review is item 7 on our essays shopping cart page.
UT Austin and Texas A&M are two universities with demanding essay requirements. UT Austin accepts the Common App #7. Texas A&M accepts the ApplyTex Topic A essay. These would be two 700 word essay (Item 1) buys on our shopping cart page. [In some cases, you could repurpose the ApplyTex Topic A essay to suit the Common App in which case you will only need one order].
UT Austin has two supplements of 300 words each. Texas A&M has two main supplements, plus five stealth scholarship supplements. You could group all these supplements into three Item 1 orders on our essays shopping cart page. So, the total would be 5 Item 1 buys.
[UTD and the University of Houston do not require platform essays, but we recommend submitting the Common App essay anyway since you 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, assuming four counseling hours, one resume buy, and five Item 1 essay buys, your total budget would be $2,879. We remain among the lowest-priced counseling firms in the United States.
Next steps: Please begin your engagement with us early. ApplyTex opens July 1. The Common App and Coalition App open on Aug 1. But essay prompts are already out. The earlier we complete your part of the admissions process, the better off you will be. Please use our online calendar to reserve your spot.
12th-graders are our most important constituency, given how truly life-changing the Senior year can be. As during previous years, we will shutter our services to all other grades between Sep 1 and Nov 1, the busiest eight weeks of the college admissions season. If you have a younger one needing help, we ask you to book appointments outside this window.
I hope to work with your student in the coming months. Good luck!
Rajkamal Rao
We are especially proud of our free offerings - our library of nearly 100 original posts dedicated to every aspect of high school readiness. Our Facebook Business Page, operational since 2013, contains a treasure-trove of posts about all things college.
Please review our latest Fees page. To estimate how much you should budget for engaging with us, add up the fees for all the individual counseling hours (typically 4-5 hours for the entire college admissions cycle) to the fees for the number of essays you want us to review. Our essays shopping cart gives you multiple ideas about how to group essays so that you can optimize each essay order.
Example: 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: Assume four hours of counseling. The resume review is item 7 on our essays shopping cart page.
UT Austin and Texas A&M are two universities with demanding essay requirements. UT Austin accepts the Common App #7. Texas A&M accepts the ApplyTex Topic A essay. These would be two 700 word essay (Item 1) buys on our shopping cart page. [In some cases, you could repurpose the ApplyTex Topic A essay to suit the Common App in which case you will only need one order].
UT Austin has two supplements of 300 words each. Texas A&M has two main supplements, plus five stealth scholarship supplements. You could group all these supplements into three Item 1 orders on our essays shopping cart page. So, the total would be 5 Item 1 buys.
[UTD and the University of Houston do not require platform essays, but we recommend submitting the Common App essay anyway since you 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, assuming four counseling hours, one resume buy, and five Item 1 essay buys, your total budget would be $2,879. We remain among the lowest-priced counseling firms in the United States.
Next steps: Please begin your engagement with us early. ApplyTex opens July 1. The Common App and Coalition App open on Aug 1. But essay prompts are already out. The earlier we complete your part of the admissions process, the better off you will be. Please use our online calendar to reserve your spot.
12th-graders are our most important constituency, given how truly life-changing the Senior year can be. As during previous years, we will shutter our services to all other grades between Sep 1 and Nov 1, the busiest eight weeks of the college admissions season. If you have a younger one needing help, we ask you to book appointments outside this window.
I hope to work with your student in the coming months. Good luck!
Rajkamal Rao
A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
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.
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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