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Hi, I'm Kiara.

I am a '21 MIT grad, ex-McKinsey consultant and now an advisor to a distinct group of high-achieving high school students each year on all-things towards the college acceptance they've dreamt up. I have found in the three years that I have been advising students that it is uniquely effective to have one mentor who can teach a student their standardized testing, closely advise them on their essay writing, and lead them in being outrageously bold in their extracurriculars.

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I am highly personalized in my approach; none of the formulaic, cookie cutter tactics that the elite college consulting businesses use. They like to package up a child based not on the child themselves but on the checkboxes that they've seen get students into schools. In my personal opinion, this contortion of a student is only harmful to them in the long run. I believe it is so much more helpful to a student to create a college application that encapsulates a student as they are in all their genuine complexity. For me personally, I always advise students with the level of ambition and drive as if it was me in their shoes, applying myself.

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Previous students I've worked with have been admitted to MIT, Georgia Tech, BU, Olin, Georgetown, and others.

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Students can apply to my current cohort of juniors here.

The Way in Which I Work with Students

I take on a handful of students each year, mentoring and teaching them closely. I build very strong relationships with every student in the small cohort I’m leading, which I've found to be a unique approach to college advising. I am available always for students' questions about what new leadership position to aim for, what summer research role to shoot for, how to market their T-shirt company. I’m young myself, funky and bold in the way I coach and most of all outrageously personalized in my approach - none of the cookie cutter stuff that the uber-expensive college advising companies use.

I am also here as a person; college applications can be very intense for students and the stress can weigh on their mental health. I was very much not immune to that myself and I empathize with it deeply. I build relationships with students where they often end up comfortable sharing whatever is bothering them, which is necessary to have energy to keep working hard.
ESSAY MASTERY

so you have great grades and extracurriculars. that's great!

but do you know why you're good at what you do? what about the way your mind works makes you an unparalleled coder?

could you describe the force at your back driving you to wake up every morning and succeed? many people are ambitious. but few can articulate why they are the way they are.

i help students understand themselves. I'll draw connections between who you are and what you've done, pulling out the threads within you that make you a standout.

this process takes time and commitment. it's an investment in understanding who you are at a younger age than most. yes, this process will breed successful essays. it will also enable you to start college actually knowing how you want to use that time (tuition is too expensive and college too short to let it slip by without deliberate intentionality.)
HIGHLY TAILORED STANDARDIZED TEST EXCELLENCE

I teach towards the SAT and ACT in a way that is different than even the top-name tutoring companies that parents send their children to. They will teach in a formulaic way, because they are large institutions and with scale comes decreased quality. This tradeoff is inherent to growth.  

I have capped the number of students I coach per year at twenty, and so I teach in a way that is highly tailored to the mind of the individual student I am coaching (ie. noticing subtle patterns in the way a student thinks and where they're going wrong) whereas any SAT company or group will be much more standardized in the way they teach (ie. just teaching a framework for how to solve the problems but not so much paying attention to the mind of the individual student).
BOLD AND CREATIVE EXTRACURRICULAR GUIDANCE

Aligning Where A Student Spends Their Time: I draw connections between who a student Is and what they do with their  time, so that thy can be intentional with that time. If a student is innately curious, we find spaces where they can play with that curiosity. Whether they are artistic, a problem-solver, or an empath, we focus their energy on bringing the best sides of them to life.

Optimizing How A Student Spends Their Time: Once we’ve focused in on where to spend a student's time, I mentor on making something incredibly bold and outrageously unique of each of those activities. If a student runs a company, why not apply for an incubator and start manufacturing product? If a student leads a CS club, why not run a hackathon for college students?

There are so many resources at my fingertips that students can take advantage of. It is a joy to see them do things most professionals in their 50s haven't done.