Boston Academic consulting Group

Getting into the top colleges and universities is more complicated and subjective than ever.

Harvard, M.I.T., Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Brown--each year, elite schools like these attract thousands of smart, talented, and motivated applicants. The top schools often have more valedictorians applying than the number of spaces for students they can offer admission to! Straight A's and a 2400 on the SAT no longer guarantee admission to the top schools.

It now takes far more than good grades and test scores to get into the most competitive schools. You will be competing for limited spots against others who are likely to have similar or better academic credentials.

How can I maximize my chances of getting in?

Do you have a clear strategy to best utilize the subjective elements of your candidacy, marshal all the right evidence on your behalf, and convey and market it in the best way possible to the Admissions Committees? Can you afford to submit anything less than a stellar, comprehensive and compelling application package?

In order to distinguish yourself from the many thousands of highly qualified applicants, you need to know…

• what Admissions Officers are really looking for
• an objective and accurate assessment of your chances
• your strengths and weaknesses
• how to stand out from the competition
• how to take full advantage of the essays and interview

The bottom line is that no matter who you are, or how good your grades are, you need to do everything you can to present an outstanding application package and distinguish yourself from your peers. This is where Boston Academic Consulting Group can help.

Expertise - Insider's Perspective

Led by Angela Suh Um, a former admissions officer at Harvard and MIT, Boston Academic offers unparalleled quality of expertise. Our staff is uniquely qualified to design strategies that will meet your goals. With higher degrees and work experiences at prestigious universities, our staff consultants possess the credentials and insider’s vantage point that you need to get ahead.

Customized Approach & Strategies

We’ll honestly tell you what the nation's top colleges are really looking for in applicants, and how you can maximize your chance of getting into the schools of your dreams

As one of our clients, you will be treated as a unique individual, receiving personalized services tailored to your specific needs. We will take the time to know you in-depth so that we can create a strategy to enhance your strengths and improve your weaknesses.

Our custom-tailored comprehensive guidance packages will maximize and enhance your overall presentation of yourself. We will work with you step-by-step through every part of the process to maximize your chances of getting into your top-choice schools.

We will help you set goals, enhance strengths, improve weaknesses, plan academic strategies, pursue extracurricular achievements, and complete successful applications-all with the goal of getting you accepted into some of the most prestigious programs in the country.

Proven Success

Our results speak for themselves: our students have gotten into many of America's top-notch colleges and universities.

Boston Academic Consulting Group is confident that we can give you a definitive advantage over your peers in the application process.

In general, you shouldn't, but Boston Academic is different. College admissions is a moving target that constantly changes positions. Something that is true this year will not be true next year. An admissions consultant needs to have a finger on the pulse of what is going on today. Cambridge, MA is the center of college admissions in America. No one in New York, Palo Alto, or Seoul will be able to tell which way the wind is blowing in Harvard Yard.

We track the current trends as they happen. Every year, we meet countless students who have been admitted to Harvard and MIT, so we know exactly the type of students colleges are looking for. The #1 source of false information and myths is from a person who knows a student who was accepted into a top tier college and has devised his or her own theory of why it happened. In order to truly know a trend or a pattern, more than a few sample points is needed. As we are located in Cambridge, we are constantly gathering data points and can fully paint the most accurate picture of what is going on in the admissions offices.

In this case, you get what you pay for. Our fees are comparable to the competition, although we offer much more than anyone of them. Do the research - find out who will actually service you, and find out their credentials. Angela will personally handle each student that comes to us, and all of the consulting will be done by her AND one of our experienced staff. We limit how many clients we accept to a very small number. We make sure that every single student gets our utmost care and attention.

There are plenty of people out there who will be glad to give you a packaged answer to any of your questions. We are not nearly that brave because of two reasons. First, we want to know as much about the student as possible. This takes a great deal of time and we simply do not have the resources to do it for every person who has that “one quick question. Answering a question without all of the information is like giving general medical advice to someone saying they have a specific pain in the leg. Second, we take responsibility for our advice. You can find books and magazines and self-described experts on every street corner, but which of them will take responsibility if you implement their advice and it turns out to be an irreversible mistake? Our job is give you the best advice possible, and vouch for it with our reputation. Again, it is a lot like medical advice. If every possible illness and remedy is precisely described and detailed in the medical literature. Then why do we need to see doctors? a doctor is the only one who possesses the expertise and depth of experience required to select the best remedy for a patient’s specific ailment. We hold doctors accountable for the advice that they dispense. By that same token, we should likewise expect such accountability from our academic consultants.

Boston Academic students have been admitted to every top college and university in the country:

• Harvard
• Yale
• Stanford
• Princeton
• MIT
• Columbia
• Cornell
• Dartmouth
• Brown
• Oxford
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Chicago
• Northwestern
• Georgetown
• Johns Hopkins
• Wellesley
• Emory
• Duke
• Rice
• Swarthmore
• Williams
• Carnegie Mellon
• Washington University of St. Louis
• U.C. Berkeley
• University of Michigan
• Wesleyan
• Boston College
• Boston University
• Tufts
• Syracuse
• Bowdoin
• Smith
• New York University
• University of Southern California
• U.C.L.A.
• U.C. San Diego
• University of Illinois
• University of Texas
• Pomona
• Claremont McKenna
• Harvey Mudd
• U.C. Davis
• U.C. Santa Cruz
• U.C. Santa Barbara
• U.C. Irvine
• U.C. Riverside

No, we accept motivated students who are applying for admission to competitive schools at all tiers. Depending on the student, this may include any of the top 100 schools in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Also, international students who are applying to college in America would also benefit tremendously from our services, since U.S. admissions criteria for international students is often more stringent.

Approximately 95% of our clients do NOT live in Boston. They come from Korea, China, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Canada, California, Texas, New York, and all over the United States. Our consulting is similar to a college admissions office. We evaluate students here in Boston, communicate by phone, email and fax, and guide our students to the best possible outcome. Those who are local or who are visiting the area are welcome to come to our office, but in practice, even our Boston-area clients still communicate with us primarily through phone, email and fax, and are greatly satisfied with the level of service they receive.

You only have one chance to get into the best college possible. It affects the rest of your life, for you will always be instantly evaluated by the name of your “alma mater” (nourishing mother). Some people believe that it's more cost-efficient to attend a local state university and attend an Ivy League graduate school. That might be true, but it's not the same thing. Unfortunately, this world doesn't have time for such details: you will be measured by your alma mater. So if that matters to you, you should aim to get into the best college possible.

If your child is in 8th grade or higher, you should begin as soon as possible. It is never too late. We do have clients start with us as early as elementary school, but at that age, we do not offer full consultation packages, since they do not need it. We will be happy to offer a TSC that will establish a strategy from a young age, until your child has completed middle school.

The average high school guidance counselor takes care of approximately 700 students. It is impossible for a school counselor to get to know all of his/her students in-depth. Angela founded BACG to change the odds, to give your child one-on-one personal attention in college preparation applications. One of the reasons why private schools have a better college placement record is because their guidance counselor-to-student ratio is nearly 100-to-one. For that privilege, parents pay 15-30K a year in tuition. Boston Academic provides customized guidance throughout the entire college admissions process through dedicated consultants who work directly with Angela Um, a former Harvard and MIT admissions officer.

Most consulting firms are run by consultants who have no experience with top-notch schools, both in their personal educational background and work experience. Very few have concrete knowledge of what really happens behind the scenes at admissions offices. Only someone with experience at an admissions office can begin to explain why someone was accepted, and why someone else was not. The reality is that after being accepted, some students or their parents may become “neighborhood experts” about how to get into college, but we have found that things which they thought were their strengths almost ruined their chances, and things which they thought were weaknesses were what really helped them.

We are proud of our track record. We believe that we have made a difference in the lives of every student we have worked with. We have helped students get into schools beyond their wildest dreams, year after year, so we are confident that we can help your son/daughter maximize his/her chances of getting into one or more of their top-choice schools.

The bottom line is that you need true expertise that you can trust, and you will find it here at BACG.

Our philosophy is that “everything is important and nothing is unimportant” in college admissions. We believe that the key to why colleges admit or reject an applicant is based on the concept of “total package”. A student is not accepted just because of a high SAT score or rejected just because of poor extracurricular achievements. Colleges accept or reject an entire person, a “total package.” An essay by itself doesn't make a difference. We help the entire student get into college, not just their essay. The essay cannot be treated apart from the total application. Its content, style, purpose and context must be linked with the rest of the application to make the most compelling case for admission. From our experience, most students make the mistake of selecting the wrong essay topic or write for the wrong audience. Simply editing their essay draft is not enough to improve their chances. We work closely with our clients to generate the best essay topics that will highlight their unique qualities and personal attributes. To do this, we choose to invest in understanding each client as an entire person, not just merely as a piece of paper to edit.