Why Cosmic?
What makes us Different from the Other 'Stars' in the Admissions Consulting Universe?
Many consulting firms flaunt a major,
and typically only, selling point:
they only staff former admission officers.
Unlike other firms, Cosmic's major selling point is that we only staff accomplished experts in various fields, such as in tech, physics, biochemistry, and philosophy.
This allows us to not only authoritatively recommend which courses and activities our clients should participate in, but also allows us to provide them unparalleled guidance in how to hone their interests and skills to such a high level, that they will standout in even the most competitive of applicant pools.
By passing down technical, subject specific knowledge to our clients, we are able to ensure that they excel in the unique extracurriculars and classes we will advise them to participate in.
This hands on approach is what allows us to successfully work with a greater diversity of students than other firms, whose expertise begins and ends only at admissions.
Why settle for only an admissions expert when you can have both an admissions expert and an expert in the academic field your child wants to pursue? Only at Cosmic College Consulting is the best of both worlds provided so that your child has the best chances of securing a spot at their dream college.
A core part of any application to an elite college are impactful extracurriculars, key word, impactful.
Volunteering to serve food at your local shelter is morally commendable, but won’t move the needle in terms college admissions.
One category of extracurricular that can move the needle is research. However, impactful, rigorous summer research programs, (the ones which are free or even sometimes pay you to participate in, instead of the pay to play ones,) are quite scarce and difficult to get into as the table below shows.
Summer Program:
MIT’s RSI
Acceptance Rate:
3.30%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
100
Acceptance Rate:
6.00%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
40
Acceptance Rate:
8.00%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
40
Acceptance Rate:
3-10%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
~150
Acceptance Rate:
~5%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
40-70
Acceptance Rate:
1.60%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
20
Acceptance Rate:
3.00%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
60
Acceptance Rate:
3.00%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
12
Acceptance Rate:
3.00%
Number of Accepted Applicants:
~35
Number of seats available at the eight Ivy League schools for early decision: *
7342
Number of seats available for non - pay to play, competitive summer research programs which move the needle for admission officers: *
457
* Seat statistics are for the 2023-2024 admission cycle.
What these numbers say is that the majority of applicants who want to conduct rigorous research during high school need to be more creative than just applying for summer programs.
That’s where we come in.
Thanks to the academic and industry expertise of our consultants, we provide our clients with the necessary technical guidance to maximize their chances of getting into elite summer research programs.
We advise them on how to create own impactful extracurricular activities which leverage their academic interests.
For example, we have mentored clients on how to use linear regression and web scrapped data to help local businesses in their community identify mispriced items, or items that they are incapable of pricing competitively. We’ve also taught techniques used in quantitative finance to participants of the Wharton Global Investment challenge, helping them place in the top 5 percent of competing teams, mentored competitors for the John Locke Essay Competition, resulting in their essays being shortlisted, and helped clients cold approach professors so that they can get some long term research experience while still in high school! Our expertise also allows us to help clients give school-wide presentations on contemporary issues, emerging technologies, or their own niche interests throughout their four years of high school, enabling them to make a name for themselves which will reach admission officers through their recommendation letters. We also help clients start clubs and grow existing ones.
Consultants at Cosmic can serve as a one stop shop for an applicant’s extracurricular needs.
We ensure that every endeavor your child sets their mind to…
turns to gold.
If you and your child go through high school without even receiving a free consultation from a credible admissions consultant, you run the risk of committing the biggest sin in elite admissions…
appearing well-rounded.
Let me paint you a tragic picture we see all too common from those who come to us at the beginning of their senior year.
An applicant, with a perfect 4.0 GPA, 1,600 SAT score, who has taken every AP class their school offers, including classes that have nothing to do with the major they are applying for. Their extracurricular includes playing multiple instruments since the age of 8, developing an app, taking part in multiple business leadership summits, multiple science olympiads placings, lots of sports, had their art featured at multiple exhibited, studied multiple languages, cultural dance, and top it all off, presidents of a dozen clubs.
Ahhhhhh!!!!!
Where to begin.
Beyond the complete confusion of who this person wants to be, what first comes to my mind is all of the sacrifices that poor teenager, in the prime of their life, had to make, to do so much in the name of being a competitive college applicant, just for it to amount to nothing. All of the timeless memories they could have forged through relationships, parties, hanging out with friends, or the simple peace of being in their own thoughts, gone.
Applicants profiles such as the one that I described don’t arise naturally. No one strives to go so far in so many disparate areas on their own volition. As a result, such applicants come off as fake to admission officers, and are promptly rejected by the most selective of colleges, despite clearly being able to academically thrive there if given the chance.
For someone to come to us with that profile, surely means that both the parents and the student must have faced untold levels of anxiety, fighting, and conflicting feelings. Only someone who knows nothing about the college admissions system would let someone spend so much time creating an applicant profile that an admissions officer wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of.
If you are unaware why this type of profile is problematic for elite admissions, consider this.
There are many times more applicants with perfect grades, test scores, and a long laundry list of extracurriculars, then there are seats available at the top 20 college in the U.S. Thus, applicants need to do everything that they can do standout from each other.
Now, what would help one standout more?
Doing a little of everything, or excelling at an international level of competitiveness and competency in a singular subject?
Being a prospective physics major who takes every AP class at your school (including the ones which give credit for classes you will never need for your college major), or taking 3rd and 4th year math and physics classes at a four year college instead?
Imagine working towards being recognized as a budding expert on robotics, political advocacy, environmental preservation, or applied machine learning.
“ The narrative has shifted from being well-rounded to becoming purposeful, and from seeking quantity to valuing quality. High school students are encouraged to embark on a journey that authentically reflects their passions, fosters leadership, and prepares them for the challenges of the future.”
“ The sheer number of 3.9 GPAs and 1500+ SAT scores put Admissions Officers in a predicament. In the final phase of decision-making, they focus on your personal story and the impact you have made in various communities. In order to tell a story or make an impact, you have to do more than study: you have to take action to influence the world around you. That’s why pursuing the right extracurricular activities is essential to proving that you are a compelling candidate for college admissions.”
The Influence of Extracurricular Diversity:
How Involvement in Multiple Spheres Enhances College Applications in the United States
At Cosmic, we can help you avoid making this tragic mistake, by giving you crystal clear guidance on how your child should spend their time outside of the classroom so that they aren’t fruitlessly sacrificing their sanity.
We will ensure that you leave your mark on the world before you graduate high school and that you love every minute of it.
Our experience publishing papers and conducting research allows us to ensure that your essays will communicate to colleges that you have exactly what they are looking for.
Notably,
colleges want to see in your essays how exactly you will contribute to their campus communities and your aptitude for achievements that will either…
increase the moral or academic prestige of their alumni, and in turn their entire institution,
or enable you to become one of their most valuable and consistent donors.
(it really is all about the money.)
Our consultants will help you dissect and analyze your story to a level of detail you didn’t even know existed and find profound non-trivial insights that it contains which we will then intertwine with your lived experiences to create a journey for the reader that they won’t soon forget.
Beyond just focusing on the story and the depth of thought your essay possesses, we’ll leverage the latest research, which you can bet colleges are paying attention to as well. This covers the correlation between writing style and success in college. A study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that the way you use small words in your Common App essay can predict how well you'll do in college. Their research showed that students who used more formal and precise language, like articles ("a," "an," "the") and prepositions ("in," "on," "at"), tended to receive better grades in college. On the other hand, students who used more personal and storytelling language, with lots of pronouns ("I," "you"), helping verbs ("is," "have"), and adverbs ("quickly," "very"), tended to get lower grades. Our consultants will help you craft your essays using a writing style that aligns with the traits that colleges associate with academic excellence, giving you a competitive advantage in the admissions process, where the difference between success and failure can be as thin as a strand of hair.
“ The most striking aspect of this project is that the most common and forgettable words in English can reveal the ways people think. Language is associated with observable behaviors that have implications for students’ success and for researchers’ understanding of that relationship.”
When Small Words Foretell Academic Success:
The Case of College Admissions Essays
It is no secret, but East and South Asians are one of the most common groups to employ admission consultants. It is also no secret that East and South Asians need to achieve much more than other applicants to be considered for top-colleges.
A recent study in Nature reports that that Asian American applicants had 28% lower odds of attending Ivy-11 schools compared to white applicants with similar qualifications. For South Asian applicants, the odds were 49% lower. Furthermore, a significant contributing factor to this disparity is the preference given to children of alumni (legacy status). White applicants are substantially more likely to have legacy status compared to Asian applicants. For STEM subjects, such as computer science and engineering, the numbers are even more bleak.
Despite affirmative action being repealed, these numbers will not decrease naturally over time.
The ideology of DEI and diversity, which is responsible for these numbers, is entrenched in the liberal arts education that many admissions readers and officers hail from. Many admissions officers have an ideological commitment to ensuring their university’s incoming class is ethnically diverse. This commitment is supported by the liberal professors who dominate the humanities. We do not use this language to criticize the current state of affairs but rather to tell it as it is. Intellectual diversity is incredibly important for a campus to be vibrant. Without it, ideas which differ from one another wouldn’t be exchanged. Their merit would not be subject to investigation, and the purpose of the college campus, to encourage intellectual growth through the exchange of different ideas and viewpoints, would be impossible. Due to intellectual diversity being strongly correlated with one’s lived experiences, and the unfortunate correlation between one’s lived experiences and their race, ethnicity, gender, sex, and other identities, such DEI admissions policies will not favor groups which have, on paper, the strongest stats.
In the industry, the solution that many consultants provide to Asian applicants is labeled “strategic positioning.”
Strategic positioning is the act of encouraging applicants to apply to majors and programs that they will be more competitive for by virtue of their demographics due to their underrepresentation in those programs.
The classic case:
An Indian female who wants to study pre-med instead makes a niche for herself in bioethics, without mentioning a word about wanting to go to medical school in her application.
This detour into the humanities on paper will provide her a much better chance to standout then the average Indian female aspiring pre-med student who has a background in classical Indian dance.
The problem however is that most consulting firms simply lack consultants with the required academic expertise to see this through properly.
It is one thing to advise someone to lean into the humanities to standout. It is a whole other thing to know enough about the contemporary state of the humanities to actually advise someone in a meaning way of how to do that. This leads to unhappy applicants who feel they are being forced into doing what their heart is simply not into.
Also, unless they are given technical guidance in this field that on paper is more advantageous from an admissions perspective to pursue, their ability to standout enough in the humanities compared to an applicant who truly decided to pursue and excel in the humanities on day one, will be limited, thus resulting in only a marginal benefit comparing to just sticking with a STEM field they would be overrepresented in, but at least have the motivation and know how to excel in.
Thanks to the technical expertise of our consultants, we not only can guide applicants to choose majors and programs which provide them a competitive advantage due to their demographic, but also educate them in depth about them.
For example, we can guide a South Asian female who wants to study computer science, to apply as a philosophy major, whose high school extracurriculars consist of using symbolic logic and the principles of computer science to argue whether we live in a simulation or not.
In doing so, we are able to help an applicant understand the cutting edge of an alternative major that they have the best chances of being accepted for, while ensuring they receive just enough exposure in what they really want to do, such that they are not handicapped when it comes time to transfer into the major they wanted all along.
For applicants who engage in such strategic positioning, we will continue to service and advise them as they go through the internal transfer process.
No matter what demographic you are part of and what you want to dedicate four years or more in college to study, we will help you find the path that will maximize your chances of getting there, and do out best to make you love it.