Historically, our absolute favorite students and parents at Ivy Coach are those who heed all of our advice. They listen to us on the student’s Early strategy. They listen to us on our activity, coursework, and testing recommendations. They appreciate our brainstorming and all of our revisions to admissions essays. They reap the rewards of heeding all of our advice and work by putting forward the best applications possible to optimize their case for admission to our nation’s highly selective universities. Put simply, they just get it. And, in our experience, there are two types of clients who get it more than anyone: repeat clients and clients who first come to us after things don’t go their way.

Why We Love Repeat College Admissions Clients

One of our favorite sayings here at Ivy Coach goes like this: “We always get the siblings. We usually get the cousins. We rarely get the friends.” People might be surprised that we are so forthcoming about our referrals. But, hey, any regular reader of our college admissions blog knows that we are nothing if not forthcoming. So why do we get the siblings? That’s easy. Because the parents know how it turned out with our assistance for their older child’s case for admission. Not only did their child likely earn admission to their dream school, but we helped stave off so many potential fights between parents and students as they navigated the process. And while parents come back to us for younger children, we’d say half the time they refer us to their siblings so we end up working with the cousins. It really depends if they wish to admit to their siblings they had expert help in navigating elite college admissions. But will they refer friends? It’s a rare occurrence. And why? Because very few want to admit their children had help as they earned admission to their dream schools. They’d rather people think they did it all by themselves…and that’s fine by us!

Why We Love New Clients Who Come to Us After Things Didn’t Go Their Way

Another batch of clients we love are those who come to us around December 15th. For these parents, they either worked with another private college counseling firm or went it alone and things didn’t exactly turn out well for their children in the Early round of admissions. Maybe their child’s admission was deferred. Or maybe their child was denied admission. But, either way, they’re looking to find out what went wrong and what needs to change before their children submit all of their Regular Decision applications on January 1st. This way, they won’t make the same mistakes again. While there are going to be some mistakes they can’t correct at that late date, there are still many mistakes that can be corrected in the weeks before the Regular Decision deadline. And why do we love these families? Because they know what they did didn’t work. They listen. They heed all of our advice…and often end up with very different results in just a few short months.