By Liz Boyd and Kim Parros
“I am a believer of the Early Decision (ED) admission choice for our students who have done their college planning with us, and have visited enough colleges that they feel secure in making that choice,” said Tim Parros, founder of Parros College Planning. “We use this strategy if everyone in the family is on board with it, especially since it comes with certain restrictions”
Having said this, the decision choice was easy for our class of 2019 student Alexa Easter. We started working with Alexa when she was a sophomore, which is a great time to start our program. Alexa worked tirelessly while at Pioneer High School to achieve academic success including multiple accelerated classes along with her seven AP classes. We enjoyed guiding her in her class choices with an end goal in mind – to get accepted into a very selective school. On top of her rigorous academics, she divided her time to pursue quite a few extracurricular activities over the years. These activities ranged from being a team member for different sports such as track and crew to being an active member of multiple clubs. Within the array of clubs that Alexa joined, she also founded the Women in STEM Club.
All of this was considered: Alexa had top-notch grades, high involvement in her extracurriculars and very high SAT scores. Because of this, we knew that academically she was in the range of students that are accepted into Barnard College, a selective all girls school. As we reviewed her college choices we decided, with Alexa and her family, that the best option was to apply ED.
Doing your research ahead of time also allows you to have a back-up plan. As you wait to hear back from the college you applied ED to you can continue to submit applications. This is a great advantage because there is nothing worse than getting an unexpected rejection or deferral in mid-December from your first choice school and potentially having as little as two weeks to put together all your other applications.
We used this strategy with Alexa and the end result turned out perfect. Alexa was accepted into Barnard College in New York City. She is very excited that by attending Barnard she will also be able to take advantage of its affiliate institution Columbia, which means that students are able to use Columbia’s vast amount of resources while still going to smaller Barnard. When asked “why Barnard” she was quick to say “I only knew that I liked it once I visited the campus, and then I knew I wanted to apply ED! I couldn’t tell that I wanted to go by only reading about it, I had to see for myself.”
Alexa had this to say about how Parros College Planning helped her with getting into Barnard, “Parros guided me in so many ways along the way to be more appealing to Barnard by helping me choose which classes to take, write a resume with lots of action verbs and organization, and working with me one-on-one on my application essays.
We are very proud of Alexa and enjoyed working with her throughout the process. She is a great example of how success can be achieved with hard work and dedication. We are excited to see how her four years at Barnard go and plan on checking back in with her in a few years to hear about her successes at college. We use the strategies that we engaged with Alexa with all of our students since our goal for our students is to get them to get into the right fit college. We would love to tell you more about how our services, work and answer any questions that you may have. Please feel free to email or call us and we can share our successes with you.
