Admissions Consulting

I am very grateful to have ARCH by my side during my University application process. ARCH is extra helpful in reminding me of due dates and guiding me to get my essays completed at a good pace and before the deadlines. I appreciate getting help in brainstorm ideas, understanding how to use my own voice and to bring out the best version of me in my essays. Thank you ARCH for all your insights and invaluable advice.

My ARCH counselors took the time to get to know me as a person and were understanding of any personal or academic deadlines that came up. Having that degree of personal connection made the college applications process feel a lot less daunting and stressful. ARCH also connected me with multiple experienced tutors across different subjects, and the extra academic support helped ensure I achieved the grades I needed.

When I first started at ARCH, I had no experience at all with US universities. I went in to university counselling expecting a strict, deadline-based counselor who would drown any essay I wrote in a sea of red annotations. While the deadlines remained an unfortunate reality, my counselors were a brilliant mix of demanding and encouraging, so working with them was smooth sailing. No essay drowning occurred. Well before the admissions process began, my counselors had already planned out my essay-writing timeline, and I was quite relaxed going into the process because I knew exactly when everything was due. They also gave me advice on what to do to improve my CV more over the couple years that I knew them. This was extremely useful, as I wouldn’t have thought of doing half the things that I did if it weren’t for them, and having 2 counselors meant that I got more advice, so that was great. Throughout the admissions process, not only did they keep me motivated to write the myriad of essays, their edits were also really helpful and I got to improve my own writing skills along the way. To prepare for interviews, I also had some mock interviews with another counselor. This was really beneficial because I had never done a school interview before, so the heads-up on what to expect and do was really appreciated and helped ease my anxieties about it. In the end, I’m really grateful to ARCH, especially my counselors, for helping me get through the treacherous sea that is US college admissions!

I really appreciate the help I got from my ARCH counselors during and even after my application process. I felt like both of them had a pretty difficult job particularly helping me out with my Common App essay due to my sister's skepticism and constant critisicim of the direction ARCH took for the essay. Without their help, I definitely wouldn't have made it into UChicago.

Working alongside ARCH always made me feel much more at ease with what sometimes felt to me a large and daunting college admissions process. As counselors had a lot of prior experience in the field, they taught me about the ins-and-outs of the process — how to best prepare for testing, the proper structure of writing certain essays, how to format my Common App account — and supported me so that I would be able to keep up with the deadlines and goals I had set for myself. I enjoyed working with ARCH counselors. Other than helping me with the whole process, talking to them in our meetings put me at ease in times of stress because they had really taken the effort to get to know who I was as a person. They understood the problems people in the process of applying to college would run into and readily helped to solve them, making me feel more confident in my application. I’m really grateful for all their guidance!