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ILUMIN Blog

Helpful tips about college admissions, test preparation and just being a better student, leader and person from ILUMIN Education.

Filtering by Category: College List

What is ED2? The Highest Ranked ED2 Schools

Elton Lin

Early Decision 2, or ED2, is a second round of Early Decision that comes with the same binding agreement as ED1—that is, if a college accepts an ED applicant, that applicant is automatically committed to attend—but the same timing as Regular Decision (RD), with a later application deadline of early January.

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How to Determine Good Fit Schools

Elton Lin

What does it mean for a school to be a good fit for an individual student?

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Why STEM Students Should Consider Liberal Arts Colleges

Elton Lin

As your student builds their college list and researches different schools, they will find that many schools fall under one of two categories: liberal arts colleges and large research universities. For STEM students, it may seem obvious that research universities are the way to go – but that isn’t necessarily the case! 

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Webinar Transcript: How To Build a College List

Elton Lin

Good evening, everyone! We have a very exciting topic today for a lot of our rising seniors (current juniors) – and maybe some younger students to start thinking about – the college list process: what schools they should be looking at when they're thinking about the admissions process.

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How To Plan Your College Visits Over Spring Break

Elton Lin

Planning for spring break? Check if college visits are on your itinerary! For all high schoolers, especially 11th graders who are building their college lists and 12th graders who are waiting to hear back from schools before National Decision Day, spring break is the optimal time to visit college campuses.

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How to Build a College List and Research Schools

Elton Lin

Have you started building your college list yet? While spring of junior year is the critical time to research colleges you want to go to, as well as to start actively demonstrating interest in any schools that you may have already been interested in for a while now, it can be wise to start researching schools in your sophomore or even freshman year.

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Northeastern: The School with Offerings

Elton Lin

Last week, we were honored to be able to host Olivia Harris, Assistant Director of Admissions at Northeastern University for a Live Q&A, in which she revealed to us that Northeastern isn’t your typical top-50 college. Olivia’s tagline was simple: “We have a lot of offerings.”

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Liberal Arts Colleges vs. Research Universities

Elton Lin

For many students, the first decision that they’ll have to make when applying to college is this: do they want to go to a small liberal arts college or a large research university?

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A Guide to College Fit, and What It Really Means

Elton Lin

“College fit” is a commonplace term in college application conversations, and especially here at ILUMIN, where we emphasize the importance of finding the right college fit for each of our students. The term seems simple enough at first glance, but then students ask themselves the question, “which colleges fit me well?” and quickly realize the answer is hardly straightforward.

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Webinar Transcript: Building A Well Balanced College List

Elton Lin

Thank you everyone for joining us today. Saturday morning – great time to be talking about your college list! And a little bit more about admissions as a lot of students are getting started with school and classes. Time starts slipping away a little bit with the admissions process. So I’m glad that we can talk a little bit now.

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