Introducing ILUMIN Education’s New Consultant: Anna Lee
Elton Lin
Anna Lee comes with a diverse array of experience:
Over 6 years of college and graduate admission experience
Worked with students who matriculated into top 10 schools (Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Brown, Duke, Cornell, and more)
Helped students successfully gain admissions to graduate, transfer, and medical school applications
Assisted in admissions to selective programs such as Tass, YMCA State Governor, Film2Future alongside scholarships such as Questbridge-Match, Gates, Coca Cola
Read more about bio here
Anna is a great advisor, and we are excited to have her on the team.
She is providing a free 30-minute consultation to discuss how she can help students with the admission process. Contact us at info@ILUMINeducation.com or (408) 479-4742.
We also asked Anna 5 questions to get to know her better.
Q/A
What is one of your favorite aspects of working with students?
The best part of working with students is always their excitement, innovation, and creativity. Though I’ve worked in this field for years, I’m always astounded by how no students are the same, even though their interests may overlap. Their academic and extracurricular passions, their commitment to their community, and their drive to achieve their goals—whatever that may be—inspire me. I love that as much and as often as the college landscape changes, as do my students. It’s a field I’m constantly learning from, and that gives me the motive to continue.
What is your approach to guiding students?
In the way no students are the same, I don’t have a singular formula in working with students. The only commonality I can see in all my past students I’ve worked with is being as uncompromising in pursuing all that they want to pursue. I’ve had a student who published his debut music album on Spotify while working with his school district to make extracurriculars more inclusive for students who lacked access to those activities. Somehow, those disparate activities came together to make a wonderful personal statement that fully showed the student. I can encourage students to pursue various activities and we can brainstorm all sorts of ideas, but to implement those ideas into tangible realities and seeing the pride in their faces of what they’ve done is what I always aim to do.
What advice do you have for students as they start writing their personal statements?
The personal statement should always aim to answer these two questions: why do you what you do and why are you the way that you are. I’m a big believer in deep critical thinking prior to the writing process; I’m also a big believer in rewrites and edits (much to the dismay of my students). Writing about your entire life in 650 words is a daunting task, and especially as high school English classes are often focused on writing about other writers and their works, turning that direction inward is not only challenging but also wildly uncomfortable. But with conversations that dig deep to reveal crucial stories and drafts and rewrites and more drafts, I’m confident every student can write beautiful personal statements that showcase their true selves to the admissions.
What do you feel is the most important quality for success?
When curiosity and gratitude meet hard work and relentless perseverance, anything is possible. I know this is a big claim, but the intersection of those four qualities yields something magical. I’ve seen it in my students, not only in their successful college results but in their professional careers beyond. In those update emails I receive from my past students, what they manage to do at college and afterwards amazes me. Students who want to know why and how things happen the way they do, and who tenaciously pursue that answer all the while remaining grateful for the people who supported them along the way are bound to succeed.
What can students do to “stand out” in such an ever-changing, competitive application pool?
This is a question I receive all the time from parents and students—what can we do? What more? As the admission process gets more difficult every year, I always reflect on this question. There’s always more leadership, activity, program, but I advise students to take a step back and look at their entire application as a holistic story.
Do the activities you spent years dedicating countless hours to make a cohesive sense with the rest of your passions? How does your personal statement reflect an aspect of your life that’s not shown anywhere else? If you were to look at your application from the admission’s perspective, do you see yourself reflected accurately? This reverse perspective allows students and parents to think more widely. The admission process has the tendency for everyone to look for microscopic details, which, of course, is important. It’s my job to be that pair of eyes so that we can answer that question together.