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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: ILUMIN Events

Webinar Transcript: How to Get Started on the Common App Personal Statement

Elton Lin

Many of you have probably heard of the Common App—really big platform, supports over a thousand colleges in their college application process—and kind of at the forefront of that is the Common App Personal Statement, or the Common App essay, which gets sent to every college that you apply to through the Common App.

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Webinar Transcript: Breaking Down the UC PIQs

Elton Lin

We’re going to take a look at some of the PIQs. For a lot of our seniors—definitely if there are any younger students, you are more than welcome to join to get a bit of preview of what’s in store—but this is mostly going to be geared for a lot of our incoming 12th graders who are going to be doing the college essays and applications coming on.

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Webinar Transcript: The Digital SAT vs. The ACT

Elton Lin

This is a transcript of a webinar from August 2024, a recording of which you can find on our YouTube channel. Thank you again to Ivy Method Tutors for co-hosting this webinar with us!

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Webinar Transcript: Pathway to Med School: High School Tips for Medical School Success

Elton Lin

This is a transcript of a webinar from August 2024, a recording of which you can find on our YouTube channel. Thank you again to Samantha Castro-Rico, Ivan Chan, and William Kerr for coming to share their personal thoughts and experiences surrounding their own pathways to med school!

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Webinar Transcript: College Majors—Why They Matter and How to Choose Them

Elton Lin

Just to intro our time: I’m going to share some content about college majors. There’s a lot of new and important data to share—some of that is going to be rehashed from the trends webinar, if you were there—so there’s going to be some of that, plus a little bit more specific data to share.

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Webinar Transcript: 2024 Admissions Trends: What’s Changed?

Elton Lin

I'm excited to share more about what we're learning about the college admissions landscape, including trends that we're seeing from this past cycle. Actually, I think the greater bracket of time is really from 2020 to now, so I think there's a lot of interesting things to share! Excited to do so.

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Webinar Transcript: College Essay Series: Supplemental Essays

Elton Lin

Good evening, everyone. I’m glad everyone could make it today. This will be the last of our essay series [this year] for webinars – and [of] giving students a sneak peek of topics to come. Hopefully, you've started already. Hopefully, you're finding time to chip away at your essays. (If not, and you're watching this in the fall… good luck to you as well!)

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Webinar Transcript: College Essay Series: Live Essay Edit

Elton Lin

We're presenting a topic that I think is relevant for a lot of our seniors right now: thinking about how to tackle the essays. How to improve their essays, I think, is a big thing. If you've already started it, you'll be in really good shape if you're already thinking about the next steps of how to make adjustments.

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Webinar Transcript: College Essay Series: Crafting Your Personal Statement

Elton Lin

Hi everyone, welcome. Thanks for joining us tonight. We have another exciting topic lined up for you today. You guys have probably all heard about the Common App – pretty big application platform! Over 1,000 colleges will accept the Common App.

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Webinar Transcript: College Essay Series: UC PIQs

Elton Lin

This evening we'll start getting into the college essay specifics: starting with the University of California “Personal Insight Questions,” or the UC PIQs. These UC essay prompts stand apart from others out there and require a different approach – and that is exactly what we'll be covering today.

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