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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.

Congrats to Our 2024 ED/EA Students!

Elton Lin

Happy New Year, and a warm congratulations to our ILUMIN students who got into their dream schools through the early application round, including Early Decision and Early Action! We're thrilled to announce that some of our students have been accepted to schools including Caltech, Claremont McKenna, Duke, NYU, Princeton, Reed, and Santa Clara University.

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Webinar Transcript: Strengthening Supplemental Essays

Elton Lin

We’ll be discussing five main types of supplemental essay prompts, which you can see listed here. Although the terms like “Why Us?” and et cetera are not necessarily the official terminology, it is really helpful for students so that they can learn how to identify the real questions that they should be answering.

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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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Is Early Admissions Evolving? UChicago’s Early Early Decision and Others

Elton Lin

This past summer, The University of Chicago announced their binding Summer Student Early Notification (SSEN) application option: high school seniors students who have previously completed one of UChicago’s summer programs can now apply to the university between September and mid-October—earlier than the ED1 timeline. This development adds to UChicago’s wide range of early application options; the institution already offers ED1, EA, and ED2.

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Introducing ILUMIN Education’s New Consultant: Spencer Horstman

Elton Lin

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Spencer Horstman to our team! Spencer brings an impressive background to our organization.

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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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