Our Philosophy on Authentic Admissions Coaching
Our admissions coaches help students build authentic, compelling applications without fitting them to a template.
At Admissions Avenue, we challenge the traditional approach to admissions consulting.
We believe that true success lies in discovering and embracing your authentic self, rather than conforming to the perceived expectations of a university admissions department. Gone are the days of being told who you need to be.
Our coaches help unveil the unique qualities, experiences, and stories that set each individual apart. We believe the best way to make a successful application is for a student to fully embrace what drives them, excel at it, then tell that story in a compelling fashion. Our coaches focus on unlocking the immense potential that resides within each student in our programs and helping them tell that story through application essays and video interviews. Each student has a memorable story to tell — our job is to bring it to life.
We do not tell students who to become. We coach them to understand what drives them, pursue it seriously, and communicate it with clarity.
We differ from others in our field: we will never tell a student exactly what to write, but we are steadfast in our commitment to helping them discover the personal story they truly wish to tell. Whether fine-tuning an application or mentoring students many years before university, we foster critical thinking and self-motivated work to ensure each student's distinct journey becomes an authentic, compelling success story.
The journey towards university admission should be neither daunting nor overwhelming. It should be filled with exploration, reflection, and discovery — and memorable stories you can include in your application!
Fact: There is no "perfect" applicant.
In the age of AI and online applications, competitive universities must evaluate more applications than ever, including those with top-percentile marks and SAT scores. Elite universities like UofT, Stanford, and Queen's Commerce are increasingly seeking candidates diverse in their interests, passions, abilities, and backgrounds. This means that there is no 'perfect candidate' — greatness is not defined by grades and standardized test scores, and many students admitted to several elite institutions are denied at others.
While marks aren't enough to stand out, neither is a laundry list of generic activities. To be successful, an admissions officer reading your application should be able to understand who you are as a person — not just a set of numbers.
We discourage students from using AI in our work — because it hurts their chances
Top universities are keenly aware that AI is changing education, and, in turn, how students learn (and think).
But they're also consistent in their approach to admissions: top universities look for intellectually curious, resilient, and creatively minded young adults who will contribute to their academic community.
Research on use of LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini is showing that it may in fact lead students to develop some of the opposite traits.
For example, recent work from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania shows that people are increasingly offloading reasoning and decision-making to LLMs altogether, a process they dub "cognitive offloading."1 A recent MIT study showed that repeated AI use reduced a student's ability to discern misinformation from real life — a critically important trait for an academic.2 And a joint study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, UCLA, and Oxford showed that counting on AI to solve problems makes people give up more readily — not exactly resilience.3
Using AI tools to write or grade your essays may seem tempting, but the reality is that they're not trained with the right data for this task: past successful essays, contemporary admissions rubrics, and the gestalt of admissions officers. And there's evidence they're harmful: a study from MIT shows that essays from high school students written with AI were, according to the teachers reviewing them, markedly more similar to one another and lacked intellectual depth compared to those written independently by the student.4 For an admissions officer, a memorable essay is the one that will make it to committee, not the one that sounds like the rest.
Our team isn't anti-AI. We recognize the transformational nature of AI across sectors. In fact, our coaches use AI for limited purposes related to operations and logistics: to stay up-to-date on current admissions requirements, application trends, and other higher education news. And sometimes we use it to help us design communication materials. We always use a critical human eye and never use AI as a substitute for learning.
We believe our job — helping students gain admission to top universities — requires us to limit AI use in our teaching work because the evidence points to it being detrimental to students demonstrating the exact traits top universities are looking for.
- Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania — "Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificially." executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318.3790656
- Carnegie Mellon, MIT, UCLA & Oxford, via CNET. cnet.com
- MIT Media Lab — "Your Brain on ChatGPT." media.mit.edu
Ready to find the best path to a top university program?
Reach out today and speak to a coach who can help you on your admissions journey.