Forbes Features Hafeez Lakhani
Dear Friends,
As we plunge into July, and as we enjoy the warm weather and long days, it’s a pleasure to see the balance with which our students are approaching summer. There is fun, there is travel, but there is also commitment: students are adding to their remarkable character stories, putting in serious work on standardized tests from SAT to GMAT, SSAT to LSAT, and beginning to excavate powerful personal essays ahead of college and graduate school applications. Law school and business school candidates are especially busy wrapping up testing and shifting focus to personal statements ahead of Round 1 deadlines in as little as two months. Rising seniors are right behind them, diving deep into the reflective process of college essays alongside final testing on July 13 (ACT) or August 24 (SAT and Subject Tests). Rising juniors are razor focused, putting in intensive effort in SAT or ACT skills growth—this phase in our work so important in nurturing score gains as large as 600 points on SAT and 12 points on ACT. As we move steadily toward fall, I encourage every student to know your deadlines and to know your goals.
It’s a special time at Lakhani Coaching, too, as we recently granted our 2nd Lakhani Scholarship, awarding $10,000 of elite coaching services at zero cost to a high achieving low income sophomore. Our 2019 winner is Fernanda Padilla Colin of Emeryville, CA, a first generation Mexican-American who only two years ago earned a path to citizenship after previously being undocumented, having crossed the US-Mexico border on foot at just three years old. A straight-A student, an avid squash player, and aspiring immigration lawyer, Fernanda narrowly beat two exceptional Finalists, Milani Aviles of New York City, and Angela Lee of Long Island. Congratulations to all the deserving applicants, and thank you to our fee paying clients who’ve expressed enthusiasm already toward supporting Lakhani Scholars. To learn more about sponsoring a scholarship, including named awards, please contact us.
In other news, it was an honor recently to be profiled in Forbes, in a feature on successful small businesses. Thank you to fellow Yalie Elaine Pofedlt for all of her thoughtful questions. It was also a pleasure to contribute to The Santa Fe New Mexican with tips to shine in a college interview. Well worth a read for those who will be visiting campuses this summer, a great opportunity to request an on-campus interview while you’re there.
Finally, we’ve included another standardized testing problem of the month, this one from the SAT Evidence Based Reading section. Happy solving!
We’ve shared tips below for various upcoming responsibilities, but as always, feel free to contact us to discuss your specific ambitions in more detail.
Hafeez Lakhani
Rising Seniors: T-minus four months
Our students are hard at work preparing for November 1 ED and EA deadlines, focused on two main tasks:
Excavating drafts of college essays: Our ultimate test for a strong college essay is as follows: imagine that we are admissions officers sitting around a table late in the afternoon. We must decide today on a pile of 500 student applications, all of which we reviewed on our iPads, in some haste, the previous week. The successful application will be one for which, when it’s time to discuss our student, someone at that table, even if tired, even after having discussed hundreds of candidates, will say: “Oh, Ella… She’s the one who…”
Many of our rising seniors have already begun our college essay excavation process by freewriting from a range of meaningful experiences, in search of the “she’s the one who..” anecdote—a moment of life in our shoes that reflects our most sincere ambition. We’ll soon shift from penning this raw material to turning it into structured drafts for common app prompts—which our most successful seniors will have complete by the time school starts. The key to the most successful essays we’ve coached—including those that have helped students secure admission to Harvard, Stanford and Yale—is simple: time to excavate, and time to process. Contact us to book one of our expert college essay coaches.
Wrap up Testing: For students who will apply Early Action or Early Decision, the following test dates remain:
SAT or Subject Tests : 8/24, 10/5
ACT: 7/13, 9/14, 10/26
For remaining SAT or ACT work, the key is to set aside concerted time to work on skills growth. Just as one cannot become a great tennis player overnight, one needs diligent practice to grow problem solving skills. All the better if this practice can be guided by an expert coach. Contact us to learn more.
Resources:
New York Times: How to Write a Good College Application Essay
Redbook: How to Help Your Kid Rock the SAT and ACT
Rising Juniors and Underclassmen
Summer Intensive SAT/ACT: What remarkable focus we're seeing from our rising juniors investing time in problem solving skills growth. The analogy to sports never gets old. If I’m training to become a great basketball player, I better put the time in on fundamentals when school is not competing for my attention: dribbling, passing, shooting, conditioning and more. But will I be ready to compete after simply becoming oriented to the above skills? No. It will take practice, discipline, repetition. Which is what our hardworking juniors are putting in currently, dissecting ACT and SAT sections and subsections for the numerous skills we need to build in order to reach excellence—the laborious “formula” that has helped our students raise SAT scores by as many as 600 points and ACT scores by as many as 12 points. There are no shortcuts—in our book, hard work is the only way to capture these gains. Contact us to customize a coaching program if you haven’t already.
Resources:
Redbook: How to Help Your Kid Rock the SAT and ACT
New York Times: Considering College? Maybe You Should Invest in a Coach
Graduate School Candidates: T-minus 2 Months
Law School: rolling applications open as early as August, with final deadlines just after the new year. If you are thinking about applying this fall, you should be moving toward completion on LSAT or GRE, to leave 1-2 months for work on personal statements. Remaining 2019 LSAT dates: 7/15, 9/21, 10/28, 11/25. We encourage submitting applications as early as possible in the rolling period. Contact us for guidance on reaching final testing goals, and to begin mapping out a unique story for personal statements.
Business School: first round submission deadlines are in early September, so a plan of action needs to be in place from now to reach GMAT or GRE goals, and to then formulate an appropriate school list and excavate intriguing personal statements for applications. Remember that the GMAT requires waiting 16 days to retest and the GRE requires 21 days. If you plan to apply in Round 1, we recommend having testing—which often entails multiple sittings—complete no later than August 1.
Medical School: AMCAS applications have been open for submission for over a month, which means time is scarce if you aspire to be a serious applicant. Our med school coaches are on call to help students take personal statements to the finish line.
Other Graduate Study: as with any admissions goal, it’s wise to get testing out of the way before finalizing a program list, making note of deadlines, and working on personal statements and other components such as recommendation requests. In many cases candidates will also dedicate time to elevating a writing sample or portfolio. Contact us to create a customized plan to reach your desired program.
Boarding School and Independent School
Most boarding schools and independent schools require SSAT or ISEE standardized testing to be submitted with applications. As with any standardized test, skills growth on these requires persistence. A number of our students are already in full swing with coaching, nicely separating the task of testing from applications, essays, visits and interviews to come later in the fall. Independent and boarding school applications can be due anywhere from November 1 to February 15. Contact us to discuss test preparation, a school list, visits, and a detailed plan of action.
Resources:
New York Times: Considering College? Maybe You Should Invest in a Coach
Problem of the Month: SAT Reading
Consider the following excerpt from Richard Florida’s The Great Reset:
The costs are astounding. In Los Angeles, congestion eats up more than 485 million working hours a year; that’s seventy hours, or nearly two weeks, of full-time work per commuter. In D.C., the time cost of congestion is sixty-two hours per worker per year. In New York it’s forty-four hours. Average it out, and the time cost across America’s thirteen biggest city-regions is fifty-one hours per worker per year. Across the country, commuting wastes 4.2 billion hours of work time annually—nearly a full workweek for every commuter. The overall cost to the U.S. economy is nearly $90 billion when lost productivity and wasted fuel are taken into account. At the Martin Prosperity Institute, we calculate that every minute shaved off America’s commuting time is worth $19.5 billion in value added to the economy. The numbers add up fast: five minutes is worth $97.7 billion; ten minutes, $195 billion; fifteen minutes, $292 billion.
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The passage most strongly suggests that researchers at the Martin Prosperity Institute share which assumption?
A) Employees who work from home are more valuable to their employers than employees who commute.
B) Employees whose commutes are shortened will use the time saved to do additional productive work for their employers.
C) Employees can conduct business activities, such as composing memos or joining conference calls, while commuting.
D) Employees who have lengthy commutes tend to make more money than employees who have shorter commutes.
Source: www.collegeboard.org