After exploring our essay repository, lessons, and WarChest resources, you'll start working on your own application materials and quickly hit a wall. When writing about yourself, you become a worse writer - you experience paralysis staring at a blank page, lose the flow between paragraphs that felt perfect in your head, juggle too many considerations at once (Will this sound arrogant? Am I being too humble? Does this answer the prompt?), and suddenly hate the story idea you were excited about an hour ago. You lose perspective on your own narrative and can't tell what's compelling versus confusing, no matter how smart you are. As undergrad students, we can all spot awkward writing, unclear arguments, and clichéd phrases when we see them in other people's work, but we need fresh eyes and honest feedback when it comes to our own materials.

That's how our give-to-get model serves our mission of providing targeted help. You come to each meeting with a specific question. Maybe "does this personal statement opening hook the reader or sound generic," or "does this cover letter explain why my skills are a match for this specific position?" But you can also ask about anything else, like "should I shorten this LinkedIn post, what images should I include, and how should I order them," or "help me do a digital audit - search my name from your location and tell me what comes up." Simply put, through testing different elements through targeted questions, you A/B test your way to an excellent application.

You share only the application material relevant to answer your targeted question with a group of 3-4 students from different programs (premed, prelaw, prebusiness) who can give feedback on potential problems or things you need input on. By sharing only limited information to get targeted advice, your complete application materials stay secure and uncopyable. Plus, if another person could tell your story, that's usually a sign you should pick a different one anyway. Everyone signs an NDA with steep penalties as a final guardrail for speaking about meeting contents. The unexpected benefit comes from giving advice to others - when you answer others' targeted questions, you learn to recognize when personal statements list experiences without showing growth, when resume bullet points describe tasks rather than demonstrate impact, when stories feel generic rather than uniquely personal, and when character trait claims lack supporting examples. These skills transfer directly to your own materials, making you better at self-editing and avoiding the same pitfalls. Our students sometimes use us on our own, or alongside admissions consultants for things that would be too trivial to spend precious and expensive consultant meeting time going over.

Here are some sample questions you may use.

The Give-To-Get Advising Model