By: Airas Qadir/Rao

I was introduced to college counselling in A2. By this point I had upgraded schools, and my new school was full of incredibly smart, incredibly ambitious girls. It felt like everyone was applying to the Ivy Leagues. As a self-assured smart girl myself, I wondered, “Is this actually possible?”

I took the SAT thrice. It was common practice. Looking back, I don’t know that I would’ve wasted my Baba’s money like that, even though he didn’t mind. But I exonerated myself because I had learnt, in my attempts to crack the SAT, a simple but grueling learn-anything algorithm: try, fail, troubleshoot, iterate. I vowed to teach kids what I had learned, save their parents some dollars. Before decisions were in on my gap year, I became a project lead and SAT tutor at Dream3. 

Right now, I am a writing specialist. More on that in a bit. 

I like to read, I like to write, both on account of Mama, and I like science. These are facts of my heart’s inner state that I have learned to wear on my sleeve. Over my years at Dream3, I have been encouraged to, by virtue of being involved in educating kids in wearing their own hearts on their sleeves. 

I liked tutoring the SAT and I liked conceiving of and overseeing both insightful and impactful student projects, and best of all, I liked collaborating with the kids themselves. My interests were manifest at this stage as well, but I naturally grew interested in the final product. The application, and more importantly, the essays. 

In the beginning, we had issues with brevity. Often my students and I would dive deep into their intellectual interests and personal growth journeys. And I mean deep. I remember one of the first supplements I worked on: four weeks to produce a piece about geometry, 750 words for a 250-word prompt. It was an essay about geometry, but it was also an essay about beauty, an essay about appreciating many ways of seeing the world. The final product, hacked away at with surgical liberty, was 249 words. I pulled my hair out in chunks. 

Oh, another one. About grief, evolution, and neuroplasticity. 900 words. The longer essay got him into Harvard, but the kid went to Yale, where the essay went in a 250-word version.  

Now, I don’t have that problem so much. I have learned precision. My work has been better for it, although it was perfected in other parts of my life first. 

It’s important to note that Dream3 exists in my life alongside various other preoccupations. I’m a fourth-year medical student. At what many consider the best medical school in the country, the expectation is to devote myself to singularity. And while I have not given in entirely, I have learned its crafts. 

Medicine has given me many things. Discipline, people skills, intellectual depth, to name the relevant ones. Precision in language I pursued separately, too, in writing and through public speaking. I speak on my university team, and I have a lot of fun winning debates by taking them to unexpected places. It helps with medicine; I find it relatively easier to help my patients understand what’s up. 

To Dream3 I bring an almost diagnostic approach. I like to meet kids where they’re at, and I like getting them to challenge themselves. In writing, this manifests as long-term relationships built over many different arcs of narrative development, either through a writing curriculum, summer camp applications, common-app intensives, or supplement-writing intensives, usually a mix of all of them, usually in that order. 

It also shows up in how I teach how to write. We read together, analyse, try. Troubleshoot, iterate. Some think AI has made this skillset obsolete, to which my only answer is, it hasn’t yet. Every year admissions trend towards plain, earnest writing, framed in the student’s own understanding of the world. And that’s just part of the win; students are happy with the process. They leave knowing themselves better. 

I know I did. Briefly I was counselled at Dream3 as well, and I walked away from it happy, hopeful about my options.