ALI

Planning Process

1. Background Analysis: Ali is a student of Egyptian, Syrian, and African ethnicity. He used to go to a school that emphasized the importance of students’ creativity, with many classes that focused on art and free expression. But when he graduated from high school, he moved to a US Jesuit School. There, he suffered from culture shock, as not only did the school place much emphasis on religious studies, the workload was significantly much higher than what he was used to in his previous school. Ali was a straight-A student, but his freshman year at his new school was when he first experienced a C grade. He came to Cardinal Education, partly to seek guidance with the college admissions process, but primarily to turn his grades around and make himself competitive for his college application.
2. Major Selection: One major problem Cardinal Education had was that Ali had no concrete idea of what he wanted to study in College. He knew his end goal was to study medicine and become a doctor like his father, but he didn’t know what path he should take to reach that goal. Worse still, his C grade had put a dent in Ali’s confidence. He wasn’t sure anymore if he had what it took to become a medical student. CEO Allen Koh took extra time and care to rebuild Ali, ensuring he was paired with tutors that could not just help him with difficult lessons, but how to study more effectively. As Ali’s grades and his self-confidence began to improve, we helped him choose a major that would let him pursue medicine later on. After careful consideration, Ali chose public health. We advised him to take this as his major as it would give him a later advantage in medical school application: public health was about studying the logistics and management of healthcare, and this would give Ali a unique viewpoint of medicine from the administrative side.
3. Activity Planning/Hook Selection: Cardinal Education set Ali to work on numerous health-related volunteer work. There was much deliberation involved here because as someone applying for public health, we had to avoid the pitfall of finding him work that would simply involve him helping doctors. He needed volunteer work where he would be involved statistics-wise and logistics-wise. One work we found for him was working with a clinic that was giving free COVID vaccination shots in low-income areas. The clinic was supposed to be giving the shots to the families who lived there, but as Ali found, very few residents were actually taking up the free service, with families from more opulent areas instead taking advantage. Ali became in charge of going door-to-door and encouraging residents to join.
   As a Black student, Ali has known discrimination throughout his life, but he was also raised in a diverse community, so he’s never had to face the issue head-on before. But when he met with the families considered a priority by his clinic, he was shocked to find most of them were predominantly Black, and most of them expressed distrust towards medicine, specifically doctors. While he was initially discouraged, Cardinal Education instead convinced him to persevere and relate to these people in order to persuade them to take their free vaccine shots.
4. Essay Editing: While Ali initially didn’t have anything interesting to write about, our plan of making him apply to different internships that would give him various leadership opportunities paid off. In particular, Ali’s story of struggling to convince Black families to take free vaccine shots proved so compelling, that we decided to make it the subject of his personal statement. We had him write about connecting with the Black community and empathizing with their struggles. Perhaps the biggest victory for Ali was when he attended a local Black church, where the preacher was railing against vaccines and how they were the latest in the long history of medical experimentations done by white doctors against Black folk. Rather than having a confrontation with the preacher, Ali opted to converse with him instead, hoping to convince him of the benefits of the vaccine. After much discussion, he was able to persuade not just the preacher, but the whole congregation as well, a win that became the highlight of his essay.
5. Outcome: While Ali’s poor grades and how it would affect his chances for college acceptance had been a worry for his family, we were able to turn things around with planning and risk-taking. Ali initially had very low expectations, but after working with us, he received multiple scholarships from colleges across the US.

Story 

Ali is a student of Egyptian, Syrian, and African ethnicity. He used to go to a school that emphasized the importance of students’ creativity, with many classes that focused on art and free expression. But when he graduated from high school, he moved to a US Jesuit School. There, he suffered from culture shock, as not only did the school place much emphasis on religious studies, the workload was significantly much higher than what he was used to in his previous school. Ali was a straight-A student, but his freshman year at his new school was when he first experienced a C grade. He came to Cardinal Education, partly to seek guidance with the college admissions process, but primarily to turn his grades around and make himself competitive in the college admissions offices.

One major problem Cardinal Education had was that Ali had no concrete idea of what he wanted to study in College. He knew his end goal was to study medicine and become a doctor like his father, but he didn’t what path he should take to reach that goal. Worse still, his C grade had put a dent in Ali’s confidence. He wasn’t sure anymore if he had what it took to become a medical student. CEO Allen Koh took extra time and care to rebuild Ali, ensuring he was paired with tutors that could not just help him with difficult lessons, but how to study more effectively. As Ali’s grades and his self-confidence began to improve, we helped him choose a major that would let him pursue medicine later on. After careful consideration, Ali chose public health. We advised him to take this as his major as it would give him a later advantage in medical school application: public health was about studying the logistics and management of healthcare, and this would give Ali a unique viewpoint of medicine from the administrative side.

Cardinal Education set Ali to work on numerous health-related volunteer work. There was much deliberation involved here because as someone applying for public health, we had to avoid the pitfall of finding him work that would simply involve him helping doctors. He needed volunteer work where he would be involved statistics-wise and logistics-wise. One work we found for him was working with a clinic that was giving free COVID vaccination shots in low-income areas. The clinic was supposed to be giving the shots to the families who lived there, but as Ali found, very few residents were actually taking up the free service, with families from more opulent areas instead taking advantage. Ali became in charge of going door-to-door and encouraging residents to join.

As a Black student, Ali has known discrimination throughout his life, but he was also raised in a diverse community, so he’s never had to face the issue head-on before. But when he met with the families considered a priority by his clinic, he was shocked to find most of them were predominantly Black, and most of them expressed distrust towards medicine, specifically doctors. While he was initially discouraged, Cardinal Education instead convinced him to persevere and relate to these people in order to persuade them to take their free vaccine shots.

While Ali initially didn’t have anything interesting to write about, our plan of making him various internships that would give him various leadership opportunities paid off. In particular, Ali’s story of struggling to convince Black families to take free vaccine shots proved so compelling, that we decided to make it the subject of his personal statement. We had him write about connecting with the Black community and empathizing with their struggles. Perhaps the biggest victory for Ali was when he attended a local Black church, where the preacher was railing against vaccines and how they were the latest in the long history of medical experimentations done by white doctors against Black folk. Rather than having a confrontation with the preacher, Ali opted to converse with him instead, hoping to convince him of the benefits of the vaccine. After much discussion, he was able to persuade not just the preacher, but the whole congregation as well, a win that became the highlight of his essay.

While Ali’s poor grades and how it would affect his chances for college acceptance had been a worry for his family, we were able to turn things around with planning and risk-taking. Ali initially had very low expectations, but after working with us, he received multiple acceptance letters from colleges across the US, as well as scholarship opportunities in the UK.