Her parents thought Susan was a math genius and Caltech or MIT must be a great undergraduate institution for her. However, the Insight Academix team found out that her genuine interest is research in viruses and her broad academic interests in poem, coding, and even politics align better with Ivy League universities than tech schools.

After careful discussion with her and her parents, we set her college admissions goal as Computational Biology major at Brown University. During her 10th grade, she qualified for AIME second time but she was losing passion in mathematical competitions as her score was stuck.

Insight Academix recommended research projects instead of pursuing mathematics and biology olympiads. She loved a bioinformatics research project after sophomore year summer and tried another biology and computer science research project after Junior year summer. Both of her papers were published in high school research journals.

She also wrote multiple poems and essays to submit creative writing contests and teen magazines. Insight Academix supported her to participate in diverse academic yet fun competitions, such as Conrard Challenge and Diamond Challenge. She enjoyed team challenges in real life problem solvings team challenges with scientific approaches. Her school classroom activities outperformed our expectations, completing 11 AP courses and scoring many 5 points, but she didn’t have much luck with the SAT exam.

We suggested she try the ACT exam because her reading skill was excellent and very familiar with scientific reading materials with complicated charts and tables. She got these skills from research activities and it was beneficial to the ACT science exam. She got 35 from the first try after about a month of intensive preparation with Insight Academix ACT tutor, and achieved her standard test goal.

She appealed to her genuine interests in research and diverse academic curiosity through her admissions essays and admitted Brown University in her early decision application.