Do you use AI tools in the process, and how do you keep student voice authentic?

AI is genuinely useful and genuinely limited — sometimes in the same moment. Firms pretending it doesn’t exist are just as misguided as firms quietly using it to do the actual writing. Neither position serves students well.

Our approach: if a specific use of AI makes us sharper and more helpful to a student, we’d be foolish not to use it. For research, for stress-testing angles, for exploring how a particular school might read a particular framing — if it improves our work, we use it. AI, a red pen, a whiteboard, a three-hour call, a dog-eared copy of a school’s published class profile — we don’t romanticize the instrument. We care about the result.

Where we draw a clear line is the writing itself — and not only for the reason you might expect. Yes, AI can write convincingly. But the process of figuring out what to say — wrestling with the story, discovering what actually matters to you, learning to translate your own thinking into clear and persuasive prose — has profound value that goes far beyond one application. That skill serves our students for life: in interviews, in professional writing, in how they advocate for themselves. Shortcutting it with a generated draft doesn’t just risk detection — it takes something genuinely valuable away from the student. Our consultants are here because they love this work. You don’t shortchange the thing you love.