About Me

I’m an advanced graduate student finishing up a dissertation at a Top Five sociology program. My research has won numerous prestigious awards, and I’m a dedicated teacher who has thought a lot about how to transmit the skills that I have learned.

When it comes to graduate admissions and funding packages, I have two advantages.

I started with a strong foundation of implicit knowledge. I’m a third-generation academic who was heavily socialized into the academic culture from birth. With this background comes a set of advantages that I’m only conscious of by carefully reflecting on them. In the words of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I have a habitus — a set of dispositions — that my life experiences, in my family and subsequently in graduate school, have honed to match what academic elites find valuable.

I built on this foundation by consciously pursuing explicit knowledge of how academia works. I am hugely interested in social status and read voraciously across fields on academic norms, theories of social signaling, and mechanisms of securing elite status in a field you are new to.

Over the years I’ve used these skills to help friends and former students get accepted to elite graduate schools and win prestigious national fellowships. Your GPA and GREs will have a big influence in where you’re accepting to grad school and with what kind of funding — there’s no question about that. But the truth is that many applicants look fundamentally similar to one another. Most applicants are on the margin where seemingly small differences in the language and focus of your application materials can make a big difference to admissions—and, just as important, to funding. It’s on that margin that I can help.