The short answer
They get the most valuable thing in the admissions calendar: junior spring and summer with nothing to cram. One of our students finished at a 34 in December of junior year, then spent the freed-up months turning his chess hobby into a channel with 25,000+ followers. That project became the spine of his application. He was admitted to Dartmouth and Columbia, offered a full ride at Emory, and chose Dartmouth.
Most students treat the ACT as a senior-fall problem, which quietly makes it a whole-application problem: prep, essays, and deadlines all land in the same semester. Thomas is what the other order looks like.
The test, done in two sprints
Thomas was a smart junior who did well in school and struggled with standardized tests. He scored a 28 on his first attempt.
His prep at Boosted Brains ran as two five-week sprints against two test dates. The first paired math with English, where his foundations were already strong. The second went entirely at science and reading. In December of junior year he hit a 34, and the ACT was over.
What the freed-up months bought
Here’s the part most families never get to experience, because the test eats the calendar. With the score banked, Thomas had all of junior spring and summer for the rest of his application.
He loved chess. The default expression of that is chess club, maybe chess club president — the same line as everyone else with the interest. Instead he started screen-recording his chess.com games with voiceover commentary explaining his thinking. He was camera-shy, so his face never appeared. He posted the recordings to YouTube, later started streaming on Twitch, and grew to 25,000+ followers across platforms — by doing more of a thing he already liked doing.
That’s a unique mechanism built in months, not years, and it became the foundation of his essays.
Where he got in
Dartmouth and Columbia said yes. Emory offered a full ride. He chose Dartmouth.
Thomas himself credits the sequencing: finishing the ACT early is what created the time to build something worth writing about. Ryder’s recruiting path runs on the same schedule for the same reason — the students with standout applications are usually the ones who stopped needing test prep before their peers started it.
