Accepted to Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon. He turned both down for a full ride at Purdue.
Chose: Purdue University
Ian did well in school and struggled with standardized tests. He scored a 25 on his first attempt.
What he actually cared about was cars. He liked tinkering with them, and he already had a side job at an auto shop.
Teaching the test in the language he already spoke
His coach stopped explaining ACT questions the way a test-prep book explains them and started explaining them the way a mechanical system works. Everything has a pattern. A car has a pattern. So does an ACT question—the same traps, built the same way, showing up in the same places.
That reframe is what moved him. The content was never the problem. Recognizing the machinery was.
He hit a 32 in February of junior year.
Then the harder question
A 32 gets a student admitted to good schools. It doesn’t, by itself, get them paid to attend. The next question was what his application actually said about him.
The default move for a kid who likes cars is to keep liking cars. Instead, Ian used what he already had—the job, the skills, the shop—and started teaching underprivileged kids near him how to do mechanical work. Then he partnered with the auto shop to turn it into an official summer class.
Four students from that class went on to get real jobs.
Why that last sentence is the whole thing
“Community service” is a category. “Four students from the class I built got jobs” is a fact with a number in it, and it’s the kind of thing an admissions reader actually remembers.
Nothing here was manufactured. He didn’t invent a passion project for the application. He took an interest he already had and pushed it one level past where most students stop—from doing the thing, to teaching it, to running something with an outcome you can count.
The work took months, not years.
Ian was accepted to Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon. He turned both down for a full ride at Purdue.
That last decision says as much as the acceptances do. The strategy produced options, and the combination of a real score and a real story produced money. Choosing the full ride over the bigger names was his call to make—which is exactly the position you want a seventeen-year-old to be in: choosing between good outcomes instead of hoping for one.
What we did differently
- Taught ACT question patterns through analogies to physical and mechanical engineering—the system he already thought in.
- Treated the test as a pattern problem rather than a content problem, because the content was never what was stopping him.
- Ran two 5-week sprints into the December and February test dates, finishing during junior year.
- Built his application around the auto shop job he already had, instead of adding an activity he didn't care about.
- Pushed the hobby one level past where peers stop: from doing the thing, to teaching it, to running a program with a countable outcome.
Coached by
Carson
Every Boosted Brains coach has a perfect or near-perfect ACT score and has been personally trained by Carson Weekley (perfect 36) and Martin (Head of Student Success).