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Student Profile
Student Name:
Aloha
Current School:
Canadian Public High School
Admitted to:
University of Southern California (USC)
Overview
Aloha’s childhood unfolded across different places: from Beijing to Canada, then to Yunnan, and back to Canada again. It’s a path that left her feeling both familiar and out of place everywhere she lived. This fall, she is heading to another country to study Environmental Science and Health at the University of Southern California (USC). Her journey there was built on years of genuine exploration, a demanding IB curriculum, and a college strategy designed around who she actually is, not a template.
Student Background
Impermanence shaped Aloha’s life from the start. Moving continents to study in Canada during elementary school, she began learning to adjust to new surroundings at an early age. Her family’s love for traveling also meant French and Spanish became part of her everyday life, on top of learning English. Having an early exposure to different environments planted something in her as she was growing up: a sensitivity to cultural differences and a willingness to understand others whose way of life is new and unfamiliar to her.
After spending years adjusting to a new life in Canada, Aloha’s family had to relocate again to rural Yunnan in China. Looking back, that stretch of her childhood shaped her more than any other. Yunnan is home to numerous ethnic minority communities, each with its own unique language, traditions, and way of life. Before moving there, the term “culture” was just an abstract concept she could not fully comprehend as a young girl. But as she spent more years living among these communities, she was enlightened that there is no single correct way to live.
Obtaining an IB diploma demanded that Aloha return to Canada in her ninth grade. By then, her interests had already started branching out into the social sciences, particularly environmental science, anthropology, and psychology. One could easily conclude that all these fields of interest are rooted in a childhood spent adjusting to new places and meeting new people again and again.
She is honest in her admission essay that constant relocation did not come easy. As a kid, maintaining friendships and adapting to new environments always required effort in many aspects of her life, especially emotionally. But over time, that repeated adjustment made her far less afraid of change and more inclined to have patience with herself as she found her footing.
Challenge
Returning to Canada for ninth grade turned out to be its own kind of culture shock, even though she had lived there for years before. Most people assumed it would be an easy transition since she was not a complete stranger to the language, but familiarity with a place is not the same as familiarity with its culture. The pace of Canadian high school caught her off guard, and so did the unwritten rules that everyone else seemed to already know: the classroom customs, the class rotation system, and the way students joked with each other all felt oddly unfamiliar. She could follow every word being said, but not always what they meant, a subtle but real gap that had nothing to do with language and everything to do with context she simply hadn’t had the chance to build yet.
The academic side of the transition was just as demanding. The IB program pushed her hardest in biology and chemistry, both subjects that require precise vocabulary and a strong foundation that is built over time. These are the exact areas she was not able to keep up with during her years away from an English-language system. Lessons moved at a pace that assumed she already had that groundwork, so she’d spend evenings re-reading material on her own just to stay caught up.
Underneath the academic and cultural adjustment sat a harder dilemma: Aloha had no clear sense of what she wanted to study. It wasn’t for a lack of interests. If anything, she had too many. Environmental science interested her, but so did anthropology and psychology, and none of these fields announced itself as the obvious one to commit to. There’s no obvious way to narrow them down. Listening to classmates who already spoke confidently about their intended majors made her own uncertainty feel more pronounced than it probably was.
How We Helped
We began working with Aloha and her family in the second semester of ninth grade. From our first meeting, she already gave an impression of being respectful and determined. Her mother attended every consultation and stayed fully engaged throughout, but she also consistently allowed Aloha to take the lead in conversations, stepping in only at key moments to encourage her to think more deeply. That family dynamic gave us a stable foundation to build a long-term plan around.
Rather than pushing her toward a major early, we set a simpler pace:
- 9th grade – explore broadly without pressure to commit
- 10th grade – identify a promising direction and start building real projects around it
- 11th grade – deepen that focus into something concrete for her application
The point of this strategic pacing was not to slow her down. It was to give her room to figure out what she liked and make sure that whatever major she eventually committed to came from her own passion rather than from anxiety about falling behind her peers.
Aloha then started to explore her interests genuinely. She took Harvard’s CS50x course to test whether computer science might suit her, given how in-demand the field is. It wasn’t the perfect match, and that honest realization turned out to be useful information rather than a setback. In tenth grade, we provided her guidance in a research project that pairs psychology and biology in examining brain structure and adolescent behavior. Through this project, she discovered a real curiosity about why people think and behave the way they do and found herself wanting to dig into the research rather than simply finish an assignment. That project became the turning point for Aloha. For the first time, she was chasing an actual question, staying up late reading papers she was not assigned because she wanted to understand more than the project required.
By eleventh grade, that curiosity had broadened further into environmental science and anthropology, two fields that on paper look unrelated but that Aloha connected through her own history. In the summer of 2025, she returned to Yunnan and conducted fieldwork on cultural preservation among the region’s minority communities, the same communities she had grown up around as a child. Through participant observation, she realized her real interest was never really the environment on its own. It was the interconnectedness of environment, health, and culture and how they particularly shape each other. Once she saw the connection, she finally settled on Environmental Science and Health as her focus.
Aloha stayed firm on wanting to pursue biology-related fields throughout the process, and her family fully supported that choice while also preparing backup options in ecology and geography. This gave her a safety net without asking her to compromise on what she wanted to study.
Alongside building her portfolio and research projects, standardized testing became another component that needed intense preparation. She began studying for the SAT in tenth grade, and our instructors worked with her to build a structured study plan across two demanding summers rather than cramming closer to test day. Having a strategic plan in place meant that the late timeline didn’t derail her the way it might have otherwise.
When it came to building her school list, we worked through twelve schools spanning reach, match, and safety categories. We acted strategically, spreading her applications across Early Decision, Early Action, and Regular Decision rounds. At the same time, we kept a set of applications to Canadian schools open, so she had strong options no matter how her U.S. applications turned out. USC’s supplemental essay prompts stood out immediately for being unusually personal, asking things like her favorite snack or what she’d say if she had ten minutes to speak to all of humanity. Questions like these punish generic, over-polished answers, so we pushed her to answer them the way she genuinely would in conversation rather than defaulting to a polished, generic version of herself. That was a real risk, but it also turned out to be exactly the right call.
The Numbers Behind the Acceptance
Aloha’s years of self-exploration and effort translated well into her results. She earned a 39 on her IB diploma, which reflected persistence given how much she’d struggled with biology and chemistry early on. She scored 1520 on the SAT, close to a perfect score and a strong addition to her application. Her school list strategically centered on top 30 universities in the U.S. with strong medical or science programs, and in the Regular Decision round, it all came together with an acceptance to USC’s Environmental Science and Health program.
A Journey That Finally Made Sense
Looking back, the constant moving that once left Aloha feeling unsettled as a child, became the very thing that made her application stand out. Her essays weren’t built around a résumé of impressive titles or perfect-sounding achievements. They were built upon research experience, a cross-disciplinary curiosity about environment and health that came from actual experience, along with community leadership and years of navigating different cultures firsthand. That honesty is likely what helped USC’s admissions officers see a fully formed person rather than a mere strong applicant on paper.
If you are also feeling unsure about how to choose a major or you’re trying to figure out how your story fits into a competitive application, we would love to help. Aloha is just one of many students we’ve guided through this process, each with a different story but the same need for an approach tailored to their own path.
Reach out and schedule a free consultation with Ivy Talent Education today! Let us help you formulate a personalized strategy towards a successful college application.
