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cos·mos \ ˈkäz-məs \ noun
1 the universe viewed as an orderly, harmonious, and unified system rather than a random collection of matter
That is how your application was meant to be. Not a random collection of matter. That idea is what gave birth to the Cosmos Program.
Who are you on paper?
Every other primary application service we offer is an audit of something you have already written. Cosmos comes before the draft exists.
Most pre-meds struggle with how to portray their story. Admissions committees want to read your application and understand who you are, and most applications have pieces tugging in different directions. Cosmos harmonizes your story into a well-crafted portrayal of who you actually are, built out of a series of interviews with a personal advisor.
A worked example
You are on a summer trip to Paris with your family. You get separated from them in a city you do not know, and you find your way back to them that night.
A family holiday in Europe. It sounds like money rather than hardship, so it never goes near the application. Most people would not think to write it down at all.
Someone alone in a foreign country with no way to contact anybody, a language they do not speak, and no idea which direction to walk. They did not freeze. They made a plan, they executed it, and they got back to their family.
That is adversity, and it is specific in a way that a hundred other essays about resilience are not.
Notice that it is the same exact story. The only thing that changed is the angle. That is what the Cosmos Program is all about.
The problem this solves
Here is the version of this we see most. A strong applicant has research, a scribe job, two years of tutoring, a mission trip, and a leadership role in a club. Every one of those is real and every one is well written. Read together, they describe five different people, and the reader closes the file without being able to say in one sentence who you are.
That is not a writing problem, which is why an audit will not fix it. An audit tells you the sentences are weak. Cosmos decides what the sentences are supposed to be doing before you write them.
How Cosmos works
You fill in the shape of your background before we ever talk: your experiences, your metrics, your school list, the things you are proud of and the things you are not sure how to use. It means the interviews start deep instead of starting from your name.
This is where the voice comes from. We interview you, more than once, because your through line is almost always something you say out loud in passing and never think to write down. We are listening for the angle the whole time.
After the interviews we come back to you with the angle we have chosen, the experiences that carry it, and the material we gathered that you did not realize was your strongest. You get to push back. It is your life and your application, and the angle has to be one you can stand behind.
You write to the angle we chose together, in your own voice. Then we go back and forth on the drafts with you, the personal statement and the activities, refining it as many rounds as it takes until the primary is as strong as it can be.
A hands-on drafting partnership, with a real scope. Cosmos is the most involved thing we do. We run the interviews, we choose the angle, and we stay with your primary draft after draft until it is ready. You write it, in your own voice, because it is your application to certify as your own work, and we shape it with you the whole way.
Before you buy
Because it is a different kind of work. The audit is one advisor reading a finished document once and marking it. Cosmos is interviews, a chosen angle, and then draft after draft of your whole primary worked with you across two months.
Cosmos shapes and builds the primary with you. The audit is a one-time read of a document you already wrote.
Before you have drafted, ideally in the winter or early spring for a June submission. Starting Cosmos with three finished essays is possible.
Then we have not finished choosing it. We bring you the angle after the interviews specifically so you can push back, and we do not move to drafting until it is one you can stand behind. It is your application and your life, and we are proposing a reading of it, not issuing one.
Start Cosmos
Try to say what your application is about. If it takes you a paragraph, that is the problem this solves, and our interviews are where it gets solved.