I applied to American universities from a Hungarian secondary school, and got almost everything wrong the first time.

Nobody in my family had done it. My school had no counsellor who knew what the Common App was. I found out what an “activities section” was supposed to prove about three weeks before a deadline, and I wrote a personal statement that read like a CV in paragraphs, because nobody had told me it shouldn’t.

What I eventually worked out, slowly and mostly by getting it wrong, is that the American application has its own grammar. Readers move through it quickly, looking for a particular kind of coherence, and once you can see that structure the process becomes far less mysterious. That is as true for students who grew up inside the American system as for those applying from outside it.

Yale opened a world I had not known existed. I read a double degree in Global Affairs and Statistics & Data Science, with a term at Cambridge, and later took a Master of Public Policy at Yale and a Master’s in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Along the way I worked at UNICEF, the United Nations, a few startups and the World Bank.

Through all of it, I kept meeting students stuck exactly where I had been stuck, missing the same explanation nobody had given me. Budapest, Lagos, Ohio, Lisbon: different school systems, the same gap every time.

The arctic tern makes the longest journey of any animal, from one end of the world to the other. Sterling is for students who want to make a journey like that, often from places where few people have made it before them.

Sterling Admissions is the help I did not have. Every student works one to one with a mentor who went through the same process not long ago, at one of the best American universities, chosen by our team, who reads the work and says honestly what it needs.

Bendegúz Dörnyei