Sheila Bauer                   Ray Ravaglia

— Raymond Ravaglia and Sheila K. Bauer are co-founders of AccessUSA

What we call ‘overnight success’ in university admissions is really the visible tip of a very long below-deck iceberg. Universities investigate a multi-year pattern of growth and achievement

Every admission season, the same stories race through WhatsApp groups and school corridors. “A student from XYZ school just got into a top US university with a massive scholarship. She must be a genius. Or they must have hired an amazing consultant in class XII.”

From a distance, it looks like an overnight miracle. Up close, it almost never is.

What we call “overnight success” is really the visible tip of a very long below-deck iceberg. Universities don’t examine just a final exam marksheet or a polished essay; they investigate a multi-year pattern of curiosity, growth, resilience, and achievement. The problem is that most families only start thinking seriously about this pattern when it’s too late.

We recommend a six-year plan for “overnight” success, from class VII to class XII. Spread over these years, a deliberate, well-designed study plan is likely to make exponential impact. But if you pack this effort into the last 18 months, and it will seem like panic.

Let us illustrate with a few stories.

Take ‘Ananya,’ a representative of several real students we’ve worked with. In class VII, she was shy but loved reading. Her school ran a short leadership and public speaking workshop; she discovered she enjoyed speaking up in small groups. In class VIII, she joined an online storytelling course and narrated a modest project on her city’s history.

In class IX, she attempted her first serious academic writing course with structured feedback from a university-trained instructor. In class X, she took a social impact project course and worked with a local NGO, to improve communication with parents in low-income neighbourhoods.

In class XI, she added two more advanced courses in areas she genuinely cared about and spent part of her summer in a short residential program on a university campus, experiencing seminars and campus life firsthand. By the time she applied in class XII, her application showed several rigorous courses, a three-year track record of community engagement, and clear interest in policy and development. To the outside world, her scholarship offer looked like lightning from a clear sky. To anyone who had tracked her for six years, it was inevitable.

Now contrast this with ‘Sara,’ who followed a more familiar path. Her family assumed that strong board marks with some test prep would be enough. Until class XI, she focused almost entirely on school exams. Suddenly, in class XII, the alarm bells rang: “We need profile building! We need internships! We need courses!”

In the space of a few months, she added three short online certificates, a rushed ‘internship’ that amounted to shadowing, and a generic community service project. On paper, she looked busy. But there was no depth, no sustained direction, and no real evidence of university influencing engagement. She still did reasonably well in admissions, but everyone felt she had left potential on the table. Same talent. Different timeline.

The six-year plan matters because growth compounds. In classes VII-VIII, the focus should be on building foundations and exploring interests across domains while strengthening core literacy, numeracy and communication skills. In classes IX-X, students should narrow to one or two serious areas of focus and produce higher-level work — rigorous projects, competitions or research — so that their academic direction is clear. In classes XI-XII, the emphasis is on deepening strengths, adding a few high-impact experiences, and aligning academics and activities into a coherent profile for favourable university admission.

In our experience, three pillars matter more than anything else: Evidence, purpose, and university-level engagement.

• Evidence: Not just claims of interest, but tangible output such as projects, papers, competitions, courses, and portfolios.
• Purpose: A gradually emerging sense of direction. Not “I figured out my entire life at 16,” but “over three years, a pattern has developed and I can explain it.”
• University-level engagement: At least some experiences where the student has worked at or near the level expected of a first-year university student with documented credit, grades, and recommendations, through advanced schoolwork, dual-credit courses, serious online programmes, or summer school.

For Indian schools and school leaders, this type of thinking has powerful implications. The real measure of a school is not its infrastructure or its brand but student success after they leave. Rankings that focus on long-term outcomes and real-world readiness, such as the EducationWorld Launchpad Rankings, are beginning to capture this. A six-year approach is exactly what such metrics reward. For families, the takeaway is simple and reassuring: you do not need magic; you need time and structure.

The world will continue to be dazzled by “overnight success” stories. Our job, as educators and parents, is to remember the truth behind them: Overnight success is simply six quiet years in a row.