By Jenna Lebovits
“Just apply to our state school.” This was the advice Command Education founder and CEO Christopher Rim received from his school guidance counselor when he expressed his intention to apply to Yale. “I wasn’t the best student,” Rim admits. “I had pretty good grades, but I was nowhere near the top of my class. Everyone, including my guidance counselor, said, ‘There’s no way you’re going to get into an Ivy.’” He applied anyway, got into Yale, and was the only student in his year to do so. Rim believes his acceptance wasn’t thanks to his GPA, but his efforts outside the classroom.
While he was in high school, Rim founded a nonprofit organization that taught schools in his area how to integrate emotional learning into the classroom. This led to him meeting Oprah Winfrey at the launch of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation at Harvard. Rim’s experience led him to privately mentor a handful of students in similar positions: those who had interesting stories to tell, but perhaps not perfect grades. “The first person I ever helped from my high school got into MIT,” says Rim. “The second student went to Stanford. And from there, those parents told pretty much everybody. And that’s how the business grew—it started by accident.” Over the next nine years, the small operation with humble beginnings would evolve into a private, white-glove college consulting firm that offers support and mentoring for students from seventh grade to senior year.
Rim and his team at Command Education work with all kinds of students—from the not-so-motivated to the high performers—to help them discover what makes them stand out in the massive sea of applicants, getting to the root of each student’s interests, passions and motivations. “We had a student who was interested in beauty, fashion and makeup,” shares Rim. “If you talk to any typical college consultant, they would say that’s not really something you can do, maybe try for an internship. But we told her, ‘Why don’t you start a YouTube account where you review makeup products, because you do it anyway?’” Rim worked with the student to build an online presence and draft letters to send to publicists and influencers. They considered their efforts successful when makeup mogul Kylie Jenner sent her the entire Kylie Cosmetics line to review. “That really built her confidence, and she did it on her own,” says Rim. “She was able to talk about this in her college essay in a very authentic way.”
All Command Education senior mentors are recent graduates of Ivy League schools and other top institutions. “We’re about half the age of your typical college consultant,” says Rim. “Because we’re younger, students don’t look at us as counselors, tutors or teachers; they look at us as like an older sibling, and more of a mentor.” There’s no avoiding the stress of applying to college, but Rim and his team aim to make the process as calm and positive as possible, while teaching valuable life lessons along the way. “We help them with everything from start to finish,” says Rim. “If a student is having trouble with a teacher who they think is unfair, or didn’t give them the points that they deserve for a test and they want to talk to them about it, we’ll walk them through how to do that. We’ll help them figure out how to defend their position. These are life skills. If you think something is unfair, you need to speak up.” commandeducation.com