Our Expertise
At Xcel, our advisors and tutors work with students over months and years, and we get to know them extremely well. We know what matters to them, when to push for more, and, importantly, when to rest.
Families often first contact us for academic support, course selection and leadership strategy, and SAT and ACT preparation. Many students then continue with us for college advising, the personal statement and UC prompt development, art and writing portfolios, and sports recruiting. We are always thrilled when they return years later to prepare for the MCAT, LSAT, GRE, or GMAT, and to be that second pair of eyes for capstone and thesis work in philosophy, biology, and sociology, to name a few.
Our tutors and advisors are scientists, actors, writers, artists, economists, environmentalists, and doctors, and they bring those lives into their teaching. Our team artist reviews portfolios for process and theme, looking for points of view that reflect the application as a whole. Our creative writer teaches students what it means to braid narrative and sharpen images until they show what the student actually means. Our academic and test-prep teams raise grades and scores. Our advising team helps students and families choose colleges with the whole arc in mind, from the first year on campus to the careers and graduate programs that come next. Our essays and applications team pulls the threads together into a clear picture for admissions committees: we help students work out what they have to say, then help them say it well.
Our Philosophy
We find joy in teaching, coaching, and advising—in knowing something well and then helping students reach their own levels of mastery. Joy is what tends to keep our teams together.
We ask a lot of our students. We ask them to study hard for good grades, to volunteer and intern for experience, to meet weekly with a test-prep tutor for top scores, and to share with us their values, dreams, and inner stories. In return, they deserve a team that will still be there next year.
That's why we pay our tutors and advisors among the highest percentages in the industry. People who are paid well, respected, and given room to do their best work tend to stay, and when they stay, students get tutors and advisors who know them.
Experienced people also use the right tool for the right job. We teach on whiteboard apps that let us work through even the thorniest concepts during a live meeting and keep a record of the work for students to review at any time. We keep a library of official tests, along with personal statements and supplemental essays (shared with permission), so students can see what they are working toward. Students study from handwritten notes and typed outlines constantly reviewed and updated by the people teaching them. And our internal workflow documents let tutors and advisors guide programs that are highly individualized but still have to meet clear goals and deadlines. Because the same people use these materials year after year, they improve with every student we teach.
Our team and our students matter most. The materials and processes we use serve them both.
