About The Author, Jamie Beaton.

“When I was a 14-year-old kid, looking outside at the big, wide world of America and the dream universities I aspired to get accepted into like Harvard, I couldn’t help but wonder: How on earth could I ever get there? How could a kid who had the same dream as millions of high schoolers compete with the world’s smartest students.

My school counsellor was wonderful but also swamped with helping all of my peers navigate their own application processes.

The day I applied for Harvard, I had literally no idea what would happen. In fact, the reason for applying to 25 top universities was simply a matter of my teenage self attempting to hedge my bets.

I’d worked hard my entire high school life, and I’d been passionately engaged in extracurriculars that mattered to me - creating clubs for all of my interests from journalism to human rights. I took six SAT subject tests because I wasn’t sure if two would be good enough. I took ten A Levels, not confident in taking three.

When I received letters in the mail, confirming that I had been accepted into every one of those 25 universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Cambridge, Wharton (UPenn), Duke and others, I was blown away with excitement. But I was equally as stunned that the opportunities I’d been given were not available to others, and from that point on, became determined to work out how the whole system worked — and share what I learned to help others.

I founded Crimson Education in 2013 with a vision to equalize the leading university admissions playing field, initially on a micro-scale and now in 2022 on a level where we leverage millions of data points on college admissions, artificial intelligence and thousands of expert tutors and mentors from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge and other top ranking institutions with the incredible support of the Crimson team.

Having attended Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, I can say that these institutions truly possess the springboard to transform one’s life and the lives of their families for generations to come. My grandfather John Beaton had to turn down a scholarship to a top British high school because he couldn’t afford the cost of the uniform, and as a result worked for more than fifty years in a highly manual role.

ACCEPTED! is the result of all I have learned as a student and a professional who built a company out of this curiosity — drawing from my personal educational and career experiences and the success of the thousands of students we’ve supported.

I warn you, it’s not your average college admissions book, but then again ‘average’ is not a word associated with what it takes to get into these elite institutions. The truth is you have to be anything but average to get into Harvard or Stanford...and I say this knowing that there are thousands of way above average students who still don’t make the cut.

That is where ACCEPTED! comes in. My aim is that, in reading this book, you will close it on the epilogue knowing a whole lot more about the never spoken about, but very important strategies that make or break a student’s chances of success. I am incredibly proud of our students and staff who utilise these strategies to their advantage, working hard and leaving no-stone-unturned in the hyper-competitive top school application process. 

With ACCEPTED! I hope you can join them.”

- Jamie Beaton