Thinktango -

Brenda Narcomey

There will never be enough words to express our ongoing gratitude to Dr. Shari Aldridge at Thinktango for the breadth of knowledge that was bestowed upon our twin sons. We received recommendations for Dr. Aldridge's services from numerous parents and proceeded to contact her at the beginning of our sons' sophomore year in high school. After the first meeting, we were off to the races with highly specific plans for our sons to meet their goals. She sharply honed their writing abilities as they gained confidence with each passing session. The feedback on essay and testing preparation was timely and surgical in nature. The summer Camplication Program was invaluable. The improvements in writing and testing skills were clearly noted. Once all the applications were submitted, our sons began receiving letters and phone calls from admission officers. The response was overwhelming. Dr. Aldridge helped our family to assist our sons in presenting themselves as well-rounded individuals that they are. The beauty of the process, looking back, was that Dr. Aldridge helped our family work together to achieve that which we thought was unachievable. She inspired our twins to go the extra mile and it truly paid off. Our sons were both admitted to every school they applied to and were happy beyond their wildest dreams. They both decided to attend Stanford University and felt it to be a perfect fit for them. Upon graduation, one of our sons was immediately hired at Blackrock in San Francisco in the Risk and Quantitative Analysis group. The other son is currently enrolled at Stanford in the Masters co-term program in Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence. He is now applying for top PhD AI programs in the country. Many thanks to Dr. Shari Aldridge! We couldn't have done it without you and wouldn't have had it any other way!

marshall Bauer

We hope this can serve as a warning to other parents. We bought Shari’s pitch and enrolled in her boot camp but when we saw the results (essays) we were aghast. In them our son in no way resembled the young man we had known for 17 years. We immediately scheduled a visit with her, at which she defended the content of the essays telling us this is what elite schools are looking for. Reluctantly we allowed them to be submitted.
Results: in the 6 schools where the essay was not important (Cal, UCLA, UVA, ETC) our son was admitted to all. In the 7 schools where the essays were important, zero admissions consisting of 5 waitlists, two denials. A follow up through a connected friend with one of the schools confirmed that the essays were a negative. We then followed up again with Shari, and she actually tried to distance herself from the content of the essays and produced a plethora of non-verifiable facts about how well it went with the vast majority of her clients.
Our takeaways: Shari does not take responsibility, offers no accountability, produces a large amount of self-reported data, has had her online identity virtually erased which should have been a warning to us, in reality costs 2X what her initial fee is, and was unable to get a 4.4 GPA, 34 ACT, varsity water polo, varsity Lacrosse co-captain, student council, multiple award winning Caucasian male into any private university he applied to.
We feel badly for our son; he now realizes how his essays did not represent him well. Luckily he has many good public school options. We are sure we are not alone in our feelings about the misguided job Shari did for us. Since it is very difficult / impossible to find any verifiable reviews about her we hope this review will serve as a warning to others. We wish we had read one like it prior to agreeing to work with her. The warning signs were there, we ignored them to our detriment and hope you do not.

IMPULSE 2180