Authenticity + Alignment + Achievement

Galaxy Mind Education

We don't just help our students achieve unparalleled outcomes—we help them discover what makes them exceptional and set them on the right trajectory the first time. Our philosophy is that admissions isn't an end in itself, but a gateway.

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Elite Admissions Advising for Future Leaders

Galaxy Mind Education is not just college consulting. Not generic mentorship. But a precise, catalytic model that meets high-potential students at a pivotal threshold, and sparks both inner growth and outward achievement: Ivy League acceptances with integrity, life-changing full rides, UN speeches to world leaders, and more.As trusted clarity partners to emergent leaders and high-potential individuals and families, we help eliminate the trade-offs between prestige and integrity, power and purpose. The services we provide help students and families who want both—and are ready to do the real work—rise to the challenges of today's complex world.

Strong admissions. Lasting results.

Our students don't just get into Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Penn, Northwestern, and beyond. Every year, our students get results like:

An advisor who genuinely sees you.

Rayner Jae Liu is the founder of Galaxy Mind Education. With a background that spans education innovation, elite institutions, and systems transformation, Rayner has spent the last decade advising leaders and helping high-potential individuals do good, feel whole, and achieve more. Rayner’s approach is rigorous and human: grounded in high standards, but allergic to performative stress culture, earning him multiple education innovation awards in universities and industry.A UN-level writer and advisor recognized by NYT Bestselling authors, Melinda French Gates, and Yale and Harvard professors, Rayner has spent his life navigating complex systems and institutions that never provided the real answers—and made the real answers available to anyone seeking credentials without losing clarity, and prestige without losing purpose. His depth of insight and precision are sought after by the world's leading figures and voices, and his commitment to equity ensures that more ignition-ready students every year have the ability to receive life-changing direction, alignment, and guidance, regardless of background or finances.Galaxy Mind students regularly outperform their peers, and besides receiving Ivy League acceptances, special program invitations, merit scholarships, and full rides, they experience greater confidence, self-assuredness, mental well-being, and authentically enriching relationships. Why? Because our students aren't here for marketing gimmicks or packaging hacks. They are here to discover their unique life's purpose. We know the admissions game, but we're not just admissions consultants. Our trusted advisors bring decades of experience across every relevant discipline and a coherence that can't be replicated, and our clients feel the difference.Rayner holds a BA with Political Science Honors from Duke University. He is an MBA Fellow at Northeastern University, trained in neuroscience at Stanford, and has presented original research at Harvard published alongside PhD scholars.

No gimmicks. The real deal.

Our students—eventually admitted to schools like Yale, Duke, and Penn—have often visited multiple counselors and struggle to write a personal statement or application that they're truly happy with—until we meet. Check out our video on why your student's struggling to write the personal statement and why we're different:

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The clock's ticking. make it count.

The RD & ED2 Intensive

You've finished your EA and ED applications or are just beginning to prepare your applications for RD and ED2 submission. Maybe your early applications didn't go as well as expected or, after going in circles or delaying the process for several months, you've finally decided you need real help. If so, now is the time to act.The RD & ED2 Package helps you cross the finish line for as many schools as you need, within reason. Last-minute miracles are extremely rare. The best work comes through deliberate discernment, practice, and accountability. This package creates a compressed experience that helps you kick into high gear and bring out your best in time for the unnegotiable and critical January 1-15 deadlines.Here's how it works:

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If you're a prospective or existing client and would like to ensure your student receives guaranteed support and attention before RD & ED2 deadlines, you can submit a deposit to reserve your spot. Here's how it works:

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College Advising Packages

All package engagements begin with a one-hour consultation:

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What people are saying

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"Rayner helped me to bring out my true self in my writing. With his help, I got into Cornell! I recommend Rayner to anyone looking for a reliable and understanding counselor who seeks to help you express your story." - Sean, Cornell

“When I first met Rayner, I was in a college essay crisis. I was completely lost on how to fix my essay, and deadlines were approaching in less than two weeks. Rayner was able to quickly catch onto what message I was attempting to deliver. Then, he masterfully revised, edited, and helped me portray my message clearly yet beautifully. I was accepted to Johns Hopkins and Penn, with my admissions officers even complimenting my essays. Rayner truly is a wizard.” - JJ, Penn

“Hi Rayner! We are in shock. He has gotten into Yale, Brown, Penn and Carnegie Mellon. He is leaning towards Yale and they are sponsoring him to fly there! The financial aid they are offering our family is life changing as well.” - 2x Yale Parent

“Society has lost the meaning of education. If you lose the truth deep in people's hearts, all that is left is confusion and trauma... Rayner uses personal experience as the starting point, grasps the ‘illness’ of society and pain points of human nature, and develops it into tangible solutions for the next generation that offer hope.” - Parent

“We’ve been around the block of college admissions consultants and struggled for months. Rayner, this essay is beyond gorgeous. I can't thank you enough for knowing what to pull out of her.” - Duke Parent, Los Angeles

“Your work starkly highlights the difference between people who regard their job as helping people and those who regard their job as bringing home a check. Thank you for being the former.” - Joe, New York

"You have excellent services and values." - NYU Parent, Boston

“NPS Score: 10/10. Reason: Rayner.” - Student

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True Insights for the journey

The Fourth Way™

Twenty essays toward a future of clarity, integrity, and purpose. Your student writes brilliant essays to share who they are and how they think. We do the same.

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How Admissions Pushes Families to Choose Prestige Over Purpose—and What We're Doing Instead

How college admissions lost its soul, what it’s costing families, and how to get in—without selling out.

I was 17 when I realized the college admissions system wasn’t built to help students find themselves. In the fall of my senior year of high school, my parents and I sat down with a sought-after college admissions consultant. They were polished, persuasive, and promised the Ivy League was within reach. They had helped students get into schools like Yale and Columbia. They talked about how, with their help, I could get in. But something felt off—and over time, that feeling proved right.With a 4.0 GPA, multiple AP courses under my belt, and a record-breaking career in one of the nation’s top high school speech and debate teams, I had all the right elements for a successful outcome. Yet even then, the counselor’s recommendations left me uneasy. When I asked about a strategy for letters of recommendation, I received generic advice that didn’t address my real questions. When I expressed concerns about my Common App essay, the response was ambiguous—and sure enough, not one university I applied to with it sent me an acceptance.Fortunately, I had three saving graces: an essay I believed in enough to send to Duke, an AP Biology teacher who recognized me in unexpected ways, and a feeling that even though no one told me who I was, that my uniqueness was the key to not only the acceptances I needed, but the future I wanted to build. At Duke, I did well, graduating with honors and receiving recognition from leading professors across departments. I later published research at Harvard, wrote speeches delivered at the United Nations, led initiatives at Samsung and Intel, and coached executives in various industries.Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong—not just in how college admissions affects individual students, but in how it shapes the world we’re trying to fix. When students are given the wrong guidance, it doesn’t just delay and derail their personal paths—it distorts the kind of leaders, thinkers, and citizens they become. The college process, misaligned, trains young people to perform instead of reflect, to conform instead of connect, to chase prestige at the expense of purpose.I know this from experience. If I’d received guidance from someone who truly saw me, I would’ve made different choices. My essays, programs, and even the arc of my career might have been more direct. Instead, like so many others, I had to find my way through misaligned mentors, expensive missteps, and the long road back to clarity. When that becomes the norm, the damage doesn’t stop at the gates of a university. It ripples into workplaces, institutions, and our culture at large—until the systems our students inherit begin to reflect the same misalignment that shaped them.

How College Admissions Corrupts Students for Short-Term Gain—and Distorts Their Futures

By the time I returned to the admissions world as a consultant, things had become worse. Admissions consultants now charged $50,000 or more to help families and students gain coveted admissions, while the advice remained generic. You might as well have bought a new car well before you ever sent your student to college.From my view, this kind of service would be justified if it were truly life-changing. But every time I looked at what was happening to students in admissions consulting and in college, I wanted to hurl. In too many places, the process bends students into someone they’re not—their voice diluted, their spark slowly managed out of them. They become “impressive” on paper because the packaging is flawless. Their applications win praise. But the authentic person inside them? Barely recognizable.The industry has become predatory. It capitalizes on fears of what happens if students don’t achieve their dream, rather than beginning by understanding the student’s unique potential. The parent or family walks in and says, “We’ll do whatever it takes to get him/her/them into Harvard,” and the response is often a clever positioning tactic: “With me, you can.” I wonder if many students and families have the same feeling I did when I went to see the admissions consultant, thinking, “maybe they know something I don’t,” yet never quite finding that confirmation that they really understood the student or knew how to help them get where they need to go.That’s the trouble I’ve seen happen to students in traditional consulting spaces. Once the admissions result comes in, there is momentary relief. But then what? The anxiety returns. The student has an existential crisis, drops out, and ends up with a fraction of the success or happiness they could’ve had—true stories with students in my orbit who were bent out of shape and dropped out of prestigious colleges. When families revisit the counselor years later, the counselor says, “That’s not my job.”That’s what I see repeatedly in admissions. The process ends as soon as the admissions results come back. Thank-yous are exchanged. Payments are processed. People move on with their lives, unable or unwilling to acknowledge that, in far too many cases, they were sold a shiny object at the expense of long-term, whole-person success. Whether the student or family was prepared for success is “beyond scope.” The essay was accepted. The destination was reached. The rest? Not their problem.These experiences mirror some of the students I met at Duke who had “made it” but spent their college years floundering: struggling to keep up, to belong, and sometimes, just to stay. When a student is shaped to be accepted but not to be whole, we get a generation of kids fighting to stay afloat in a system that never saw them. And unless we change how we guide students from the beginning—this story will keep repeating.

What Happens When Students Are Truly Seen in the College Admissions Process

As the Cornell professor Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, students are asking, “Help me become a whole person,” and it is to them whom the university—and many admissions counselors—have nothing to say. I’ve seen too many students fall through the cracks—brilliant, sensitive, driven students—because no one ever helped them understand what made them whole.JJ had taken 12 to 15 AP courses, had a perfect GPA, and had done some incredible work throughout high school. He had sought an essay coach as early as summer of that year but came to me after being rejected from Yale just weeks before Regular Decision deadlines. To be clear, I generally recommend an earlier start to the writing process, and there are a million reasons a student would be rejected from Yale—after all, it’s Yale. But when I looked at the essay, I knew why he had been rejected.“It sounds like you’re trying to tell a story about what this event has meant to you,” I said. “But the problem? I can tell you have a deeply caring and devotional nature, but I have no idea what you’re saying—and if I were an admissions officer at Yale, it would be hard for me to admit you based on what I’m reading here.” We worked together over just a few short sessions, and everything changed. He was subsequently admitted to schools like Johns Hopkins, Penn, Northwestern, Emory, and Georgetown:When I first met Rayner, I was in a college essay crisis. I was completely lost on how to fix my Common Application essay, and deadlines were approaching. Rayner was able to quickly catch onto what message I was attempting to deliver within my essays. Then, he masterfully revised, edited, and helped me portray my message clearly yet beautifully, with my admissions officers even complimenting my essays. Rayner truly is a wizard, and I highly recommend him.How can admissions counselors still be providing generic advice, having students write essays that make no sense and providing suggestions that overlook their uniqueness? Helping students find their unique voice and direction shouldn’t be the exception. It should be the foundation of how we serve families.

What I Want for Every Family

That’s why I created Galaxy Mind Education—to eliminate the false tradeoff between prestige and purpose. We guide students with a blend of elite admissions strategy, award-winning storytelling, and whole-life alignment, helping them get in without selling out. Every student works with me directly, alongside a vetted network of trusted advisors. And while our students have earned spots at places like Yale, Brown, Cornell, and Duke, the real outcome is deeper: clarity, confidence, and a strong inner compass that lasts long after the acceptance letter fades.It’s also what led me to introduce The A+ Method™, a framework that resolves the longstanding conflicts between authenticity, alignment, and achievement in admissions and higher education. These interlocking parts shape student success, career alignment, and well-being, and have everything to do with whether a student spends years unrecognized, unsupported, and off-course, or if they go further to actualize their unique potential. For many families, the time for alignment is now.I’ve watched students go from fragmented and frustrated to clear, connected, and calm. Many students would end up giving TED talks within weeks of meeting me based on resonance alone, without it ever being recommended in our conversations. Others went to places like Yale, Cornell, and Brown—not because they played the game better, but because they finally realized who they were, and how to express it. Along the way, I’ve had my education innovation work featured by leaders like Melinda French Gates and 4x #1 NYT Bestselling author Marianne Williamson.The A+ Method isn’t just about getting in. It’s about using the process itself to build the clarity, resilience, and direction that college is meant to deepen. It’s about removing the painful trade-offs between being one’s authentic self and achieving one’s goals while resolving the tension between the family’s fears and the student’s dreams. When we open ourselves to achievement and authenticity, students don’t just get accepted. They feel seen. They discover what truly matters to them—and often, for the first time, they understand what makes them exceptional.Sometimes I still think back to that meeting with the consultant who promised so much. If the person sitting across from me had seen me and known how to guide me toward something real instead of something rehearsed, things might have looked different. Maybe I would’ve skipped the false starts. Maybe Duke would have been just one of many great options. Maybe I would’ve known that I was more than enough.But I didn’t, and too many students still don’t. That’s why I do this work. I want something better for students and families. I believe the admissions process can be a portal—not just to selective universities, but to self-understanding, not just to prestige, but to purpose, not just to a good college list, but a beautiful life.College admissions shouldn’t be a masquerade, but a process of becoming. When students finally feel understood and parents witness their children light up from getting in as their real selves, everything will begin to change—for students, for families, and for the world they inhabit.

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Why Your Student’s Struggling to Finish the Personal Statement

The truth: counselors who lack authentic skills homogenize, rather than differentiate, their students.

It’s become a pattern: a student comes to me to work on the personal statement in the summer, fall, or winter, and I find out that they’ve been working on it for months—with other consultants—with little to no progress.They tell me they’ve been struggling all summer to write the personal statement, even though they have a 4.0 and a 1500+ SAT score, don’t struggle with self-knowledge or writing, and have been working regularly with other admissions consultants.“We’ve been around the block,” a parent said.Another student, after working with me for a few weeks, reveals to me how many consultants they’ve visited over the last few months to no avail. Apparently, no one has been able to help them tell their story. Meanwhile, my students finish in about 2–3 weeks, and, in many cases, 2–3 sessions. Essays don’t always have to be hard.So what’s the problem? Why is it that many students who have spent time in the admissions circuit are taking months to write their personal statements to no avail, only to finish in 2–3 sessions once they’ve found me?It’s because the quality of advice a student receives is critical to their success, and the vast majority of admissions consultants do not provide good advice. The essay advising process has many pitfalls. Without the ability to perceive your student’s humanity, those pitfalls are inevitable.Every student finishes the personal statement on a different timeline. Some finish in days to weeks, while others may take months. This is completely normal. A student’s completion time depends on their writing abilities, self-awareness, number of previous iterations, mindset, circumstances, and much more. So there’s no one “right way” to get it done, just the best way for the student.Still, the fact remains that there are students who can complete the college essay within a matter of hours to weeks but end up taking months with the wrong advice, and it appears to happen repeatedly due to the same problems entrenched in the industry. It leads to a lot of frustrated and wasted money. The habits I have observed from many educational counselors, and, dare I say faux counselors, include:Shooting down a student’s idea before giving it full consideration. The student brings their idea for a story they want to tell. Almost immediately, the consultant imposes their interpretation and rejects the idea. The student reluctantly follows along, and the parent, just wanting to find someone who can provide guidance, starts to doubt their own judgment.Telling the student to write about something for which they have no enthusiasm or excitement. The counselor “knows better,” apparently, with no taste for the student’s consent or empowerment. Instead of the process being student-driven, the counselor is running the show. The student has become a prop.Having students write about an extracurricular activity or unremarkable experience and turn their essay into another performative resume. It is much easier to write about an extracurricular activity and slap the idea of being “impressive” on it. The problem is that this is almost never impressive to admissions officers. It doesn’t resonate. Identifying and articulating a student’s story is much more difficult and takes much more skill—a skill most people don’t have.This type of counseling doesn’t just do students harm in the admissions process. It also sends a message that students are what they do, rather than who they are: fascinating, valuable individuals with unique stories and gifts that play a larger part in our world. This is part of our society’s meaning crisis, and too many consultants take part because they think parents and students don’t know better.My hope is that you realize that you do know better. Instead of handing away your authority to a counselor who doesn’t grasp how admissions works or recognize your student, trust your instincts find someone you can rely on to help your student find what resonates with them and achieve resonance with their colleges.

What students need in an advisor when writing the college essay

To write a memorable, meaningful college essay—especially the kind that not only results in admissions and scholarships, but personal notes from admissions offices—having someone who can help students draw out their uniqueness is crucial. So, when looking for support, seek these qualities:Someone who sees and understands your student. Is the counselor able to perceive what’s truly unique and valuable about the student? Does the student feel a deep resonance, or are they subject to additional stresses and pressures that create internal and external misalignments?Someone who will help them stand out, not homogenize them. Does the student feel that the essay they’re about to write is truly them? Is it the kind of essay that only they could write, or could it be anyone else’s essay? This is where most counselors fall short, and where students and families should feel more license to challenge the advice they receive.Someone who understands how to write this format. Does the counselor understand the true architecture and function of a personal statement, or are they spitting out homogenized ideas? (Surprisingly, even many English teachers end up doing this.) The truth is, very few places have the ability to identify the story, facilitate the execution, and help the student stay true to themselves and find their direction.Make sure that when your student writes the personal statement, that they have trustworthy and effective guidance. The right guidance will not only serve students and families within the immediate application process and yield better results, but also help the student discover deeper truths about themselves.If you want a litmus test of the college essay that is going to get the best results, it’s this: the essay should be a touchstone in the student’s life that they look back on years later and go, “That’s why I wrote that. This essay was key to my becoming.” The moment you recognize what that story is, it’s only a matter of time before it gets told.

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