Tomas: From Test Struggles to a Full Scholarship

Building Confidence and Skills in Test Prep

Is your student strong in some areas but needs to build confidence and skills in others?

Tomas worked with Miss Claire in an RTC program for promising low-income students at a private nonprofit. He received RTC’s ACT curriculum and instruction in a small-group classroom setting.

Tomas started with a 24 Composite ACT score (equivalent to 1180 SAT) and aimed for a significant score gain. Right away, his organization, diligence, and discipline stood out. These strengths played a major role in his test prep success.

Tomas’s Strengths and Challenges

• Reading, English & Science: Tomas had excellent reading comprehension and quickly learned to decode passages and analyze test design.

• ACT Math Struggles: Math was his biggest challenge, but with structured support, he learned to identify formulas, apply strategies, and maximize his score potential.

• Performance Coaching: Tomas also developed positive self-talk techniques to stay calm and confident, particularly after difficult test sections.

Achieving a Remarkable Score Gain

Through diligence and a calm, focused test-taking approach, Tomas saw:

• +3 points in Math

• +7 points in Science

• +9 points in English

• A perfect 36 in Reading

Tomas maximized his ACT score, achieving a Superscore of 30 (equivalent to 1370 SAT), positioning him for top college admissions.

From Test Prep to College Success

RTC also worked with Tomas on his college application essays, and he generously allowed us to share his Common Application Essay below.

Tomas and his older brother Santiago are first-generation college students in their Colombian immigrant family. He was awarded a full QuestBridge scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he is now studying Political Science and maintaining a 4.0 GPA. His first semester, he earned an A in Calculus — the first time he had taken the course.

We are beyond proud of Tomas and excited to see him soar!

Tomas’s Common Application Essay

As a child, I heard adults tell me to do what makes me happy; however, they never seemed to mention that almost nothing is free. I had to learn that lesson as soon as I entered high school. When I started my freshman year, I very excitedly signed up for any extracurricular that piqued my interest. This is how I stumbled upon my primary extracurricular activity: Speech and Debate. I love to learn and exchange ideas with new people, and that is exactly what this activity allowed me to do. There was one problem, however: every tournament costs money!

Any travel tournament costs anywhere from $250 to $500 dollars, which my parents did not have. Sometimes an end-of-the-season tournament could cost more than $500 dollars. For the average competitor, this may not be such a great issue, but my parents are working class people who could not afford to send me to my private school, much less spend more than $2000 dollars a year for an extracurricular activity, no matter how much I loved it. Being a full-scholarship student at my school, I have always known that my family did not have the same financial capabilities as those of my peers, so I could never be angry with my parents. Instead, I would have to find a way to earn my own money.

That is why, last summer, I decided to work in construction with my dad. Fortunately, his employers were nice enough to give me a part time job. Nonetheless, it was not as manageable as I had originally thought. Most days I had to work outside or in houses with no air conditioning, either painting or working in demolition. The intensive work combined with the blistering sun struck me with a newfound respect for my father, his fellow laborers, and myself.

I have never been unappreciative of my parents, but this experience made me bond with my father in a way that I could never have imagined. He did that job every day for years on end, all for my brother and me. Of course, I only had to do it for a summer, and I was not going to complain to him daily, because, at the end of the day, I chose that job. Each day I would work alongside my father painting, pounding nails, and mixing concrete. This made me really think about how everything he and my mom have given me was borne out of hard work, a concept that I had never understood until then.

Above everything else, this summer job, that was only supposed to be about money, taught me about myself. It taught me about self reliance, that if I encounter an obstacle or a problem, all I have to do is look inwards, believe that I can do anything if I put my mind to it, and then take action. This lesson will serve me for the remainder of my life; whenever the road gets tough, I will remember that nothing is impossible unless I convince myself that it is so.

By laboring alongside others, I also learned to appreciate the efforts and tasks of everyone from a cleaner all the way to a supervisor. This will serve me in the future, enabling me to appreciate and respect the laborers of our society, because I have been, for just a brief time, in their shoes in the boiling sun working alongside them. While this job did allow me to go to many tournaments without such a heavy economic burden on my parents, more importantly, it taught me to be grateful, rely on myself, and appreciate those around me.