Admissions & Futures Consulting
You,
and us.
Together, we make great things happen.
The record speaks first.
Where our students end up.
of our Oxbridge candidates were invited to interview.
of our Oxbridge candidates received an offer.
admitted to one of their top three course choices.
success rate on Early Decision and Early Action.
Across our mentors' candidates to date.
Our students have gone on to study at
What we offer.
Admissions is the outcome. The work comes first.
Three programmes, each built around something real — a mentor, a question, an idea. The application follows from the work, not the other way around.
How a year with us unfolds.
First
We listen
A conversation with your family — the student as they are, not as a transcript. We only proceed where we believe we can genuinely help.
Then
We plan
A clear map of the months ahead: what to build, what to study, and when. Your family sees the whole schedule.
Through the year
We build
Mentoring, research, projects, preparation — steady work, kept on course, with one team holding every thread.
Finally
We deliver
Every piece brought together into one confident application, read line by line by a senior mentor before anything is submitted.
The people.
Mentors from the rooms your child is aiming for.
Cambridge and Harvard, by way of thousands of hours of real counsel. You meet the people who will do the work — before any engagement begins.
Begin somewhere.
Useful, before you ever write to us.
The future is not assigned.
It is built.
Vision
Why we exist.
Amethys began with a conversation we could not stop having. We had both been through the machine — the rankings, the checklists, the advice handed down as if the world were standing still — and we had both watched brilliant friends follow it faithfully into lives that fit them like borrowed coats. The advice was not malicious. It was simply written for a world that no longer exists.
What a career means is changing. What a university actually values is changing. What genuinely opens a door — that most of all. And yet an entire industry keeps optimising children for the old map: more activities, thinner ones; essays polished until no person remains in them; ambition treated as a ranking rather than a direction.
So we built something that begins somewhere else entirely. We begin with the student — who they actually are, what truly draws them, where they might thrive — before a single form is opened. Then we put ideas in their hands: real projects, real research, real work beside people who do it for a living, and the chance to discover whether they love a thing before they promise four years to it.
Only then do we turn to admissions. By that point the application almost writes itself, because there is a real person behind it — and committees, who read thousands of manufactured files a season, recognise a real one instantly.
We work from Hong Kong, across Europe, Africa and Asia, in English, Mandarin and French — a small team of people from the rooms our students are aiming for, doing this work because we remember what it was to stand where they stand. We take on the families we can genuinely serve, and we tell the truth even when it is unwelcome, because a family that trusts us with their child's future is owed nothing less.
We help your child toward the life they actually want. And we walk beside you the whole way.
Our Team
The people who will know your child.
You work with them directly, from the first conversation to the last. One student, a full team of specialists — guiding them from the first idea to the final offer.
Kitty Tseng
Lead Strategist & Admissions
Ed.M., Harvard University · B.A. Education & Psychology, University of Cambridge — Triple First Class Honours, ranked first in her year.
Kitty leads admissions strategy at Amethys. She read Education and Psychology at Cambridge, where she took a Triple First and placed in the top ten percent of her cohort in every year — first overall in her second — before taking her Ed.M. at Harvard under Dr. Elizabeth Bonawitz. She has counselled applicants across the American, British and Canadian systems, and has written or refined more than two and a half thousand pages of application work. She works in English and Mandarin, both native.
The record
of her Oxbridge candidates invited to interview.
of her Oxbridge candidates received an offer.
admitted to one of their top three choices.
her own SAT — with a top score of 5 on ten AP examinations.
Placements include Princeton, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, Rice, UCLA and Vanderbilt in the United States; Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, UCL, LSE and Edinburgh in the United Kingdom; Toronto, UBC and McGill in Canada.
As a teacher
Alongside strategy, Kitty teaches — SAT reading and writing, TOEFL, and psychology across the AP, IB and A-Level curricula. Her students' records speak in numbers: eighty percent of her SAT students score above 1400, every TOEFL student has passed 110, and ninety-five percent of her AP candidates earn a 4 or a 5, with individual gains as large as 420 points on the SAT. She teaches the way she counsels — precisely, honestly, and to the standard she held herself.
How she works
Kitty's method is editorial in the oldest sense: she finds the true story in a student's record and cuts everything that is not it. Applications she has shaped read as one argument from the first line of the personal statement to the last activity entry — which is precisely what a committee, reading quickly, rewards.
Erick Castañeda
Academic & Research Mentor
A.B. Integrative Biology, Harvard University · Secondary in Global Health & Health Policy · Researcher, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Erick mentors students in the sciences from inside the work itself. At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute he researches diffuse midline glioma — a paediatric brain tumour — in the Filbin Lab, investigating neuron–glioma interactions in radiation resistance using patient-derived models. At Massachusetts General Brigham he conducts mixed-methods research in surgical education, has contributed to multiple manuscripts for peer-reviewed publication, and helped design a patient-feedback system now piloted department-wide. He is fluent in Spanish, and spent a summer in Santiago translating clinical research into materials families could actually use.
What he brings students
How he works
Erick treats a student like a junior colleague: real questions, real methods, real deadlines. Students leave his mentorship with work they can defend in an interview — and with a truthful picture of the field they are entering, which is worth as much as the work itself.
Bespoke
One student. A full team of specialists.
Bespoke is our flagship admissions programme. A dedicated team forms around one student and stays with them from the first idea to the final offer — strategy, writing, academics and interviews each handled by its own specialist. It is built for families aiming at Oxbridge, the Ivy League and the world's most selective universities.
Why we work this way
How it works
Discovery
We get to know the student — interests, strengths, ambitions — and build the school list and the plan around who they actually are.
Build
The real work takes shape, mentored week by week — the substance the application will later stand on.
Application
Personal statement, essays and admissions tests — every piece written in the student's own voice and reviewed by its specialist.
Interviews & offers
Structured interview preparation, then decisions — with us beside you until the last offer lands.
The two tiers
Each tier is a defined programme of expert sessions, timetabled around the student's school year and adjusted as the year moves. Fees are set out plainly in conversation and confirmed in writing before anything begins.
The details
The specialists
A month inside Bespoke
The timetable
Each month opens with a fresh personal timetable — every session, every deliverable, every deadline, built around the student's school calendar.
The sessions
Focused one-to-one work with each specialist through the month — strategy, writing, testing, and in the upper tier the project — each thread advancing in step with the others.
The steering
The lead strategist reviews the whole picture as the month closes: what moved, what stalled, and what the next month must do about it.
The family note
A written note to parents each month — what was done, what comes next, and an honest read of where the student stands. No chasing required.
Who it is for
Families who want the whole journey held to one standard — and a team that knows their child by name.
Frontier
Mentorship from the people building what comes next.
Frontier is one-to-one mentorship with researchers and engineers working at the edge of artificial intelligence and deep technology — people from the world's leading universities and laboratories, doing the work everyone else reads about. A student in Frontier does not take a course about the field. They work inside it: a real project, a real standard, and a mentor whose day job is the subject itself. We are opening Frontier first to families in China.
The mentors
Every Frontier mentor is active in the field now — not retired from it, not adjacent to it. They are drawn from the small community of people at leading institutions who train the models, build the systems, and write the papers the rest of the world cites. Before anything is agreed, we introduce the mentor to your family: their work, their background, and why we chose them for your child. The fit is the product.
The shape of the work
Every engagement is built around a project chosen with the mentor — scaled honestly to the student, and real enough to be worth defending. These are the kinds of projects our mentors run:
Language models
Train a small model from scratch
A transformer built and trained on a curated corpus — and a study of what it learns, and fails to learn, as it grows.
The core apprenticeship
Reproduce a published result
The classic training of a young researcher: take a real paper, rebuild it, and write up what the authors left out.
Evaluation
Design an evaluation that matters
Probe how frontier models reason about a domain the student knows well — and build the test harness others could run.
Applied systems
Build retrieval that actually works
A retrieval-augmented system over a real document collection — measured properly, including where it breaks.
Robotics
From sensor to decision
A perception-and-control pipeline on real hardware or in simulation — the full loop, end to end.
Computational biology
Read the data of life
A focused study on real sequence or protein data with the field's modern tools — small in scope, honest in method.
How they mentor
The apprenticeship, not the lecture
Students learn the way laboratories have always taught: real work, done beside someone senior, held to the field's standard rather than a syllabus's.
Reading like a researcher
Papers every week — read closely, discussed, and argued with. The student learns to tell a result from a press release.
Review, line by line
Code and writing are reviewed the way a lab reviews them. The student learns to defend every choice — and to change their mind well.
Questions over answers
The mentor's job is not to hand down solutions but to sharpen the student's questions until the solutions follow. That habit outlasts any single project.
Where it leads
A student leaves Frontier with three things: a finished piece of work they can show and defend; genuine fluency in how the field thinks and talks — the kind an interviewer recognises in the first five minutes; and a working relationship with someone at the frontier itself. For students aiming at computer science, AI and engineering at the most selective universities, that combination is the strongest possible evidence of seriousness. We make no promises about admissions outcomes — no honest firm can — but we will say plainly: this is the preparation we would give our own children.
The details
The Systems
Four systems. One standard of care.
Wherever your child applies, the attention is the same: a small list, a dedicated team, and a plan that runs from the first conversation to the final offer. Choose a system to see how it works.
American admissions weigh everything at once — grades, tests, essays, activities, character. We help your child present one coherent, memorable self.
The application, in short
How we help
The calendar, at a glance
British admissions are course-first. Precision matters more than breadth.
The application, in short
How we help
The calendar, at a glance
Families in Hong Kong often keep several routes alive at once. We hold them together in one calm plan.
The routes, in short
How we help
Europe's difficulty is rarely choice — it is coordination. We manage the map.
The landscape, in short
How we help
Application Review
The last read should come from someone who has done this before.
Even a strong application can be misjudged in the final week. Application Review places a finished application in front of a senior Amethys mentor — schooled at a leading institution, with hundreds of hours of counselling behind them — for a candid, line-by-line assessment before you submit.
What you receive
Who it is for
Students in their final season who want an honest second read — including those outside a full programme who simply want that precision once.
How it runs
You share the file
The complete application as it stands, and the schools in question — sent securely, held in confidence.
We assign the reader
A senior mentor whose background fits the target — the Oxbridge file goes to the Cambridge triple first, not to whoever is free.
The written read arrives
Within five working days: the assessment in full, and the action list — or within forty-eight hours where a deadline demands it.
The conversation
A session to walk through every finding, so nothing in the report is left ambiguous the week it matters most.
Resources · University Profiles
Know the room before you enter it.
Clear profiles of the universities our families most often consider — the numbers, the character, and how we help you approach each one.
Resources · SAT & ACT
Know exactly where they stand.
Thirty questions, asked the way the test asks them — fifteen in Reading & Writing, fifteen in Math. Answer a section and we estimate a score range out of 800, the way a real diagnostic would.
Resources · GPA Converter
One scale, from any system.
Translate grades from the US high-school, French, IB and UK systems into an indicative US 4.0 GPA. A quick estimate — not an official conversion.
Resources · Ebooks & Guides
The thinking, in full.
Our longer guides, written for parents who want the thinking behind the practice. Leave an email and the guide arrives in your inbox.
The Quiet Advantage
What selective universities actually reward — and how to build it, early.
Fourteen Months
A calm, week-by-week plan for the entire application year.
The Shape of a Standout
On narrative over checklists: how a memorable application is built.
Events
Come and think it through with us.
A series of intimate online webinars for parents and students, led by our Lead Strategist. Each session runs to an hour, follows the admissions calendar, and holds time for your questions. Places are limited by design.
The Application Year, Explained
The complete map of the fourteen months ahead — what happens when, which decisions matter most, and where families lose time without noticing. For families beginning to plan seriously, twelve to eighteen months out.
Inside the Oxbridge Interview
December interviews are weeks away. Kitty — every one of whose Oxbridge candidates has been invited to interview — walks through what tutors are actually testing, works a real interview question live, and shows what composure under pressure looks like in practice.
The Final Fortnight: Regular Decision, Done Well
With January deadlines close, the gains come from precision — supplements that are genuinely specific, an activities list that carries weight, and the last read that catches what tired eyes miss. A working session for final-season families.
Registration for each session opens roughly six weeks in advance. If a session is full — or you would like the recording of one that has passed — write to consulting@amethys.global and we will hold you a place at the next one.
Where You Stand
Nine questions. An honest read.
Answer as things are, not as you hope they are. We will tell you plainly what your child's position looks like from where we sit — and what the months ahead are for.
The Timeline
The year, mapped.
Choose the system and where your child stands. What follows is the map we build every year — the real sequence, in the real order.
Questions
Asked often, answered plainly.
When should we begin?
Earlier than most families expect — not because the application takes years, but because the things worth applying with do. Real research, a genuine project, a considered direction: these are built in Years 10 to 12, not in the final autumn. That said, we take on students at every stage, including the final season, and shape the work to the time available.
Do you work with families outside Hong Kong?
Most of our families are elsewhere — across Europe, Africa and Asia. The work is conducted online, in whichever time zone suits the student, with the same team throughout.
Which university systems do you cover?
The United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and continental Europe — often several in parallel. Running two systems at once is common in our practice, and much of our value lies in reconciling their calendars, requirements and strategies into one plan.
Who actually works with my child?
Mentors schooled at the universities your child aspires to, with hundreds of hours of counselling and tutoring behind them — and a record we publish. You meet the people who will do the work before any engagement begins.
What does it cost?
Engagements are shaped to the student, so we discuss fees in conversation rather than on a page. Begin with a private enquiry and we will set out the options clearly and completely — there is nothing hidden in the structure.
Do you guarantee admission?
No one can, and you should be wary of anyone who implies otherwise. What we offer instead is a record we stand behind, work that makes a student genuinely stronger, and complete honesty about where they stand at every point.
What does an engagement actually include?
Everything is set out in writing before we begin: the team assigned to your child by name, the programme of work, the session cadence, the deliverables, and the terms. You will never discover mid-engagement that something you assumed was included is an extra. Where a family works across two systems, the plan covers both, on one calendar, under one team.
Where is Amethys based, and how do we work across time zones?
Amethys Global is headquartered in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, and our mentors work across European, African and Asian time zones as a matter of course. Sessions are scheduled around the student's school day, not our office hours, and your family has a single point of contact throughout — reachable by email, and by the messaging channel your family actually uses.
How is Amethys different from the large consultancies?
Scale. The large firms run thousands of students through a system; we hold a short list, and the people you meet in the first conversation are the people beside your child in the last. Our programmes are also built the other way around — the work first, the application as its natural consequence.
Terms of Engagement
How we work, in writing.
Every engagement is governed by a written agreement issued before work begins. What follows is the shape of that agreement, so nothing about working with us is a surprise. It is a summary, not a contract; the signed agreement prevails.
Questions about any of this are welcome before signing anything — ask them at the first conversation, or write to consulting@amethys.global.
Privacy
Your family's information, handled like our own.
We collect little, use it narrowly, and sell none of it. This page says what we hold and why.
Private enquiry
Let us begin a conversation.
Or write to us directly — consulting@amethys.global