Authent Ed College Counsel · Seoul
Admissions · Recent classes through 2025
Imperial College London King's College London Brown University University of Pennsylvania Johns Hopkins University UC Berkeley New York University Washington University in St. Louis University of Virginia Case Western Reserve University Swarthmore College Carleton College Grinnell College Macalester College University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University of Wisconsin-Madison Penn State University Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Personalized college counsel for international families targeting selective US universities.

I'm Hae Chang Seong, founder of Authent Ed. I work with every family from course planning and ECs through the application essay — and into college. No junior staff. No handoffs.

Book a free consultation
2024 · Spring
Imperial College & Macalester
A 3.45 GPA student worked through a two-month structured self-discovery process to draft her essays — admitted to two highly selective programs, one with a $15,000 annual scholarship.
Essays · College list
2024 · Spring
UIUC & Rose-Hulman
An engineering applicant rebuilt his narrative from "interest" to demonstrated work — admitted to both UIUC and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Essay narrative
2023 · Fall
IB HL Biology & Chemistry — both 7s
A student moving from the Korean local-school system into IB HL achieved 7s in both Biology and Chemistry through fourteen sessions of methodology coaching across the curriculum transition.
Curriculum transition
2023 · Fall
Course plan for a research-track applicant
Four-year AP/IB course plan rebuilt around two intended majors and the actual published curricular requirements at each target school — not against a generic checklist.
Course planning

What I do

Five practice areas, one consultant. Each engagement begins with a free consultation; from there we agree on scope and a working cadence. I do not run a roster larger than I can teach personally.

I.
College list strategy
Reach, match, and likely schools calibrated to actual admissions data — GPA distributions, financial aid posture, curricular fit — rather than ranking lists.
II.
Four-year course planning
AP and IB course selection mapped to intended majors and target programs from ninth grade onward. The earlier we start, the more degrees of freedom we keep.
III.
Extracurricular strategy
Depth over breadth. We build a small set of activities the student actually cares about and commits to — then make the case for them truthfully.
IV.
Essay & interview preparation
A structured self-discovery process that surfaces the student's real story, then helps them tell it in their own voice — never written for them.
The principal

Hae Chang Seong — the only consultant at Authent Ed.

Hae Chang Seong
Lived in
India · Poland · Korea · USA
Degree
St. Lawrence University
magna cum laude
Research
Immunology, University of Virginia
Teaching
AP & IB — Math, Biology, Chemistry
Ten years, four countries
Practice
One-on-one, by appointment

I grew up across three countries — India, Poland, and South Korea — before coming to the US for college. By the time I graduated from KIS Pangyo, I had already spent years teaching classmates through subjects they found difficult. What started as volunteer tutoring in middle school had become the work I most wanted to do.

At St. Lawrence I followed the pre-med track — Dean's List, magna cum laude, immunology research at UVA. On paper I had a plan. Then I worked for a year and a half, came back to Korea for military service, and somewhere in that stretch the certainty quietly dissolved. I had been heading toward a destination I'd inherited rather than one I'd arrived at by genuinely asking who I was or what I wanted to build.

That pivot is why I now work the way I do. Authent Ed is one consultant — me — and a small roster of students I work with closely over time. Not a task manager: someone you can think out loud with. That is the difference I built this practice to provide.

Read the full biography
On essays
Why the personal statement is not a writing problem.
The applicants who struggle most with the Common App essay are usually the strongest writers in the room. The bottleneck is almost always self-knowledge, not prose.
On course planning
Reading the curriculum, not the brochure.
For a research-track applicant, the published prerequisites at each target program tell you more than any ranking list. We plan from there, backward.
FAQ
When should we start working together?
Ninth grade is ideal; tenth grade is normal. Eleventh grade is still useful but with fewer degrees of freedom in course selection. Senior fall is essay-only.
FAQ
Do you only work with Korean families?
No. International-school families across Asia are the core of the practice; Korean and bilingual TCK applicants make up the majority but are not the requirement.

The first conversation is free.

A thirty-minute call. No pressure, no sales pitch — just an honest read on where the student is, where they want to go, and whether working together makes sense.