About our students
Our most successful students are more interested in their own skills and motivations, and less interested in applications to architecture schools. The strongest work emerges from serious introspection. AP’s role is in tutoring students to understand their skills, motivations and interests, and to apply that authenticity to architecturally-oriented visual and written work. Only then can schools take students seriously.
Sebastian, Head Tutor, AP
Who we work with
We take on around 40 students a year on our online tutoring program, and most enrol for six to eight months. Our program is built around individual relationships between tutors and students, not volume.
Our student body is international. Most applicants come from the US or the UK, but we regularly work with students from across Europe, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, Hong Kong, and beyond. More than half are undergraduate applicants, with US BArch programs and UK BSc and BA degrees being the most common interests. The remainder are postgraduate applicants applying for MArch and related programs.
Our students share an uncertainty about how to begin. One parent sums up a feeling many families may recognise:
“As a family with no experience in creating portfolios, we very much relied on AP’s invaluable advice.”
— C.S, BArch applicant, 2025 entry
Her daughter went on to receive offers from multiple top UK schools. Another parent describes their daughter as a high-achieving STEM student and competitive athlete for whom art is something she does in her free time to unwind. She had never prepared a portfolio or worked consistently with a tutor before deciding, late in her junior year, to apply to undergraduate architecture programs.
Others come from more art-focused backgrounds but are equally uncertain about how to translate their existing work into something architectural. One student describes arriving:
“Initially lost and unsure on how to approach my art portfolio, not knowing how to create ‘spatial’ pieces.”
— R.C, BArch applicant, 2025 entry
Many postgraduate applicants come to us while studying an entirely different subject at university. These applicants face their own distinct challenges, and one MArch applicant writes:
“Navigating the graduate application process alone was challenging. Working with Sebastian and his team transformed my journey. They provided insights to enhance my portfolio and essays and encouraged me to aim higher.”
— B.O, MArch applicant, 2025 entry
Admissions outcomes
Our students have been accepted to the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL (multiple students, across multiple programs), Rice University, Columbia GSAPP, Yale School of Architecture, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Cambridge, MIT, the Architectural Association, Syracuse, Pratt, RISD, Tulane, the University of Virginia, and Hong Kong University, among many others. Our students often win merit scholarships, and many are admitted to all or most of the programs they apply to.
We do hold admissions outcome data, though I’m deliberate about not leading with it. Every student at AP on a tutoring enrollment has gained admission to at least their second-choice architecture school, and the vast majority are admitted to their first choice. That includes schools like the Bartlett, which has acceptance rates of around 5%.
Leading with numbers and outcomes tends to attract the wrong mindset. But what’s encouraging is how our students describe these outcomes. Nobody writes about hitting a magic formula or cracking an admissions code. What comes through instead is a sense of genuine creative development, of becoming a better, more articulate, more self-aware thinker over the course of the program.
“I feel that my creative process and creative development as a whole was fostered and strengthened.”
— D.B, MSci applicant, 2026 entry
Another parent, whose son was admitted to his first-choice school after applying to programs with single-digit acceptance rates, reflects on what makes AP different:
“Architecture Prep does not employ a cookie-cutter curriculum with duplicative activities for every student. My son’s tutor invested time to understand his personal artistic vision, then capitalised on his strengths to guide him in creating a portfolio that showcased his unique creativity. And despite all the stress of the college application process, my son had a fantastic time. He eagerly anticipated his tutoring sessions and then gleefully tackled suggestions, because they were tailored to his strengths.”
— N.L, BArch applicant, 2024 entry
The tutoring process
The process follows a broadly consistent shape, even as the content varies completely from student to student. Sessions begin with a survey of what the student already has and who they already are. Then come tasks, reviews, and iteration, always in service of revealing something authentic.
One parent describes:
“Charlotte [tutor] helped reveal a consistent portfolio theme that was authentic and meaningful to our daughter, and which tied back to the personal statement and, ultimately, linked through to the interview conversation.”
— C.S, BArch applicant, 2025 entry
That thread connecting portfolio, writing, and interview as a single coherent picture is something we think about carefully for every student. It isn’t accidental.
An example of this approach in action is with one student whose interest in crochet became a central project in her portfolio. She describes how her tutor:
“Encouraged me to develop a crochet model inspired by decay and growth in nature, as crochet is something I love doing as part of my hobbies, thus helping me create a highly personal, developed, and multi-media portfolio.”
— D.B, MSci applicant, 2026 entry
The result was a genuinely original piece of materials-thinking, rooted in the student’s own life. She received an offer from the Bartlett.
Interview preparation receives the same level of personalisation. The same student describes how sessions encouraged her to open up:
“I’d previously give quite closed answers, but when it came to interview, I was able to use the skills he [tutor] taught me in guiding the conversation to where I wanted it to be.”
— D.B, MSci applicant, 2026 entry
Another student, who had never done a formal interview before, was taken through multiple rounds of presenting her portfolio until she felt confident. Her tutor “got to know me as a person and tailored the interview preparation sessions to me.”
Beyond the application
Across all our testimonials, there’s a consistent observation that goes beyond simply getting in. Students describe acquiring skills in portfolio formatting, in spatial thinking, in presenting their own work, that they carry into university and well beyond it. One student notes:
“Not only was this useful for my [application] portfolio submissions but it will be for my university portfolios.”
— D.B, MSci applicant, 2026 entry
Another reflects how “the skills I gained during our sessions have been useful beyond just my application process.” (K.B, BSc applicant, 2024 entry)
Some students come to us while already at university, finding particular value in the kind of individual guidance that isn’t available on their program. Others look back years later with the same clarity. One student, now practising architecture after working with us in 2018, writes that the experience gave him:
“A safe and non-judgmental space to experiment with different ideas and techniques, allowing me to express myself creatively and grow as an architect.”
— I.S, BArch applicant, 2018 entry
The word I always come back to is authenticity. Not the performed kind, the sort that sounds like it was workshopped in a tutoring session, but the kind that emerges when someone is genuinely helped to understand what they care about and why. That, in the end, is what architecture schools are looking for. But beyond architecture schools, it should be what any creative looks for.
One student, accepted to the Architectural Association, UCL Bartlett, and Hong Kong University with a full scholarship, puts it in terms that appear in different forms across many testimonials we receive:
“Architecture Prep is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.”
— T.S.W, BArch applicant, 2024 entry
The reason it keeps appearing isn’t because students are grateful for getting in. It’s because they’re grateful for how they creatively developed in the process of diligently working with their tutor, week by week.
Sebastian, Head Tutor, AP