Command Education’s mission is to empower each individual to find their passion while developing valuable life skills for college and beyond. We motivate students to view education as a path to realizing their potential and making an impact on their generation.
A Pioneering Approach to College Consulting
In 2016, Command Education became the first and only consultancy to embrace a student-centered, emotionally intelligent approach to college admissions advising.
Unlike traditional college prep services, Command offers holistic, long-term guidance for students across various stages of their educational journeys. Our mentors invest deeply in each student’s journey, serving as expert advisors and relatable role models who motivate students to develop their passions, develop meaningful initiatives, and convey their authentic voice. This one-on-one mentorship is complemented by the specialized expertise of the broader Command team.
Families around the world trust our highly personalized, bespoke mentorship, with students beginning as early as middle school to thoughtfully develop their academic and extracurricular profiles and discover their authentic passions. Our students aren’t just class presidents—they are award-winning nonprofit founders, community organizers, political activists, innovators, and entrepreneurs.
Our Inspiration
While studying psychology at Yale University, Command Education Founder and CEO Christopher Rim worked as a research assistant at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where he helped analyze a survey of 44,000 high school students about how they felt at school.
Approximately 75% of the words students used to describe their experience were negative, the most frequent being “Tired.” “Stressed.” and “Bored.” But when asked how they wanted to feel, students used a very different vocabulary: inspired, empowered, supported, excited, passionate, purposeful, motivated.
Through this research, Christopher realized that students who feel inspired by their work and supported in their goals are the ones who discover their passions, develop confidence, and ultimately thrive in the highly competitive college admissions process.
This insight became the foundation of Command Education.
Founding Story
In 2015, Christopher Rim was a Yale sophomore working as a research assistant in the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, under the direction of Dr. Marc Brackett, one of the field’s leading researchers. There, he saw firsthand what a national survey of high school students had found: the words they reached for most often to describe their own education were tired, stressed, and bored.
Around the same time, Christopher began helping a few students from his hometown with their college applications, working out of his dorm room. His first two students were admitted to MIT and Stanford, and their parents told everyone they knew. One mother told him something that stuck: it wasn’t his credentials that reached her son—it was that he was close enough in age and experience to actually understand him, something her family’s more accomplished tutors had never managed.
Christopher recognized what the research had been telling him all along: students don’t thrive because they’re managed more rigorously. They thrive because someone finally sees them. That conviction, that connection changes outcomes more than credentials do, became the foundation Command Education was built on.
