Rayner Jae Liu, PCC
Ivy League Admissions Expert | 10+ Years Experience | Duke Alum
Studied at Duke University
Admissions Committee at Self Employed
Successful clients at
Available tomorrow
Starting at 6:00 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Rayner's Offerings
Custom hourly · $300/hr
Get help with Application Strategy, Editing, and .
Rayner also coaches for Executive Coaching and Leadership Coaching. View all.
Rayner’s College Qualifications
Coaches professionally
60+ people coached for College
Rayner has helped clients get into these schools:
How does a student with a 3.5 GPA make it to the top of the waitlist of a #1 program while those with higher GPAs were rejected? How does a student rejected from Yale REA receive multiple offers from top schools in the RD round and receive personal notes from Penn and Johns Hopkins admissions officers? How do other students get into multiple Ivy Leagues and have them offer to fly them to visit campus? They trust me to help them tell their stories. I help students get an edge in college admissions, college essays (Common App and supplementals), and career navigation while finding peace and joy. With 10+ years of experience in education my students achieve outstanding results and my knowledge, skills, and abilities make me one of the most sought after counselors on the market. Having trained with admissions directors from Stanford and worked directly with admissions officers from Columbia, Duke, UVA, and UMD, I have strong insights into how admissions decisions are made. As an Integral Coach®, I am trained to work with you in an ethical and empowering way. I have also coached directors and Presidents in higher education, which gives me further insight into colleges' priorities. My writing has also been widely recognized. The Duke English Director of Undergraduate Studies called my work "an academic achievement," and distinguished Harvard professors have placed my writing in the Top 4%. I have also been published on the Gates Foundation website and have been mentioned multiple times by a 4x #1 NYT Bestselling Author Marianne Williamson for my writing and insights into the human condition.
Rayner can help with:
Application Strategy
Editing
Essays
Interviews
Recommendations
Resume
School Selection
Secondary Review
Waitlist Strategy
Rayner also coaches for Executive Coaching and Leadership Coaching. View all.
About Rayner
Most of my students who get into schools like Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and similarly competitive schools get stuck for months on the Common App and supplemental essays. It’s not because they don’t know how to write. It’s because standard advice tells you to hide the most interesting parts of yourself. High-achieving students are often advised to build an admissions profile by flattening their identity. While the result is rarely immediately catastrophic on paper, your student has felt the violation long before they’ve sent in their application, and your natural worries as a parent get shut down rather than genuinely resolved. My work with elite university graduates reveals that students who are flattened by admissions consultants to win a short-term acceptance incur an expensive, decades-long trajectory error. Succeeding in today’s chaotic world cannot be engineered through the outdated packaging playbook, but traditional admissions hides this reality while pushing you to make decades-defining choices based on an incomplete understanding of your student. My practice combines a decade in education reform, professional coaching, and elite-level positioning with academic backgrounds in Duke anthropology, Harvard philosophy, and Stanford neuroscience to reverse this trend. I decode a student's psychological architecture with a level of precision most practitioners never touch—identifying the exact intellectual threads and patterns that no resume, transcript, or traditional consultant can capture. Many of my students feel seen clearly for the first time—and their precision and clarity frequently lead to dream school acceptances, handwritten notes from Ivy League admissions officers, and substantial merit scholarships. But more fundamentally, they receive a level of structural clarity that naturally creates long-term educational ROI. Looking "impressive" is typical. I discover what makes your student unforgettable. Credentials: Certified Integral Coach® | ICF Professional Certified Coach | Professional Coaching Faculty | BA Honors Duke University | Religion Scholar at Harvard University | 10+ years in leadership, education, and talent development | Experience across Fortune 100, startups, and mission-driven ventures
Why do I coach?
I coach because I see distortions—stories we’ve been told, identities we’ve been sold, strategies that cloud our judgment and lead to burnout, disconnection, and regret. But I also know what’s possible when someone has the right guide who sees their potential and helps them rise to meet it in a way that honors who they are. I coach to help people align who they are, what they want, and how they’re meant to lead. I also draw on powerful frameworks and systems to provide my clients with reliable guidance that liberates them into their differentiated authority.
Work Experience
Executive Leadership & Admissions Coach
Self Employed
2021 - Present
Admissions Committee
Senior Content Marketing Manager
Fama Technologies Inc.
2018 - 2020
Interviewer
GTM & Sales Enablement Consultant
Wind River
2017 - 2018
Product Marketing & GTM Consultant
Samsung Electronics
2016 - 2018
User Experience Designer
Code and Theory
2016 - 2016
Rayner was also given offers to work at
Intel
Code and Theory
Education
Duke University
BA with Honors, Cultural Anthropology & Political Science (Global Peace & Conflict)
Multiple departmental honors, merit scholarships, and education innovation awards. Focused on organizational behavior, design thinking, rapid prototyping, ethnography, and inclusion and recognized publicly by Melinda Gates for insights into human development and education.
1 Review
Overall Rating
5.0
Rayner has helped clients get into these schools: