Our Mission
At Top Student Academy, we're on a mission to revolutionize the way high-achieving and aspirational students master critical thinking and academic writing. Imagine a place where your child's natural curiosity is turned into a powerful tool for tackling complex problems and crafting compelling essays.
Our vision is to help parents and students reach both the short-term goal of getting higher grades in challenging courses that require critical thinking and essay writing, and the long-term goal of excelling at Master Skills that are required to achieve fulfilling success in work and life in your child’s future.
We achieve both by creating transformational growth in a student’s intellectual and critical thinking capacity.
We transform students into high level strategic thinkers and creative problem-solvers with high emotional intelligence.
And we know, as parents, you're entrusting us with something precious. That's why we're committed to excellence and providing the most effective, world-class learning that delivers transformative, long-lasting results to help our students thrive both in school and in life.
At Top Student Academy, we're not just preparing students for school; we're preparing them for the world. Join us, and let's unlock your child's potential together.
Our Story
How we came to specialize in training and empowering students to surpass their academic limits and reach their highest intellectual potential
Top Student Academy specializes in developing and maximizing students’ highest potential in critical thinking and academic essay writing.
For over a decade and half, Top Student Academy has specialized in and excelled at bringing advanced students to the next level.
Our motto is: “Where the best become better.”
What follows is how our journey unfolded...
Our Founder
Top Student Academy’s founder and TEDx speaker, Rene Wang, has been involved in defying the conventional way of learning and exploring out-of-box teaching methods since toddlerhood.
Rene grew up with educator parents. Her father was a Fulbright scholar and an English Literature professor who authored 7 books. For 25 years, he worked for the Fulbright Foundation, recognized to be one of the most prestigious scholarship foundations in the world.
She thus grew up in an environment surrounded by scholars and professors from top universities in the world, and dinner table conversations about Greek epics or Shakespeare were the norm. Her mother was an award-winning journalist who interviewed around eight thousand luminaries around the world, and was also a best-selling author who wrote about early childhood education, with 16 published books under her belt.
Her parents started teaching her to read when she was two-and-half-years-old using various creative, fun games they invented.
By 4 years old, she was reciting multiple classical poems and reading voraciously, enjoying her home library of over 400 children’s books with gusto. She appeared on national television and was referred to as a child “prodigy,” which is a term she rejects, because she firmly believes most children have similar potential for accelerated intellectual growth with the right guidance and creative nurturing. She understood that it wasn’t that she was especially gifted. It was the intellectual challenges that stimulated her brain during the formative stage that shaped her cognitive development.
This became a defining belief she infused into the inventive curriculum system she later designed for Top Student Academy to facilitate similar cognitive growth impact in students like your child.
This early education advantage sculpted her psyche to associate learning with creativity and joy and nurtured her lifelong passion for reading, writing, and learning. She’s particularly passionate about Greek drama, Victorian literature, 20th century plays and poetry, and, of course, Shakespeare.
More importantly, it programmed her mind from a young age to always seek inventive and unconventional ways in creating accelerated learning methods for herself and others.
She graduated with a Double Major in English Literature and Theatre on Dean’s List with a 4.0 GPA from one of the top three universities in Canada, University of British Columbia (ranked #34 in the world), which nominated her as Oxford’s Rhodes Scholar candidate.
After university graduation, she worked for a year as a professor assistant in France, at France’s national teacher’s training college, Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres, where French teachers acquire their Masters Degree in Education. This European education experience deepened and diversified her pedagogical philosophy.
Her own foray into her education career started in 9th grade, when she started teaching small group classes of elementary students language arts. She continued teaching children and teenagers for the rest of her own high school years. With a passion and gift for imparting knowledge through creative and effective methods, facilitating powerful intellectual growth in others came to her naturally.
In her sophomore year in university, she started organizing and teaching group classes of students who were a mere couple of years younger than her. She specialized in training students to ace the English Provincial Exam, where students had to complete three essays analyzing poetry and short stories within three hours. It was known to be an extremely challenging exam and statistically only a small percentage of students got an A. While the provincial average score for this exam was in the 50%-60% range, 90% of her students who trained with her for at least 2 years scored over 90%. That was when she started her multi-decade long commitment to develop a robust system of strategic techniques to help aspirational students excel beyond expectations.
Click to watch Rene’s TEDx talk: ”Hack Your Education”
Driven to inspire and elevate young people’s performance and consciousness, she founded Top Student Academy, a world-class institution that specializes in higher level critical thinking, rhetoric, and academic essay writing training.
As an out-of-box thinker who believes in transcending what others deem “impossible”, Rene is a multidisciplinary visionary and intellectual explorer. Having traveled to over 55 countries and ventured through diverse knowledge fields, she developed unique world views driven by big-picture Systems Thinking and has delved deeply into major Mental Models, Thinking Models, and super-learning skills.
She is so passionate about super-learning that she gave a TEDx talk titled “Hack Your Education” to inspire and teach young people to use Super-learning and Mindset Training to “hack” and supercharge their learning process and precondition their brains to maximize their learning abilities.
Super-learning, Mental Models, and Thinking Models—these components designed to magnify learning results have since become some of the most important elements in the revolutionary curriculum system she created for Top Student Academy to help students like your child.
Her drive for creating an innovative proprietary curriculum emerged from her own personal struggles.
In high school, she was in English Incentive/Honors classes and even skipped grades, while her classmates jokingly called her The Walking Dictionary. She invented a speed-learning method and was learning 30 to 50 new words a day for fun.
However, just like many of our students, she knew what her own weaknesses were and desired to improve.
She sought help outside of school, from expensive private tutors who were professors or PhDs to after-school learning centers’ essay classes or SAT writing classes, but their ways of teaching were conventional, thus they all presented serious learning blocks.
Though she thrived in traditional academia, in retrospect she could see patterns of the pitfalls and hindrances in classes both in and out of school that wasted her time and massively slowed down her learning progress.
Being a big picture Systems Thinker, she later identified and categorized these pitfalls into the “Four Main Learning Blocks” of these conventional ways of teaching, and designed our curriculum that completely shattered these Four Main Learning Blocks.
She was determined to invent better systems and teaching approaches that accelerate learnings results for others. She’s not interested in just creating courses. She’s only interested in creating the most effective courses that maximizes students’ success.
And the foundation of Top Student Academy, as well as the astounding, life changing results of its students that you will see and read about in our Testimonials section, is the culmination of this lifetime of educational experience and work.
Our Journey
When Rene founded Top Student Academy, she realized her unsatisfactory experience with conventional educational methods was much more common than she thought.
Countless students and parents also told her that they had similar struggles and disappointments.
Many had tried other tutors or writing classes that wasted so much of their valuable time and money.
Often these traditional methods were only able to help students improve to a certain rudimentary level, but never beyond.
Most of the writing classes available at tutoring centers or online are for students who are weaker writers, who are younger, or have weaker foundations.
Most teachers, including teachers at the best private schools or tutors who teach SAT or AP English classes, teach generic concepts (“have 3 points in your outline,” “start your intro paragraph with a hook,” “use transition words like ‘moreover’ or ‘nevertheless’,” etc.) that can only help students with the basics.
Those that market themselves as higher level classes like AP or IB English classes in tutoring centres may use more difficult reading materials (novels, poems, etc), but still the same old teaching methods and concepts.
This is the equivalent of putting a Honda engine into a Ferrari car body... It looks good on the outside but fails to deliver true performance.
They do NOT teach specific, strategic techniques that can help high-achieving students improve to the point of EXCELLING.
“I would highly recommend this course to almost ANY child planning to go to university.”
“I cannot believe her improvement...She improved from a 4 to a 7 (IB school: B to A+ (96%+) in 1 year)!
– Student’s Parent Heidi
“What differs between [Top Student Academy’s] program and my previous tutors is the breadth and scope of the course.”
–Edward Z (Princeton University; full-ride scholarship)
(96% in IB English High Level)
In fact, the biggest complaint we hear from our students, especially students in highly-ranked public or private schools, is that their teachers at school simply expect them to write high level papers but do NOT teach them HOW to write high-level papers.
Many students that come to Top Student Academy have experienced similar issues prior to joining us...
They do well at school. They are either getting A’s or B’s in English, and many of them are even in advanced or honors classes and are very creative thinkers.
Yet they still wish to improve more.
Sometimes because essay writing can still be a struggle for them and sometimes because they want to gain a competitive edge.
When they work with tutors or take other writing classes (online or at after-school education centers), the teachers either tell them that they “don’t need help,” or they find those classes too simplistic and are a waste of time and money.
Since traditional, regular teaching won’t satisfy the high demands of our students whose dreams are attending top universities, getting big scholarships, and a fulfilling life with big dreams and meaningful professional pursuits, it gave Top Student Academy an unique opportunity to continuously develop the most cutting edge and advanced proprietary techniques and create a world-class and transformational teaching method that deliver the best results.
Years and years of specializing in working with high-achieving and aspirational students who wish to break their limits and reach their highest academic potential empowered us to keep testing and perfecting our proprietary materials and methods so the results become better and better.
We created a comprehensive and methodic system that consistently and successfully trains students to improve with high efficiency and effectiveness, reaching the highest level students aspire to reach.
We have poured cumulatively tens of thousands of hours into the creation of every single course at Top Student Academy, and you and your child can reap the rewards with a mere fraction of that effort.
“The teaching materials are very helpful…not something you can find elsewhere. And it’s the best!
I think what makes it so special is because she organized them in a way that makes it easy to retain.”
–Jaxon (Johns Hopkins University; English mark improved from 78% to 96% in less than a year)
“After about a year here, I went from about 75% to a low 90%, or a high A. It’s a LOT of progress.”
The main reason I would recommend this course to others is because it definitely teaches you all the details of good writing, and all the variety of techniques that you can apply to almost anything.
...I learned more techniques in one year of Gold [Level Course] than I learned in the last two years at school.”
–Katherine B (improved from 4 to 7 in IB Eng, equivalent to ~75% to 96%+ (A+) in 1 year)
Many of our students excel in elite programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, or are in advanced English classes such as AP English, AP Literature, or different versions of Honors or Enriched English classes…
However, your child doesn’t have to be in advanced classes to benefit from our program!
Our program is also perfectly suitable for students who simply want to do well in regular English classes—in fact, those students usually see an even bigger improvement and the biggest growth in their grades!
Our accelerated learning will help your child fast-track and avoid a lot of wasted time, maximizing your child’s intellectual and mental growth.
Whether your child is already near or at the top of their class, or whether you dream that they can be at the top of their class, Top Student Academy can help both you and your child rise to even higher levels!
Scroll & read what our students say about us:
