About

We got into the Ivy League without a single hook, and we can show you how we did it.

Bake sales, robotics, debate, orchestra, lab benches. The ordinary things we did in high school, before anyone knew where we'd end up.

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When the Harvard admissions lawsuit went to trial, researchers got access to years of internal admissions data. They found that more than 43% of the white students admitted to Harvard were ALDC: recruited athletes, legacies, applicants on the dean's interest list, and children of faculty. Of those, the researchers estimated that roughly three-quarters would have been rejected without that status.

A lot of people who sell college advice came from these groups. They sell the fact that they got in, without mentioning the advantage that helped put them there.

Everyone at Nest Admissions got into the Ivy League without a hook. No legacy status, no recruiting, no family connections. We applied one or two years ago, in a very competitive year, and we got in the ordinary way.

Why recent matters

A lot of college consultants are former admissions officers, and that experience is worth something. But many of them left years ago, and the process has changed a lot in the last five years.

Test-optional policies arrived during the pandemic and are now partly reversing, with different schools moving in different directions. The Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023, and colleges responded by leaning much harder on essays to get the context they used to get elsewhere. And then AI showed up, which has changed both what readers notice in a personal statement and what they've become suspicious of.

We applied through all of that. We wrote the supplements that are on the Common App right now, for the schools you're probably looking at, and we still remember what it felt like to be seventeen and staring at an empty document in the second week of October with nothing to say.

There's one more thing that's hard to put on a resume. Students often open up more with us than with adults. That matters most in essay work, where the hard part is usually getting someone to tell you the true version of a story instead of the one they think sounds impressive. That conversation goes differently when the person asking is twenty, not fifty.

What we can't tell you

We're new, so we can't point to a percentage of our clients who got into a particular school. We'd also be skeptical when other companies do. Those numbers usually say more about who a firm chose to take on than about anything it did afterward. A company that only works with students who already have a 4.0 and a national award will post a great acceptance rate without having caused any of it.

We also can't promise you'll get in anywhere, and neither can anyone else. Selective colleges turn down a huge number of applicants every year for reasons that have nothing to do with how good the application was.

What we can tell you

Smaller things, but useful ones. What everything costs, before you ask. How long we'll take, before you book. And that you'll leave every session with something written down, so you're never trying to remember it all later.

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A real essay

One of ours

One of our mentors wrote this for their own Princeton application. We blacked out their siblings' names for privacy.

When someone asks me how many siblings I have, I don’t know how to respond. It’s a simple small-talk question, but my answer changes every time.

If I want to shock people, I say six. It’s technically the truth, but it’s misleading. I have one brother, four half-brothers, and one half-sister. I’ve only ever lived with three of these siblings, and two have since moved out. The other three live across the country, and I see them every few years.

I ponder the question: what defines a sibling?

For most of my life, I would tell people I have three siblings. That's how many I’ve lived with and thus felt close with, so it felt like the most accurate depiction of my family. Yet, the half-siblings I grew up with are just as related to me as the half-siblings I rarely see. This led me to question why I felt more connected to the siblings I lived with. Was it simply proximity, or was there something deeper at play?

Over time, though, I’ve come to realize family isn’t just about shared daily experiences—it’s also about the effort we put into maintaining our connections. Everyone is busy, but we make time for the things we consider a priority. Sometimes that means pushing off studying to play No Man’s Sky with my half-brother in California or to FaceTime my half-brother in Michigan.

I’ve also come to appreciate that each of my siblings have played a unique role in shaping who I am.

name redacted, my only full-blood sibling, is my biggest cheerleader. His support has taught me to love and accept myself.

name redacted and name redacted are the half-brothers I grew up with. name redacted’s chemistry background inspired my own scientific interests, while name redacted’s health struggles have shown me the importance of wellness.

name redacted and name redacted are the half-brothers I didn’t grow up with. name redacted’s unconventional career path taught me that success doesn’t need to follow a traditional route. name redacted’s ideological differences with my parents have shown me how to have respectful disagreements with others.

name redacted is my half-sister. Due to her rocky relationship with my parents, I’ve only met her sporadically. Her situation taught me to approach others with empathy, since family connections can be strained for reasons beyond my control.

My experiences with my siblings have shown me that family is less about proximity and more about the connections we choose to nurture. Each person, regardless of how often I see them, brings value to my life, whether that’s the memories we’ve shared or the values they’ve passed on. At Princeton, I want to embrace this perspective in the relationships I build with my classmates. Fostering connections with the intentionality I’ve learned from my family, I know each person has a unique viewpoint I can learn from.

And, when I am inevitably asked the ice-breaker question of “how many siblings do you have?” I now know how to respond. I have six siblings who have shaped me, even across time and distance.

We're a small team of Ivy League students, most of us at Princeton, and we grew up in different places.

See the full team

How we pick our mentors

Getting into an Ivy League school tells you someone was a strong applicant at one point in time. It doesn't mean they can teach, or that they're patient with a nervous sixteen-year-old. We check for those separately. You're not hiring someone's acceptance letter. You're hiring the person.

So before we hire a mentor, every applicant goes through:

1
Editing a sample essay, which we read blind against the same rubric
2
A mock consulting session run with a member of our team
3
Shadowing at least three real client sessions before running their own

Where we draw the line

We'll coach you closely, but we won't write anything for you. We ask questions, tell you when something isn't working, suggest ways to restructure, and push you to be more specific. We won't draft original content, supply anecdotes you didn't give us, rewrite the essay in our own voice, or use AI to generate any part of an application.

Read the full policy