College applications, done right.

Most families run a college application out of a spreadsheet and a shared doc. Deadlines slip because nobody owns them. A missing a–g course gets discovered in the fall of senior year, when there is no term left to fix it.

And the parent writing the checks usually has no way to see what has actually been done this month. That last part is the one I set out to solve first.

I’m Austin Choi. I studied Electrical Engineering at UCLA. I found the college application process needlessly confusing, so I built the practice and the platform I wish my family had.

Applying was harder than it needed to be. The requirements were scattered across a dozen pages, and the rules that actually mattered were buried: which courses counted, which grades counted, what was due when. I spent more time working out the process than working on the application. Most of that difficulty wasn’t the work itself. It was never quite knowing where I stood.

So I built what I wanted at the time, a platform that shows a student and their parents exactly where they stand. I built it with graduates of UCLA and USC, among others, who went through the same process and knew where it goes wrong.

That date does not move. The two months in front of it are the worst possible time to be working out what the application actually asks for, and that is when most families start.

The Sprint is eight one-on-one sessions over six weeks, finished ahead of the deadline rather than against it. Most of that time goes to the four Personal Insight Questions: finding the story first, then drafting, then cutting until it still sounds like your student. Around that I review the campus list and build a deadline checklist covering every school on it. Student and parent both have platform access throughout, so nobody has to ask how it is going.

On the UC side: I tutor the courses that actually move a UC GPA, and the platform shows what each grade is worth. A grade in 10th or 11th grade in an A–G academic course changes the number. A grade in 9th, or in a non-academic course, does not. Most tutors cannot tell you which is which, and most counselors can identify the problem but cannot fix it.

On the SAT: UC and CSU are test-blind, so scores do not factor into those applications at all. The SAT still matters for private universities, out-of-state publics, and merit scholarships. If your student is only applying to UC and CSU, I will tell you that test prep is not where your money should go.

I coach, I ask questions, and I edit. I don’t write, and I don’t run a student’s draft through a model and hand it back.

Admissions offices are actively screening for applications that don’t sound like the applicant, and an essay that reads as ghostwritten is a worse outcome than an honest one that is merely good. The Personal Insight Questions are also short enough that specificity beats polish. The details that make an essay work are ones only your student has.

The platform helps students brainstorm from the activities they have already logged. It does not generate prose.