Real Profiles

For each school, see composite student profiles based on real admit patterns — what an accepted, waitlisted, or rejected applicant actually looks like. Plus sample essay openings + links to schools' published "Essays That Worked" archives.

⚠ A note on accuracy

Profiles shown are composites built from publicly known admissions patterns — they're not scraped from specific Reddit/Twitter posts and don't represent any one real person. Stats are realistic to each school's actual admit pool. Sample essays are illustrative model openings, not verbatim student work.

For real, verbatim admitted-student essays, every school's page links out to the official "Essays That Worked" archive (where one exists) plus the live r/ApplyingToCollege results threads.

Pick a school to see profiles

Harvard
Cambridge, Massachusetts · 3.6% accept
Stanford
Stanford, California · 3.9% accept
MIT
Cambridge, Massachusetts · 4.5% accept
Yale
New Haven, Connecticut · 3.7% accept
Princeton
Princeton, New Jersey · 4.7% accept
UPenn
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · 5.4% accept
Duke
Durham, North Carolina · 5.1% accept
UCLA
Los Angeles, California · 8.6% accept
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, California · 11.5% accept
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas · 29.0% accept
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan · 17.7% accept
NYU
New York, New York · 8.0% accept
USC
Los Angeles, California · 9.0% accept
Carnegie Mellon
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · 11.0% accept
Johns Hopkins
Baltimore, Maryland · 6.4% accept

Browse all 155 colleges →