The pandemic has made getting accepted into many of the country’s top universities more difficult for graduating students. And with in-person class limited in many places, boosting a resume with extracurricular activities is has also become more difficult.
That was a complaint Emmet Halm heard from a number of people while back in DFW, after taking a year off from Harvard due to the lack of in-person classes. And while home in the area, he found it difficult to build his own resume when competing for a limited number of internships and summer jobs.
“I was fed up looking for opportunities and I… noticed that people were frustrated with online learning, especially the college process. It's super daunting, no one is really getting the resources they needed, everyone seemed more stressed out than usual,” Halm told NTX Inno. “So, I saw a lot of need on that end, and then a lot of… students like me had more free time and a willingness to give back. So, I thought that there might be something there.”
The solution and the idea behind his recently launched edtech startup Acceptitas when Halm sent a survey out to fellow students at his university about what they felt most stood out on their resumes to help them get accepted in Harvard. The overwhelming majority of responses came back with the same answer: passion projects.
“It was kind of like reading the writing on the wall and thinking, ‘Wow, this is a huge advantage… that most of the most successful students are doing and a lot of people aren’t really focusing on it or think it’s out of their reach because maybe it’s too hard to start something on your own like there’s no school club,’” Halm said.
Launched in September from his parents’ home in Dallas, Acceptitas offers near-to-pear mentoring services to students from middle school to high school seniors, guiding them on preparing for the college admissions process. Through the company’s platform users are matched with one of Acceptitas’ 12-person team of fellow Harvard students for services like developing and creating a passion project, then using that to build a personal narrative to things like essay editing and interview prep.
“Every college application is a personal narrative, a personal story,” Halm said.
Acceptitas vets its employees based on a series of interviews to determine past experiences with the college application process and communication skills. Currently, all of the students working with Acceptitas are Harvard students.
When he first started, Halm was a one-man operation. However, after posting some education TikTok posts from the company that took off, he started to bring others on board with the help of the student entrepreneurship program Harvard Ventures.
Halm said part of the reason so many high school students are struggling with the admission process during the pandemic is that some schools are being more lenient on grades due to the stress of online learning, as well as the fact that many schools are now waiving their SAT requirements. Coupled with a decrease in extracurricular activities and job opportunities, many more students are competing for fewer spots at university.
“It’s easier than ever to apply to college especially during COVID… it’s hard for students to really narrow their list down and put their efforts behind a small list,” Halm said. “A lot of students I hear, they’re really stressed, they had all these great things going for them and now their resume is kind of blank.”
Still bootstrapped, Acceptitas has plans to build out its services as it brings in more clients. The first planned addition is the rollout of an online course in March that will allow users to get some of the general information about the admissions process via asynchronous courses, with one-on-one time when needed, allowing the company to help more students. However, Halm said he is working on finding the right balance between personalization and automation.
“We really want to emphasize reaching the largest number of students possible while keeping things very personal, which is always a struggle because if you automate everything it’s not personal and if you automate nothing, then you can’t reach very many people,” Halm said.
Down the line, Acceptitas also hopes to launch a series of passion project bootcamps over the summer, which Halm describes as a startup incubator for student-led projects. And later in the fall, the company plans to create an on-demand essay editing platform for students who just want quick help without mentoring. Halm said he hopes that addition will also provide some gig work-style employment to other university students. As the need grows, Halm said he intends to expand Acceptitas’ workforce beyond Harvard.
“I really want students to understand the importance of doing a passion project because they don’t just have to do endless clubs at their school,” Halm said. “If students can realize, ‘I don’t need to do everything, I can just focus on maybe the one or two things I’m really interested in’… that’s okay and that that’s very valuable in and of itself.”
