Your application starts here.

A path I had to build myself.

I decided to apply to US universities the summer before my senior year of high school, from an ordinary school in Belarus. I paid several thousand dollars — close to what my parents made in a few months combined — to consultants who turned out to have no idea what they were doing. I got rejected everywhere.

So I decided to do it myself. There wasn't even a single SAT test center in my country — not a shortage of good prep, an actual absence of anywhere to sit the exam. So I flew to Lithuania alone to take it once, and then to Dubai to take it again, working part-time on the side to pay for it myself. I couldn't even afford the sixteen-dollar CSS Profile fee — I applied everywhere on fee waivers and handwritten financial documents, piecing together a process no one around me had ever gone through.

I reached out directly to Belarusian students who'd gotten into Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton and asked them, essentially, to teach me everything they knew. I wrote to admissions officers at different universities. I read everything I could find on the psychology of perception, on how a person gets remembered in a stack of ten thousand applications. I turned myself into the expert no one had been for me.

There were nights I genuinely thought none of it would work — that I'd spent everything my family had, alone in two countries, for nothing. And then the offers started coming in.

Alongside Notre Dame, Minerva, and Berea, I was also admitted to Simmons University with a substantial scholarship, two Erasmus exchanges with full funding — in France and Hungary — and a research program mentored by PhD candidates from GWU and UNC.

As I went through my own admissions cycle, I started writing about it publicly — and people began reaching out for advice. What started as informal consultations turned into a full mentorship program within a year.

I'm currently a student at the University of Notre Dame.

A method, not a formula.

Where my students have gone.

These are results from my students — my first cohort, a small group from my first year of mentoring. My second cohort is underway right now, which is part of why research placements and activities outnumber admits so far: most of that group hasn't finished applying yet.

In their own words.