Startup Spotlight — Acceptitas

What is Acceptitas?

Acceptitas is a near-peer mentorship service that provides students with college application mentorship and passion project development from current Harvard undergraduates.

We believe that all students should have access to excellent and highly-personal assistance and mentorship so that they can realize their full potential, pursue their passions, and submit with confidence.

We leverage the first-hand knowledge of Harvard students with the effectiveness of near-peer mentoring to create an incredibly personal and accessible college admissions experience.

Through a wide range of fully virtual services, students work closely alongside Acceptitas’ team of trained Harvard students to craft their most compelling college application narrative. This unique, customizable, program allows for students to interact directly with current Harvard undergraduates who can offer assistance with anything ranging from summer passion projects to last-minute application editing.

What’s the founding story of your startup?

Acceptitas started out of the frustration with online learning and the uptick in anxiety from parents, students, and counselors about how a virtual world would change student’s lives and college admissions.

Our founder, Emmet Halm, saw that these pain points were overwhelming school counselors and that current solutions were either inaccessible to most people due to cost, and were often only helping students in their final years of high school. Acceptitas was created to help a wider range of students and their families earlier on in their education. Intervening early and shaping a student’s journal is much more effective than waiting until senior year to find a way to describe it.

Acceptitas started with Emmet in September, out of his childhood room in Texas. With the help of a few design-savvy friends and a personal business mentor, Emmet grew Acceptitas until he could no longer handle all the clients by himself. That’s when Emmet brought Acceptitas to Harvard Ventures, where he met Tom DiPietro, now the VP of Marketing for Acceptitas.

Since then, Acceptitas has experienced initial growth and success, serving over 50 students and their families across the country and growing to a team of a dozen Harvard students. Acceptitas also provides quick college application tips and tricks to a combined total audience of over 130,000 across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

What sets Acceptitas apart?

There are three key factors that set Acceptitas apart: our near-peer model, our emphasis on passion projects, and our Harvard quality. First off, because our mentors are all current Harvard students, they understand how stressful college admissions is, know what top schools are looking for, and can connect with students in ways that older counselors cannot. Time after time again, psychological and education studies show the incredible impact of mentoring from a slightly older and more successful peer in every field. Having a near-peer model allows us to keep our services extremely person, relevant, and cost-efficient.

Secondly, our emphasis on passion projects truly set us apart from other companies. Our conviction that passion projects were the single largest overlooked category in college admissions drove us to conduct a randomized study of Harvard students early on in our venture. Our data showed that nearly 75% of Harvard students completed an independent project in high school and felt that it significantly impacted their college application. Acceptitas helps students take advantage of this extremely powerful opportunity to build their own projects, explore their interests, and significantly strengthen their applications.

Third, being a team of Harvard students allows Acceptitas mentors to give students and parents the most up to date information on what top schools (like Harvard) are looking for and what kinds of people thrive in this environment. People also know that they can trust us, as all our teammates have succeeded to the highest level. Additionally, we’re able to connect students with the resources and network of Harvard, which is valuable when building passion projects, helping students find summer opportunities or network with like-minded peers.

What is your vision for your business in 5 years time?

There are millions of hardworking, motivated students who are largely not being served in a personal and high-quality way by the current market. Our goal is to scale the highly personal, near-peer model of Acceptitas to reach these students. In order to do this, we’ll have to move away from strictly 1-on-1 sessions towards our own edtech platform. Right now we are developing a holistic digital program that will exponentially expand the number of students we can provide with high quality, personal mentoring.

In addition to this, we’re also developing a free-lancer platform for essay feedback, that will allow top-college students to get quickly trained and work on demand. Our goal is to help as many students as possible while creating on-campus jobs.

Our ultimate 5-year goal is to be the leader in the near-peer mentoring and admissions space.

What is your Hottest Take? That is, an opinion or belief that you hold core to your company’s mission statement that may be unexpected or controversial.

Peers are more persuasive and influential than adults.

People tend to trust and listen to the advice of people who are similar to them, especially if they seem like a more successful version of themself.

If your parents tell you to do something, your automatic reaction is to refuse, but if your cool older cousin who goes to Harvard tells you, you’re much more likely to take their advice. This belief that near-peer mentors can connect in ways that older counselors or admissions experts cannot is central to our mission.