CollegePrep

AI college essay counselor that helps students discover student's story before writing and find their identity.

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Inspiration

When students start preparing for college applications, it's often hard for them to understand themselves or remember small past experiences. Because of this, it's really overwhelming for students to start telling their own story. Other websites that help with college prep usually ask questions in text form, and students have to type out their answers. That's a hassle. Also, when students talk to a counselor, there's not much time, so it's hard for them to share their own story clearly. CollegePrep gives students a way to find and collect their own stories, so that when they do talk to a school counselor later, they'll have material that's more specific and more helpful.

What it does

CollegePrep is an AI-powered platform that helps high school students and families tell their college application story. It guides students through a complete process:

  1. Find Your Experiences — instead of a blank questionnaire, students look at familiar picture story cards that help them remember things.
  2. Growth Timeline — experiences are organized by grade and time period, so students can see how their interests and activities came together.
  3. Student Model — the app turns selected experiences, memorable moments, and answers into scores for values, strengths, interests, goals, and growth stories.
  4. Story Lens / Narrative Explorer — even one student has many possible personas — like educator, researcher, community builder, sports science explorer, or literary designer — so they can look at themselves from different angles.
  5. Essay Planner — the app maps selected evidence into a story structure, building the essay around a few deep moments instead of just a list of activities.
  6. Essay Writing — while the student writes in their own words, the system gives helpful tips.
  7. Feedback & Final Review — the app checks the essay's overall consistency, including whether the evidence fits, whether the story structure makes sense, and whether it sounds like the student. CollegePrep is intentionally not an "AI essay writer." It's an AI counselor that helps students understand themselves before they start writing.

How We Built It

CollegePrep was built with Next.js, React, and TypeScript. Since we aren't professional developers, we relied on suggestions from Codex. The work included: • Turning rough product ideas into concrete UI flows • Creating sample student profiles with different interests and grade levels • Building the Student Model, Story Lens, Essay Planner, Essay Writing, Feedback, and Final Review pages • Improving UX text, layout, readability, and visual hierarchy • Improving the logic connecting experiences, moments, lenses, story structure, drafts, and feedback • Debugging Next.js hydration issues and TypeScript errors • Preparing the project for GitHub, Vercel, and Devpost submission The core product logic is focused on preserving the student's voice. Instead of just producing one generic essay, the system uses the student's experiences and answers to shape story structures and feedback priorities specific to each lens.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was making the essay-writing flow feel warm and personal, not like a typical AI writing tool. Also, our connection with Codex wasn't always smooth — sometimes requests were slow or got no response, and we even thought about giving up. But we worked through it by starting over and asking Codex questions from the beginning. To solve these problems, we improved several core engines: • Follow-Up Question Engine — asks more specific questions when a student adds a moment. • Lens-Specific Story Structure Rules — the story structure changes depending on which lens the student picks. • Evidence-to-Essay Mapping — connects each experience to the role it plays in the essay. • Student Voice Model — checks whether the draft still sounds like the student. • Dynamic Feedback Engine — sets feedback priorities based on evidence, prompt fit, story structure, and voice.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think it's important that CollegePrep shows a complete college-application storytelling journey, not just a writing box. Our main achievements include: • A complete demo flow from finding experiences to the final essay review • Multiple sample students with different personalities, interests, lenses, and essays • A Student Model that connects experiences to values, strengths, interests, goals, and growth stories

What we learned

We believe that listening to the student's own voice and helping them find meaning even in small activities will help them not just with college admissions, but in the future too. That's why we started this site with the idea that recalling memories through pictures — instead of text questions — would be more helpful.

What's next for CollegePrep

Next, we want to grow CollegePrep from a rich demo into a real, working counseling platform. Our plans include: • Building the Student Model based on students' actual data • Recommending activities backward from the future the student imagines for themselves • Improving the adaptive follow-up question engine • Creating summary materials for counselors to use

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