The Kolly Journal.
Honest notes on getting into top schools. Written by the founders of Kolly.
Admission Requirements for Rice University
Rice is the smallest school in the top tier and admits like it. With around 4,800 undergraduates spread across eleven residential colleges in Houston,…
The Kolly Founders · 8 min read
Admission Requirements for UCLA
UCLA gets more applications than any university in America, roughly 150,000 a year, and it reads them through a system that looks nothing like the Common App…
The Kolly Founders · 8 min read
Admission Requirements for UNC Chapel Hill
UNC Chapel Hill is really two schools wearing one name. For North Carolina residents, it is an attainable flagship with in-state tuition under $10,000…
The Kolly Founders · 7 min read
Admission Requirements for University of Michigan
Michigan is the public university that private-school applicants keep on their list without quite understanding it. It enrolls over 34,000 undergraduates…
The Kolly Founders · 8 min read
Admission Requirements for USC
USC changed the game this cycle. For fall 2027 applicants, the university is offering binding Early Decision for the first time in nearly every program…
The Kolly Founders · 8 min read
Admission Requirements for Washington University in St. Louis
WashU has spent two decades quietly assembling one of the strongest undergraduate programs in the country, and its admissions process is quietly one o…
The Kolly Founders · 8 min read
The Kolly scoring methodology
How Kolly grades a college essay, and what happened when we tested it head to head against a plain chatbot read on the same AI model.
The Kolly Founders · 5 min read
Introducing Kolly 2.0
A complete rebuild around the first AI model trained on hundreds of thousands of accepted college applications.
The Kolly Founders · 5 min read
Admission Requirements for Harvard University
Harvard rejects nearly 96 out of every 100 students who apply. That math is the easy part. The harder question — the one this guide answers — is what…
The Kolly Founders · 9 min read
How AI college essay reviewers actually work
An AI college essay reviewer reads your draft against patterns from accepted essays and returns a score plus the most important fix. Here's what that means in practice, and what to look for in a good one.
The Kolly Founders · 5 min read
