Meet Halo
The First Workspace Built for College Apps
Built by students at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Cornell.
Everything for your college apps. One place.
A Google Doc holds your essay.ChatGPT gives generic feedback.Halo runs your entire application.
College apps scatter essays, deadlines, and schools across Docs, ChatGPT, and spreadsheets. Halo unifies it all in one workspace. Feedback matches each school’s real bar, built on thousands of admitted students and admissions officers. It coaches, never ghostwrites: your voice, never ours.
Get Your Halo Rewind
Don’t get left out.
Every student working in Halo gets a Rewind. You only apply to college once.
One workspace. The whole application.
Every tool you need from first idea to submit, built for college apps and free to start.
Brainstorm your topics
Stuck on what to write? Guided games and prompts pull your best stories out of you and feed straight into your Story Profile.
Research your schools
Smart links pull each school's real programs and traditions into one place, and a research agent reacts to your notes, tying them to your story and flagging what to dig into next, all surfaced right beside your draft so you write your 'why us' without opening another tab.
Write every essay in one place
One editor for your Common App and every supplemental. Halo helps you seamlessly reuse essays across your list, auto-checking for residual references from other schools. A built-in toolkit handles the rest, a live word count display, Angelo to trim over-length drafts, and a Polish pass for grammar and redundancy.
AI Essay Analysis
Most tools say “looks good.”
Halo gives you a score, and the reason behind it.
Halo reads your draft against the real bar at your school, on a 100-point scale calibrated to thousands of admitted essays and the officers who read them. Scored on every dimension that school’s rubric actually weighs, a written reason for each, and the highest-impact fix first. This is the part we obsess over.
A grounded, specific essay that lands solidly in the Strong range; tightening the opening and the close is what lifts it from here.
Most admitted essays at top-20 schools land in the Strong range (75–84). Yours is competitive.
Where to start
Fix the opening grammatical error
“my family’s assembles” is a possessive-verb collision in the first clause Harvard reads.
Change it to “my family assembles,” one word removed, then read the opening aloud.
Replace the abstract closing with a lived image
“shared humanity” is the least vivid line, and it’s the last thing the reader sees.
End on one concrete detail from the gift-bag scene instead.
Data from thousands of admitted students and hundreds of admissions officers.
Meet the Team
HarvardJeremy Lee
Hey, I'm Jeremy. I come from a low-income household, and I applied to college without a counselor, scraping together every piece of admissions advice I could find. When I got into Harvard, it hit me: students who lose this process often lose it before they even start, simply because no one ever showed them how it works.
I went on to coach applicants into schools like Princeton, Duke, Cornell, and many more, and I realized the gap wasn't only advice. It was the workspace itself. A Google Doc gets the job done, but getting the job done isn't enough. Students deserve better.
So I built Halo, the only workspace made for applying to college. Choose your schools, gather your research, and write every essay natively in one place, then take your finished work straight to the Common App. Halo gives you the guidance a $400-an-hour counselor would, prompt-specific rubrics, and your whole journey in one home, powered by tens of thousands of real data points from students and admissions officers at your dream schools. And it starts free.
Rachel Ding
Duke
Cindy Chen
Stanford
Manny Matsudaira
Harvard
Rachel Lee
CornellStart free. Upgrade only if you want to.
Everything you need to apply is free. No credit card.
Premium
For students actively applying
- Everything in Free
- Unlimited essay analyses & re-scoring
- Chat with your essay coach
- Full Profile Analysis + chat
- Deep school-specific research
- Parent Dashboard
- Advanced essay reuse scanning
Free
No credit card required
- Create unlimited essays in our workspace
- 2 full-quality essay analyses
- Earn up to 3 extra analyses
- Topic generation & suggested angles
- Brainstorm games
- Polish, grammar & word-count trimming
- Get-Unstuck essay coach
- Activity-to-essay idea engine
- Proactive research agent
- Smart Links research
- Personalized Application Planner AI
- Halo Rewind
- + Many more free tools
Season Pass
One payment, the whole application cycle
- Everything in Free + Premium
- Covers the full application cycle
- One-time payment, full unlock
- Priority feature access
Give your apps the workspace they deserve.
Brainstorm, write, get real feedback, and track every deadline. All in one place.