There is no single quality for a successful Brown applicant according to University admissions officers. But to a prospective Brunonian, online college admissions influencers may have advice on how to make their Brown application shine.
The Herald spoke with four admissions influencers who discuss the college application process on their social media platforms. Several Brown students also shared their experiences engaging with this admissions content.
Sarah Frank ’25, a University scheduler at Brown, aims to make her social media content “accessible to anyone, regardless of the background information” they come to it with.
“I went to a Title I high school in Florida and was in junior year when the pandemic hit,” Frank wrote in an email to The Herald, emphasizing that information on selective schools like Brown at the time often felt limited to Zoom information sessions. But the universities she was interested in made admissions information accessible, she wrote. That inspired her to start creating college-related content in order to share application advice in “as digestible a way as possible.”
Today, Frank has over 146,000 followers on TikTok.
Over her time at Brown, Frank has tried making her content “more about the Brown experience than the application process.” She reached a point where she had already discussed all the advice she had gotten about the application process, so she “wasn’t really saying anything new.”
“Knowing what a school is like beyond the statistics or photos of an admission page is such critical information to help students decide if they want to apply,” Frank wrote. Understanding what life is like at Brown is “arguably equally helpful in the application process” to direct admissions advice, she wrote.
“There’s no one straightforward track to get into Brown,” Frank emphasized.
But while Frank’s insights come in part from her experience at the University, many external influencers have also created Brown-related content.
Kian Simpson, co-founder and CEO of Cohort — a college counseling service provider — said he started making TikTok content as a way to expand access to guidance he wished he had in high school.
Simpson said it is important for students applying to Brown and other top universities to understand what a school values.
He sees Brown’s identity in particular as “very open-minded,” which he credits to the Open Curriculum, adding that Brown is “looking for people who have similar mindsets to their education.”
But Simpson pointed out that if a student only wants to focus on one academic subject, “that doesn’t mean that Brown is a bad fit for them.”
“Brown wants to see what you can also do for their community,” said Lissett Bohannon, a former high school counselor who currently works for the online college application research platform Niche. Bohannon later started Instagram and TikTok accounts dedicated to sharing college advice.
Bohannon says that when applying to Brown and other competitive schools, applicants need to “figure out (their) story.” Between essays and letters of recommendation, she believes that there should be a common theme throughout an application.
She added that admissions is “not just about you.”
But Daniel Lim, a Duke University alum who has over 380,000 followers on Instagram and 340,000 on TikTok, finds it “tricky to find patterns between kids who get accepted to a particular school.” Lim recently posted a series of videos to his TikTok analyzing successful Brown applications.
“When the admission officers are picking a student to accept, they're not looking at the student individually, per se, but how they would fit into the broader class,” Lim said. “They're looking for balance within the class.”
Lim knows some former admissions officers, so “all the advice that you see about admissions” on his page is taken “directly from them.”
Leila Taweh ’29 said that while she found admissions content “very intimidating,” she felt the content occasionally offered useful insights about Brown. Taweh remembers watching content about Brown’s video essay while preparing her application.
“They specifically said don’t do a ‘day in the life’ because that’s what everyone does,” she recalled. “You should do something unique that isn’t just boring, that isn’t just you talking to the screen.”
“Some of the advice was helpful because it was specifically tailored to the Brown essays,” said Zaid Taqi ’29.
While Raphael Costa ’29 said he has come across college admissions influencers online, he never consciously applied their Brown-specific advice to his application. He found most tips “either super generic or super specific,” making them unhelpful and unrelatable, he said.
Toren Snyder ’29 noted that admissions content creators frequently appeared on his social media feeds, but that he “didn't really use any of their advice.”
“I think a lot of it was kind of manufactured to generate attention,” he added.
Ben Castillo ’29 said he intentionally avoided admissions influencers entirely. “I saw them on Instagram, but I just blocked them,” Castillo said. “They just tried to get people worried.”
Incoming first-year Temitope Williams advised future applicants to “try to listen to people who are actually at Brown.”
“The person that actually goes to the University is most helpful,” she said.
Ali Schapiro is a senior staff writer for University News, covering admissions and financial aid. She is a freshman from New York City and plans to concentrate in English. In her free time, she enjoys vintage shopping, playing tennis, and doing New York Times crossword puzzles.
