A Letter from Us

Almost a decade ago, Geeta was staring at a list of college applications she’d already submitted, wondering if she’d made the wrong choices. She’d been trained in Carnatic music since she was four years old. Mornings before school spent on vocal warmups and practice, weekends spent driving to competitions and concerts, more than a decade of discipline that shaped how she thought, how she listened, how she showed up in every other part of her life. And still, when it came time to fill out her applications, it didn’t feel like enough on its own. So she added robotics club. She added a Stanford summer internship. She added badminton. Not because she loved all of it equally, but because well-meaning counselors, other parents, and the general anxious hum of the admissions process had told her that a “well-rounded” applicant needed more boxes checked.

Geeta went to UC Berkeley and she’s now a software engineer who still performs Carnatic music, still practices, and still finds her way back to it. But looking back, she wishes someone had told her the truth. The strategy she followed, piling on activity after activity to look impressively well-rounded, doesn’t work anymore, and it may never have worked as well as everyone assumed.

Admissions offices have gotten sharper at spotting the difference, and the applicants who stand out today aren’t the ones with the longest resume. They’re the ones who took one or two things and actually built something around them: a project, a body of work, a clear thread connecting who they are to what they want to study next. That’s not a list. That’s a profile.

Khushi grew up seeing a different kind of gap. Raised in Kenya, she watched talented, hardworking students around her go without opportunities that were treated as ordinary elsewhere in the world. Not for lack of ability, but for lack of access. That gap followed her to Berkeley and never really left. After graduating, she built her whole career around closing it: working in education impact, college counseling, and eventually starting her own companies aimed at helping students, especially students who’d been told their story wasn’t “enough, ” figure out how to tell it in a way that actually got heard. She’s spent years inside the admissions process from the other side of the table, watching what makes a reader sit up and what makes their eyes glaze over on the fortieth nearly identical essay of the day.

Here’s the part that matters most for you. An enormous number of Indian-origin applicants will list Carnatic music, Hindustani music, Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and other Indian classical art forms on their applications this year. Ten-plus years of training is, quietly, one of the most common lines on an Indian-American application. That alone won’t make you stand out. Not because your training isn’t extraordinary, but because an admissions reader has seen that sentence a thousand times before. What will make you stand out is what you did with it. Did you build something? Teach something? Question something? Combine it with the thing you actually want to study? That’s the difference between a line on a resume and a story only you could tell.

This is what we set out to build for you.

We met as dorm roommates at UC Berkeley and stayed roommates for all four years, which meant we didn’t just live near each other’s lives, we lived inside them. Geeta brought Khushi to Carnatic concerts and taught her to hear the difference between ragas. Khushi brought Geeta into conversations about education equity and what it actually takes to open a door for a student who’s never had one held open before. Over years of late-night conversations, Geeta talking through a composition she was learning and Khushi talking through a student she was counseling, we kept coming back to the same idea. What if we put our two worlds together? Geeta’s decades inside Indian classical music and the reality of what actually made her own application work, paired with Khushi’s years of expertise in how admissions actually thinks, what actually reads as authentic, and how to help a student build something real instead of something performative.

This ebook is that idea, finally written down.

It’s not a shortcut, and it’s not a formula to copy word for word. It’s a starting point, dozens of ways your art form can meet the field you actually want to study, whether that’s biology, computer science, business, education, or anything else. Our hope is that somewhere in these pages you find the version of this that’s actually yours. Not the one that looks good on paper, but the one you’d be excited to talk about for twenty minutes in an interview, because you built it, you lived it, and nobody else could have made exactly that thing.

You’ve already put in the ten years. Let’s make sure the story matches the training.