Your Application Might Get an AI First Look: Here's What That Means For You
Students pour months into their applications. They rewrite essays a dozen times, agonize over which activities to highlight, and carefully choose their recommenders. All of that effort eventually lands in front of an admissions reader who may spend just a few minutes with the file.
That part isn't new.
What is new is who, or what, may be doing the reading first.
AI Has Quietly Entered the Admissions Office
A growing number of colleges are using artificial intelligence somewhere in their admissions process. That doesn't mean AI is making the final admissions decision. In many cases, it's being used to help admissions offices manage volume, organize information, or evaluate certain parts of an application before or alongside human review.
A few schools have been public about how they are using it.
UNC Chapel Hill has acknowledged using AI to provide data points about application essays and transcripts, including writing style, grammar, and course rigor. Virginia Tech has gone a step further: for the current admissions cycle, every essay now gets both a human score and an AI-generated score, and when the two scores differ significantly, a second human reviewer steps in.
Other schools are using AI in narrower ways, such as scanning transcripts, summarizing application materials, or flagging inconsistencies for a human to review.
The important point is this:
AI is becoming part of the admissions workflow, right now, this cycle.
Why This Matters More Than It Might Seem
I want to be clear: this isn't a reason to panic.
Colleges continue to emphasize that AI is being used as a tool to support admissions professionals, not to replace them. No student should assume that an algorithm is sitting somewhere making an independent admissions decision.
But it does change something important.
In the past, the first impression of your application was formed entirely by a person opening your file and beginning to read. Now, in some cases, technology may be generating a score, summary, or set of data points before or alongside that human review.
And that raises an important question: What does your application look like when someone, or something, has to make sense of it quickly?
That brings me back to something I tell my students all the time: Your application needs to hang together as one clear story.
Your essays, activities, academic choices, and recommendations should all contribute to a clear picture of who you are. If every part of your application is going in a different direction, the reader has to work harder to figure you out. If there is a clear, authentic throughline, your application is much easier to understand. And that matters whether the first look comes from a human, a piece of technology, or both.
What You Can Actually Control
You can't control whether a particular college uses AI in its review process.
And you shouldn't try to write your application for a hypothetical algorithm.
Write for the human being who ultimately has to understand you.
What you can control is how clearly and intentionally you tell your story.
Make sure your essays, activities, and course choices reinforce the same picture of who you are.
Don't treat each part of the application as a separate box to check.
Be specific about what you actually did and why it mattered to you.
Write essays that sound like you, not like what you think an admissions officer wants to hear.
Make sure the application as a whole gives the reader a clear understanding of who you are.
That's the same advice I've been giving students for years. The technology may be changing, but the fundamentals aren't.
At Planting the Ivy, this is a huge part of the work I do with my students. We don't just look at a personal statement or an activity list in isolation. We look at the entire application and ask whether all of the pieces are working together to tell the right story.
Because you don't get to control who is looking at your application first.
But you do get to control what they see.
