Founder and Lead Counsellor
Founder of Plinth Education. Five years counselling students across India, the UAE, the UK, the US, Australia and Singapore; a Doon School and Drexel University education; and a conviction that the application is decided in Grade 10 and 11, long before anyone opens the Common App.
Background
House Captain, Secretary of the Technology Council, Headmaster's Cup for Excellence in Computer Science, Games Blazer for hockey and badminton. Ran Second Helping, which cut the dining hall's daily food waste from 78 kilograms to under 9, and I-Bins, which made three villages self-sufficient in composting. This is where the idea that a project should leave evidence started.
Went through the Common App as an Indian applicant with a CISCE transcript and no counsellor, and received a scholarship to study software engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The process was the education.
Began helping juniors from school with essays and activity lists; built that into Projectling, an impact-project and essay counselling practice working with students in India, Dubai, the UK, the US, Australia and Singapore. More than eighty recorded one-to-one sessions and written profile reviews for around eighty-five students, alongside research mentorships that produced roughly twenty-five published student papers.
Associate product manager roles at Exelon and JSW while completing the degree. The habit of writing specifications is why every Plinth engagement starts with a written diagnosis.
Founder and chief executive of Counza, an AI-native college counselling company built with a technical co-founder. Five years of running counselling by hand is the reason I know which parts of it software should not touch, and that question is most of what I do there.
Founded to do the counselling work properly, at a scale where one person can still do all of it: a published method, prices in the open, and no student faces on the website. Deliberately human, and deliberately small.
Outcomes
What I believe
Treat the application like an MBA application. Selective universities read for depth of skill, level of competition and development over time. A Grade 10 student can start building all three; a Grade 12 student can only describe what exists.
Cohesion beats coverage. Ten activities in two pillars is a story. Ten activities in ten directions is a list. Readers remember stories.
Never bluff. In interviews, in essays, in the activity list. Admit what you do not know and reason from there. It is the single most reliable signal of a mind worth teaching.
The counsellor should be auditable. Written diagnoses, written plans, a calendar the family can see. If a counsellor's work cannot be inspected, it cannot be trusted, and that includes mine.
The obvious question
Because the two answer different questions. Counza exists because most students in the world have no counsellor at all, and roughly 376 of them share each school counsellor in the United States. Software is the only thing that reaches that number. Plinth exists because a small number of families want the opposite of scale, and are paying for judgement that carries a name.
The line between them is not squeamishness about the technology, it is about what can be held to account. A model can summarise a transcript, surface a competition worth entering, or keep a calendar honestly. It cannot decide that a student should drop the impressive activity for the awkward one that is actually theirs, and it cannot be blamed when that call is wrong. Every part of the work that turns on that kind of judgement stays with a person at Plinth, and that person is me.
The practical commitments follow from it. No model drafts a Plinth student’s essay, activity description, recommendation or research paper. Nothing a family sends is used to train anything. No Plinth file is visible to Counza, and no Counza system touches one. What editing does and does not mean is set out in full on the essay service page.
Writing
Financial aid and scholarships
How to fill out the CSS Profile for 2027-28 section by section: parent data, income, assets, the expenses section, special circumstances and IDOC uploads.
8 min read
Choosing a counsellor
How much should you spend on college counselling? About a tenth of one year's tuition, why it pays back, and why the cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest.
7 min read
Financial aid and scholarships
The family income threshold for financial aid at US universities, what the dollar cut-offs are worth in rupees, and why assets decide Indian outcomes.
6 min read
Financial aid and scholarships
Does applying for financial aid hurt admission chances for international students? What need-aware costs, and when applying without aid is the wrong call.
6 min read
Send the transcript and the activity list. I write the review myself.