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Eliza Phung takes risks—as long as she can take them from her Boston penthouse. The red-carpet regular and self-styled innovator says she wrote the bestselling Thirteen Ways to Make GPT Wrappers in exactly 20 minutes.
Phung attends a university with an acceptance rate near 5% and runs Prestigely, an Ivy League counseling service. She has more than 1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, plus a 4.0 college GPA built through demanding classes such as “The Intersectionality of Matcha, Vampires and Indigenous Werewolves” and “Intro to NFTs 101.”
In a satirical interview, she shared her brutally expensive approach to the mysteries of elite college admissions.
With six of the eight Ivy League schools requiring tests again, Phung dismissed concerns that a score below 1550 would automatically sink a Harvard application. A 1550 is excellent, she said. The real problem is becoming the 700th math-playing, violin-performing future doctor named Wang in the applicant pool.
For $6,000, Phung offered to reinvent such a student as a world-class Mongolian throat singer from the steppe. Budget-conscious families could pay $5,000 to have their child reassigned to the math-clarinet-engineering category instead.
She was equally contemptuous of applicants trying to appear well-rounded. A student who combines varsity tennis with Model United Nations might make her spill her Dubai chocolate latte.
Prestigely’s strategy is to rebrand even the most ordinary hobby. A teenager who enjoys recreational soccer, for example, would instead become the CEO of an international nonprofit devoted to turf-based kinetic movement—an organization serving more than 13 sentient organisms across 50 yards.
Phung said successful applicants need a “spike,” the admissions trend promoted across TikTok that prizes extraordinary strength in one narrow pursuit. One rising senior whom she berates on Zoom every other day can recite The Grapes of Wrath in Pig Latin. He may be unable to state his own name without stopping, dropping and rolling, but Phung expects him to do it beneath Yale’s Harkness Tower.
The biggest warning sign on an Ivy League application, she claimed, is listing two parents on the Common App. Applicants who reveal that level of supposed privilege should at least explain themselves in the additional-information section.
Asked why families should trust an online influencer instead of an experienced admissions officer in Cambridge or New Haven, Phung was direct: She does not need their trust—she needs their money.
Her own financial pressure, she argued, makes her uniquely invested in every client’s success. Northeastern tuition costs $90,000 a year and continues to climb, leaving her just as desperate as the families buying her advice.
Prestigely also boasts a team of experienced specialists. Among them is Cleetus, the company’s liaison at Penn Admissions, who hears precisely what happens while committees debate which applicants to admit, reject or place on the waitlist.
That access comes with his job as a janitor.