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Plinth Education

Founder and Lead Counsellor

Vansh Gupta

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.

Vansh Gupta, founder of Plinth Education

Background

How I got here

  1. 2015 to 2021

    The Doon School, Dehradun

    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.

  2. 2021

    Applied to the United States

    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.

  3. 2021 to 2026

    Counselling, then a firm

    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.

  4. 2023 to 2025

    Product work

    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.

  5. 2025 to now

    Counza

    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.

  6. 2026

    Plinth Education

    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 students I worked with achieved

From the counselling practice that preceded Plinth, 2021 to 2026. Reported without names, by design. The work was theirs; the method was the same one described on this site.
  • Dartmouth College, admitted with a full scholarship
  • Stanford University, admitted
  • Cornell University, admitted as a Tata Scholar
  • UNC Chapel Hill, admitted with a 90 percent scholarship
  • John Locke Institute Essay Competition, multiple Very High Commendations (top one percent of about 18,000 entries)
  • Students selected for research mentorships including Cambridge's CCIR programme and NUS GRIP
  • Around twenty-five student research papers published in peer-reviewed high-school and open journals

How we count and report outcomes.

What I believe

Four positions, held firmly

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

You build AI for this. Why is Plinth human?

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

Recent articles

The first call is with me.

Send the transcript and the activity list before the call. I read them myself.

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