The College-Admissions TikToker Who Tried to Crack the Code

Daniel Lim waves his hands, shaking the table underneath him and making his phone camera wobble. “This is the most insane college application I’ve ever seen in my life!” he exclaims in the opening shot of a TikTok video.

An anonymous student’s stats flash across the screen: 4.2 GPA, 1560 SAT, and top 10 percent of his class. “NYTiMeS bEstSelLeR at 16 yRs oLd” is written in hot pink, the random capitalization parroting an iconic meme format.

“I’m gonna try to guess which universities he got into,” Lim declares.

Wearing a salmon pink T-shirt with a small microphone attached to his collar, Lim rattles off the student’s other achievements: He was named to the “Arab 20 Under 20" list (“What the hell? I didn’t even know that existed,” Lim quips); started math and physics social-media pages with over 200,000 followers; and made more than $300,000 from his two best-selling books (Lim looks at the camera with a deadpan expression that says, Can you believe it?).

Then come the predictions. Lim guesses the student will get into Princeton and Stanford Universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 11 other colleges, while forecasting disappointment from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Northwestern Universities. “All you guys thought that he would definitely get into Harvard,” Lim notes in a follow-up video, moments before he reveals the student’s actual results. Lim leans in close. “Question is — did he actually?”

It’s a typical video for Lim, a college-admissions content creator who graduated from Duke University in May. If you peruse his social-media accounts, you’ll find scores of videos with headlines bemoaning impossible and stress-inducing admissions standards. Many of the video-preview pictures capture his face in various states of shock, outrage, and disbelief.

The videos under his handle @limmytalks, reflecting his nickname “Limmy,” have accumulated millions of views, earned him over 464,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, and made him over $100,000 in brand deals. Lim claims to have read over 5,000 college applications that students around the globe sent him. He shares some of their applications on his accounts and reveals where they got in, which is a major draw for his audience. In the comments, they fiercely debate whether or not the applicant will land a coveted spot at their dream college — and decry what they see as injustice when seemingly stand-out students fall short.

“I know, I know, it’s hard,” Lim says in a high-pitched voice after he reveals to his audience that the aspiring Harvard student did, in fact, get rejected, as he prophesied. “But you got this. I believe in you. You will get into your dream school. I will manifest it right here for you.” He closes his eyes, tilts his head upward, makes a prayer gesture, and vigorously shakes his hands.

At a time when the admissions process feels more opaque than ever, social media has emerged as a key information source for teens vying to get into highly selective colleges. TikTok aggregates over 86,500 videos related to college admissions, and more than 430,500 Instagram posts are tagged with #collegeadmissions. Lim is one of the most noteworthy actors in a fraught space where the line between helping and harming anxious applicants is, at best, unclear.

His essential promise to his audience is that he can help make sense of what feels to his followers like inscrutable and consequential admissions decisions. That promise has led hundreds of applicants to flood his inbox and direct messages with the same question: What are my chances of landing at my dream school?

It’s a question that has consumed Lim, too. His pursuit of the answer dominated his high-school years and college aspirations, brought him modest fame as an influencer, and inspired him to try to democratize and demystify an admissions process that has mesmerized him and so many other high-achieving students. Could Lim succeed where others hadn’t, and finally crack the code?

Lim moved with his family to the United States when he was 4. His parents had gone to college in South Korea, and they moved to the Lehigh Valley, in Pennsylvania, for his father’s job with a medical-technology company.

Growing up in a majority-white neighborhood near Bethlehem, Lim enjoyed what he called “regular hillbilly activities”: making mud pies, playing manhunt in cornfields, crafting bows out of branches, and riding bikes down rural roads with his friends. When he was 12, his parents realized that his father’s salary working in IT wouldn’t be enough to afford college in the United States for Lim and his sister. The family moved to New Jersey, where his parents opened a nail salon to supplement his father’s income.

His mother, who earned degrees in German and Russian, still works long hours, six days a week, in the salon, often clouded in acetone. Lim thinks about the concessions she had to make. “I don’t think it’s anyone’s dream to take care of kids and work at a nail salon,” he says.

His parents’ hopes that higher education would lead to a good job and comfortable lifestyle drove Lim to achieve, but they accounted for just a minor part of his yearning to attend a highly selective college. Mostly, he was swayed by the messages that were all around him online and in person at Fort Lee High School, a “middle of the road” public high school just across the George Washington Bridge from New York City. He saw elite colleges as the ultimate symbol of status and achievement — and having what he called a “general aura of coolness.”

“Everybody’s talking about them all the time,’” Lim recalls thinking. “There must be something that’s valuable.”

To improve his chances, Lim began to construct a specific “persona” in his freshman year that he hoped would impress admissions officers. He settled on pursuing medicine, drawn to a career where he could help others. He found extracurriculars to bolster his image: He worked at a microbiological research lab, shadowed a doctor in a clinic, and volunteered at a hospital.

By his junior year, he felt like he was doing all the right things — only to watch in horror as older peers that he considered shoo-ins for elite colleges started to receive rejections. He felt determined to avoid the same fate, but he didn’t know where to start.

Then, he found Reddit and its vast subreddits on college admissions. It quickly became his lifeline.

When he woke up in the morning, he would roll over in bed, grab his phone, and check ApplyingtoCollege, one of the most popular subreddits about college admissions. There’d often be 50 or 60 new posts that populated the page while he slept. He’d read those and every new post that appeared throughout the day. His fate, it felt to him, hung on each new scrap of information.

When it came time for him to apply, Lim relied on a popular subreddit strategy — “shotgunning” — where students apply to as many institutions as possible and see what sticks. He applied to 25 colleges.

In his personal essay, Lim sought to highlight a key part of his character: his inquisitiveness.

He set the scene in an epistemology class, where the root of crime was the topic of discussion. “Points are made,” Lim wrote, “but I am unhappy.” The questions began: “If a person has a tumor in their brain that clearly caused irrational thinking, can they even be blamed for their criminal act? In that case, isn’t all behavior governed by brain activity? Do we blame ourselves, or our brains?”

“Answers seemed to never be enough,” he wrote. “Each new question raised even more questions.”

The first decision he received was from his dream school: the University of Pennsylvania, to which he’d applied early decision. He tells the story in a TikTok video, sharing that he was sitting in a public library with his sister when he got the notification. Other people there caught on, and dozens quickly swarmed around him. He was the valedictorian, after all.

He recounts what happened next in vivid detail: how his hands became clammy and he had the gut feeling that he was about to be rejected. Instead, he was deferred. After calling some friends to break the news, he took a deep breath and called his mother. She picked up after three rings and was silent after he told her. It felt like an eternity passed. “Ah, is that so?” she at last responded in Korean. “It’s OK.”

Lim cried for two hours. “Theres not a day i remember more clearly than that night dec 16th 2019,” he wrote in the video’s caption.

He never got the validation of landing at an Ivy — though most of his followers hope he can help them do so. But he did receive what students in his position often crave: some rationale explaining why they got in or were rejected. A Duke admissions officer sent Lim a handwritten note explaining that they admired his desire to pursue medical school from a sociological perspective. She wrote: “We would be fortunate to have you as part of our community.”

Lim began at Duke in the fall of 2020, during pandemic-era uncertainty, with a clear plan for medical school. But he quickly became disillusioned by the medical system — one that he viewed as privileging those with money and power, often at the expense of patients with fewer resources.

The cost of medical school seemed less and less worth it — especially when he thought of his parents and how hard they’d worked to help him pay for his education. By the end of his sophomore year, he let go of his dream.

Left without a clear idea of what to do next, he tried to get a summer internship in social-media marketing. He didn’t get the job, but he still took to social media that summer, professing his philosophical views, his thoughts on the world and money, and the immigrant experience. But when he mentioned in a video that he went to Duke University, something changed. His audience wanted to know how he got in, so he started making more videos about his experiences at and application to Duke.

Then, he got a message from a stranger who sent his entire college application to Lim. The applicant asked Lim what his chances were to get into Harvard. Lim posted a video about it — sharing the student’s test scores and grades, outlining their extracurriculars, and predicting the stranger’s academic future.

He proclaimed to the internet that the “random kid,” as Lim dubs him, had a good shot. And he was right.

The chance encounter became Lim’s origin story as an influencer and college-admissions seer, which he recounts in a video pinned to the top of his Instagram profile.

“Ever since, more than 5,000 people have sent me their college application,” he says. “And yes, I’ve read every single one so that I can show you guys the best ones.”

A video montage follows: Lim attempts a skateboard trick, but the board flies out from under him and he starts to fall. The video quickly cuts to him boxing, shirtless; then lobbing a basketball from half court; and singing loudly while sitting on the floor.

At the end of the montage, Lim fixes his eyes on the viewer. “So I wanna know a little more about you,” he says. “Tell me who you are. I wanna know.”

TikTok and Instagram are the latest in a long line of digital platforms attempting to make sense of college admissions, like the decades-old College Confidential and the popular ApplyingToCollege subreddit. Lim’s prediction strategy isn’t novel, either, with a whole ChanceMe subreddit dedicated to it. But to a greater extent than other platforms, authenticity and relatability are key pieces of currency for influencers. Lim comes with an edge in that he was in his audience’s shoes just a few years ago.

Lim connects with his audience by regularly trying to make sense of his own admissions journey. One of his most popular videos to date — with 7.8 million views and thousands of comments — is Lim’s Ivy League rejection list, complete with pictures of idyllic Ivy campuses and “waitlisted” and “rejected” captions attached. Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit” plays in the background: “Thought you were too good for me, my dear,” it begins. “I wish I knew, I wish I knew you wanted me.”

The rejection list, posted in July 2022, is emblematic of much of Lim’s early material, which expressed the same confusion he felt in high school, when impressive students failed to get into their dream colleges. His audience was often confused, too. Most of Lim’s social-media feed reads like a who’s-who of overachievers: There’s the applicant from a royal family in India who served as the head of sales and marketing for an EV-charger-installation company, or the home-schooled student from California who was a world-class Fortnite player and a judo Olympian.

Lim also spotlights stories of resilience, such as the prospective student who fled the Yemen civil war after he built an anaerobic digester for his hometown, or the transgender student whose parents forbade her from writing about her identity in college essays, so she crafted two sets of applications — one in front of her parents, and the other in secret.

By reviewing applications on TikTok, Lim hoped he could bring transparency to college admissions. He included the predictions of applicants’ success just for “fun,” and his audience grew. He hoped they knew that his guesses weren’t the gospel, but he suspected that some did not fully understand his lack of accuracy. He usually had about a 50-50 chance of being right — a statistic that didn’t significantly improve even as he read hundreds of applications.

If his predictions were no more accurate than a flip of the coin, the admissions decisions themselves started to look similarly random to Lim. In his videos, his language gradually evolved, moving away from expressing feelings of injustice and, instead, to emphasizing the arbitrariness of the results.

Under the video of the best-selling author who was rejected by Harvard, one commenter asked, “What more does Harvard want 💀💀💀💀💀,” which received over 102,000 likes and 164 comments. In response, Lim notes that “this should be a clear indication that even though your application could be amazing — like unbelievable — these top schools, they don’t care.” His eyes widened: “They will reject you if they want to reject you.”

Still, he kept doing the predictions; they were a hook that kept his audience coming back. To Lim, it served his goal of guiding applicants through the complicated world of admissions — a worthy goal, he believes, because he understands the struggles they’re going through and has their best interests at heart.

Not everyone is so sure.

When Thomas Caleel stumbled across limmytalks the first time, he thought, “Oh my god, who is this joker?”

Caleel, a former director of M.B.A. admissions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, had just begun to dabble in social media as the founder of an admissions-consulting firm. Social-media algorithms quickly picked up on his interests. Before long, Lim and his predictions repeatedly showed up on his page.

Alarm bells went off in Caleel’s head. He knows that being “deserving” isn’t enough to explain admissions decisions, that selective colleges could fill a class 20 or 30 times over and still have a worthy cohort. That’s not something most students necessarily understand — or accept — about the admissions process. “Would I take admissions advice from a student?” Caleel asks. “I would take it with a big grain of salt.”

Against the backdrop of a growing youth mental-health crisis and the broader debate about whether social media is to blame, some critics accuse influencers like Lim of preying on and profiting from applicants’ anxieties. By providing a platform where toxic comparisons run rampant, college-admissions TikTok presents a “particular misery,” argued Jay Caspian Kang, a New Yorker staff writer, in a story last year.

Kang cites college-admissions TikTok as a prime example of how “kids these days are under an inordinate amount of pressure to compete with one another,” and he points to Lim as a key piece of evidence. Kang declares that Lim’s predictions are all at once “nonsense” — along with other “self-appointed college experts of TikTok” — even if they’re usually correct because students often don’t get into their dream college.

Lim takes such criticism in stride, acknowledging that people can reasonably question his qualifications. He agrees that his predictions have “very little functional purpose.” He claims he even tried to contact Kang on social media to better understand his concerns. But Lim rejects the argument that people like him are the problem. His audience comes to his pages with those high-stakes feelings and insecurities already ingrained in their minds. That, he argues, is not his fault but the natural byproduct of a vague and inequitable admissions process.

“If the admissions process was crystal clear,” he says, “then maybe I would not be a content creator.”

As Caleel consumed more of Lim’s videos, he began to see Lim in a gentler light. While many online admissions advisers played on fear to sell their services, Caleel says, “what I liked about Limmy was he was like, ‘Look, I’m not selling anything. I’m just doing this for fun. I’m doing this because people are coming to me.’”

Caleel and Lim have since developed a mentor-mentee relationship, with regular chats about college admissions and content creation. Caleel retains some skepticism about college-admissions social media — but he encourages those in the sector to resist the urge to see influencers as “scuttling little cockroaches” and instead reflect on their allure in the first place.

Generic guidance on best practices is “deeply unsatisfying” for students born into the internet age who are used to sifting through mounds of information and finding answers online, Caleel says. “If you’re an intellectually curious person, and a high achiever, obviously you need more than that. So, who’s stepping into that breach?”

Lim seeks to fill that breach with his content. But he wanted to do even more.

At the end of 2022, Lim wrapped up his first six months as an influencer, by which time over a thousand students had sent him their college applications. The randomness of their outcomes only became more apparent with every stellar application he reviewed. But as students continued to flood his DMs with questions about how they could improve their chances, he couldn’t let go of the hope that there had to be some underlying logic — if only someone could crack it.

Maybe, he began to wonder as he leafed through applications, there was another way to find out the truth. Maybe new technology could reveal whether or not an applicant’s results were truly as random as a coin toss. ChatGPT had just gone live in November. Lim didn’t know much about artificial intelligence — or how it worked exactly — but he was intrigued. Perhaps, he thought, the hundreds of applications he had could be used as data that could be analyzed. Maybe it would even reveal a pattern. He resolved to found a start-up. He’d call it DreamSchool.ai.

But the idea quickly fizzled. Lim spent that spring semester talking to people who worked with AI, who explained that training an admissions AI model would require mountains of data on applicants and admissions decisions that were not accessible. Lim ended his junior year in disappointment. DreamSchool.ai had flopped, and he felt burnt out on college and lost in his neuroscience studies, staring down a future that felt anything but clear.

The admissions process was also becoming more unclear. The Supreme Court’s decisions to strike down race-conscious admissions left already-anxious applicants searching for even more answers — and turning to Lim for answers. It was around then that Lim went to San Francisco on a trip to visit a friend from college.

Lim’s mind seemed elsewhere, recalls Daniel Wolf, on whose couch Lim crashed in San Francisco. Over burritos in the Mission District and other meals, Wolf and Lim fell into familiar conversations about the business of content creation and Lim’s rise on social media, which had provoked a transformation in Wolf’s friend. “It unlocked something for him,” Wolf says. The money and success Lim gained throughout the last year convinced him there was still potential to turn his social-media following into a viable business. “So,” Wolf says, “he started thinking about other opportunities.”

Lim strode through the city for days, buzzing with ideas about networking opportunities for Dream School — in local high schools, or at highly selective colleges, or with venture capitalists. Amid the rush, he fell asleep on a park bench in the middle of the day, earning him a nasty sunburn across the bridge of his nose. Not long after he arrived home in New Jersey, he decided on his next step: He’d take a gap semester and spend it in San Francisco, where he sought to branch out on his own and bring Dream School to life.

“When opportunity calls, you have to go get it,” he says in a video about his decision in August 2023.

A few days after that post, Lim settled into his San Francisco apartment in Duboce Triangle, just a few minutes south of the city’s main thoroughfare. For weeks, he messaged and met with dozens of students and parents, trying to reimagine Dream School (with no AI). What did they struggle with most in the admissions process, he asked, and what kinds of tools could have helped them through it?

In one early conversation on Instagram with a mother, Lim pitched his product. He sent her a mock-up of a potential applicant profile, showing a fictional student’s stats, top extracurriculars, and their top-choice colleges, highlighted in different colors. He envisioned people sharing their college applications, comparing them to those of others, and swapping opinions en masse — not unlike the chatter in his comments sections.

The mother gave a pointed response that went to the heart of many efforts to crack the code of highly selective admissions: “I think the big question (as a parent) is… are they doing the right things? I feel like I hear, over and over, that there doesn’t seem to be a formula.”

For Lim to monetize the idea, she wrote, the platform would have to be “more compelling.” She added, “One students success w an application does not translate into another students success with the same school.”

It was a common reaction to his big idea. People started out enthusiastic, but when it came time to talk about how much they’d be willing to pay, their answers became less committal and they wanted more concrete answers — answers that Lim didn’t know if he or Dream School could provide.

The more conversations he had, the more his energy dwindled. His lack of business savvy caught up with him, too. He formed a partnership with a coder to build the platform, but he turned out to live in Malta, which slowed down communication and hindered the project. Still, Lim held out hope. If he could just establish the platform and market its relevance, maybe the people would follow.

“You know what applying to college is like? It’s like shooting darts from 300 feet away, blindfolded, and held upside down,” Lim says in a video promoting Dream School’s launch, with uncharacteristically flashy graphics. “So what’s the only realistic thing you can do? Read other people’s successful and unsuccessful applications on Dreamschool.ai.”

When the site went public in October, 7,000 users flocked to the platform in the first two days. But many of them soon abandoned it. Dream School hemorrhaged users the rest of the week. Lim quietly reeled, channeling his frustrations at a nearby skate park and cuddling with his roommate’s dog — a half-Shih Tzu, half-poodle named Zozo — back at his apartment.

In November, Lim told his online followers that Dream School had flopped. He shared the news on Discord, in a group chat: “I realize that it is not what u guys are looking for — might have to wrap it up and say i tried 😭”

“Bro,” one person responded, “Don’t give up.”

Lim didn’t know what else to do. “At the moment,” he said in November, “I’m a little lost.”

Lim left San Francisco soon after, ready to finish his degree at Duke. He was still trying to make sense of his first real failure. Maybe, he thought, it was time to put admissions content behind him. Perhaps he would create a start-up to help other influencers. It could be that content creation was the thing he really understood — not college admissions.

Higher education seemed increasingly tricky. “There’s only a finite number of spots at all the American universities, and that, unfortunately, it is somewhat rigged,” he says. “You either get lucky — or you don’t.”

He hated that he let his audience — and himself — down. But selective-college admissions have been, and likely will always be, opaque — no matter how much data he compiles, what kind of platform he creates, or how many TikToks he makes.

“It comes down to kids wanting to feel like they’re in control, and so they’re like, ‘Oh, maybe if I just do this thing, or maybe if I throw money at it, somehow it’ll work out. Maybe I can quell my anxiety a little bit by doing this or doing that,’” he says.

“But, ultimately, what the kids are actually looking for is to get in. It’s hard to guarantee that to anyone.”

Lim isn’t the kind of person to linger in regret. He’s also come to see all the time and energy he spent on social media in a new way. Where he once thought it could get him into a selective college and, later, develop an audience that craved advice on how to do the same thing, he now sees its true purpose as something different — as fostering a sense of community.

He now looks back at the hundreds of hours he spent on Reddit and thinks they may have made little — if any — tangible difference in his college-admissions prospects. But it did provide a place filled with other frustrated applicants to vent about the pressures and unknowns of admissions. It felt “psychologically comforting” to fall into Reddit rabbit holes where everyone’s questions and self-doubts about admissions were the same as his own.

That became the impetus of his latest venture — Lacuna, a platform he built with a friend during his last semester at Duke. It’s a space online where prospective students can connect with current students at top colleges for advice and mentorship. The platform hasn’t struck gold, Lim admits, with only a couple dozen calls made on it so far, but he hastens to point out that it’s still early in the admissions cycle.

As graduation approached, Lim spent hours walking around the Sarah P. Duke Gardens on campus, meandering among its 55 landscaped and wooded acres and mulling over his years at Duke, when once he’d fervently hoped to go somewhere else.

Where he got admitted to college meant the world to him in high school, but it is hard for him now to imagine going anywhere else. He hopes that he can convince his audience of the same — that they will be okay, no matter where they go to college.

His videos have also shifted, reflecting the realizations that have compounded over time. He now posts more “average” applications on his pages to show a broader range of applicants and results beyond the most-selective institutions. He also stopped posting his predictions in two separate videos; instead, he provides his predictions and the results in one fell swoop, to dial down the anxiety and anger.

After years spent trying to crack the code of admissions, Lim’s biggest takeaway is this: “You shouldn’t base your identity, or you shouldn’t base your value, on extrinsic and random outcomes like admissions,” he says.

He recognizes that it isn’t a message that his audience wants to hear — especially not from him. “It’s tricky for me to say, because, you know, I also went to Duke,” he says.

Regardless, Lim intends to keep spreading that message and posting applications through at least the next admissions cycle. Beyond that, his post-graduation plans are ill-defined. He’s taking a road trip across the country, after which he’ll settle down in the Golden Gate city.

A few days into his trip, Lim made a pit stop at a reservoir in Colorado, where he caught up on his DMs. He opened a message on Instagram that he received from an applicant with whom he had started talking last December, after the student had been rejected by Columbia and deferred from MIT. “My mind has been in the gutter,” the student told Lim then. “I search for solace in your videos.”

Lim urged him to keep his head up, telling him in a personal voice memo that the rejections were no indication of how he would do in the long run of the admissions cycle. “Take me as an example: I got deferred from my ED [early decision] school, but now I’m probably at the best-fit school for me.”

As he lingered near the reservoir, Lim read the student’s latest message: He’d just committed to Colgate University, and he thanked Lim for curbing his expectations while still encouraging him to persevere. At last, the student had partially grasped what Lim had been trying to explain to him and his followers.

“Moral of the story is college apps are scams and do NOT reflect anything about anyone,” the student wrote, “and I’m glad you helped me realize that.”

Lim replied to the student’s text with a heart emoji and posted it to his public Instagram story — with a few revisions.

The “not a reflection of you” part was the most important thing to keep in mind, Lim wrote in a caption next to the original text.

“Try your best,” he added. “Control what you can.”