College applications involve more than just writing essays; they also demand that students scour through a thousand websites in need of information, process it on their own and spend an enormous amount of time, doing everything rather than applying. Frustrated with the scattered, costly resources for college preparation, a 16-year-old high school student in Virginia saw an opportunity to help others like him out.Shriyan Avadhanula was juggling his IB coursework, varsity soccer, and competitive pickleball while also being a junior at Henrico High School in Virginia. At the same time, he was navigating college websites, GPA calculators, SAT resources and test preparation platforms. According to him, the information he wanted usually existed, but it was scattered across different websites, sometimes difficult to interpret and often behind paywalls.“I used to have a bunch of tabs up on my computer, where it’s like a GPA calculator, college websites, SAT resources — all of that stuff was so overwhelming,” he said.Eventually, during his freshman year, he decided to see if he could build a better alternative himself. What he began as a basic GPA calculator and college admissions prediction tool, eventually became Scholark, a free digital platform that now includes AP test preparation and college admissions resources. Avadhanula estimated he spent roughly two and a half to three years building and revising it, adding features as he encountered new needs as a student himself.It wasn’t that information was not available about college; but Avadhanula said that it was presented in a disjointed way and still students like him were trying to use it. “Why not just build a platform … I can use with everyone else?” he recalled thinking.College websites can present students with statistics, admissions requirements and other information within what Avadhanula described as a “big wall of text.” With Scholark — which Avadhanula noted ends with a ‘K’ for visually aesthetic purposes- he sought to organise information around the questions and resources he and other students were looking for.Another consideration was the cost. While preparing for his AP Computer Science Principles exam, Avadhanula recalled completing roughly 50 practice questions through an online resource before encountering a prompt asking him to pay $49.99 for a subscription to see his score. “That really, really annoyed me and frustrated me,” he said. “And I realised that wasn’t the only place that does it.” Moreover, he said that experience reinforced his desire to keep Scholark free.The platform’s earliest iteration was much simpler than it is today, with a GPA calculator and an AP study guide component he initially built to help himself prepare for AP Computer Science Principles with better practice materials. Learning some of the technical skills needed to build it through online programs and from his father, who works in software development, Avadhanula said he built Scholark using website tools like HTML, CSS and, primarily, JavaScript. As the project progressed, he also began using artificial intelligence to help identify bugs in thousands of lines of code.“I remember spending countless nights, no sleep, just trying to learn how [the College Board] make their questions,” he said. “And then I learned. I made, I think, 50 questions on how they phrase it, and then trained my AI agent to continue making questions like that the way I did it, and that’s where it started making them more accurate.” The process paid off for him personally, Avadhanula said he used the early version of the platform to study for the aforementioned AP Computer Science Principles exam and earned a four out of five.From there, Avadhanula said Scholark kept growing, adding more college-planning resources, including an admissions prediction feature that compares information students enter with publicly available admissions data.That feature grew out of another problem he encountered as a user, different admissions websites could give substantially different predictions, without always making it clear where those estimates came from. Scholark shows users the data behind its estimates, he said, though he is careful not to present the results as definitive. “I’m not going to claim that it’s 100 per cent accurate because I don’t believe anything is 100 per cent accurate, because there’s always room to grow,” he said.Avadhanula shared Scholark with friends, asked them to be candid about what worked and what didn’t, and continued making changes based on their feedback. But then people he didn’t know started finding and using it. Avadhanula said more than 10,000 users have accessed Scholark since its launch in 2025, with traffic peaking around AP exam season as students searched for free study resources. Seeing that growth was unexpected, he said, particularly for something that began as a tool he had built for himself. “I didn’t think people would actually use it,” he said.Now, those users give him another reason to keep tinkering with a platform he still considers a work in progress, but the perspective that prompted him to start building it hasn’t changed: He is still one of the students trying to navigate the information Scholark was designed to curate.“I made the whole UI [user interface] itself very easy to access, very student-like, because I’m a student as well,” Avadhanula said. “I know what a student wants to see.”
