The Hook Program | Ivy Brothers

The Mentors

Students build alongside people who have created projects for a living.

Nick

Harvard & UC Berkeley Graduate · AI Researcher at Harvard & MIT

Nick graduated from Harvard with a degree in Biostatistics, and has extensive work experience in data science and artificial intelligence research at Harvard and medical research at MIT. He is looking forward to helping students create machine learning model and neural network projects.

Robayet

Brown · NASA Research Scientist

Robayet has worked as a Research Fellow for NASA, having completed research related to experiments in microgravity. He also worked under the Deputy Director of Small Spacecraft Systems' Virtual Institute. He is looking forward to volunteering his time helping students create world-class projects.

100+

More Mentors Across Every Field

Selected Projects

Built by students, from scratch.

Quantum ArtifactPhysics + Art

Paired installations in different galleries, linked by code simulating superposition so that altering one changes its twin, built alongside a white paper on quantum indeterminacy in artistic objects.

The Nation's HeartbeatHealthcare + Policy

A public library of infographics that turn healthcare legislation on insulin pricing, newborn screening and opioid policy into something patients, clinics and legislators can actually read.

The Linguistic UniverseLinguistics

A virtual reality space for learning Chinese dialects by standing inside them, from a Qing marketplace to a Ming scholar's studio. Over 2,300 beta users across 12 countries.

Junior Economic Club of New YorkEconomics + Finance

A student-led organization bringing New York high schoolers into finance and economics. Featured in Forbes, with speakers including Lloyd Blankfein and Mark Cuban.

The Disappearing Library: Testimonies of Vanishing WorldsEnglish · History

Testimony from displaced and endangered communities, archived as stories that delete themselves on a countdown unless a reader saves or passes them on. Recognised by a national literary magazine and a Harvard professor.

Socratic Speaking AcademyPolitical Science + IR

A program built to widen access to competitive debate, aimed at students who have the argument but not the team behind them.

SmartCruiseEngineering

A virtual prototype for a self-driving car: micro-cameras placed inside a 3D environment feed images to a neural network that judges whether a collision is coming. The student earned recognition from a product manager at Uber.

Cheer Up ProjectPsychology

A journal on mental health that takes work in any form, publishing psychological writing alongside prose, poetry and short fiction.

Athena ProjectComputer Science + Politics

A cryptocurrency built to put ideas on the blockchain: a censorship-resistant record for speech, sitting where free expression, politics and distributed systems meet.

iPhone AppAny Field

For students with an idea and no engineering background: a mentor takes them from concept to a working app: scoping the problem, designing the interface, and shipping something real to the App Store.

Two Of Them, Up Close

What these actually look like.

OsmanFounder

Osman built The Nation's Heartbeat so patients could read the laws that govern their own care.

Healthcare + Policy

The laws most likely to change a family's life, covering what insulin costs, which conditions a newborn gets screened for and how opioids are prescribed, are written in language almost nobody outside a statehouse can read. Osman's answer was a public library of infographics that turn healthcare legislation into something a patient, a clinic, or a legislator can actually use.

The project tracks bills as they move and publishes each one as a visual explainer aimed at the people the policy affects: Illinois becoming the first state to screen newborns for MLD, the signing of HB579 and HB2296, the law bringing down insulin prices. It has since grown in two directions: building visuals for policymakers who need their own legislation understood, and producing patient-facing flyers that clinics hand out directly.

It runs on volunteers, accepts outside submissions, and states its mission plainly: to empower individuals from marginalized communities. The work is ongoing and public at thenationsheartbeat.com.

A searchable infographic library covering opioid policy and insulin law
Visual explainers produced directly for policymakers
Patient flyers distributed through healthcare clinics
Open to volunteer contributors and outside submissions

The student who built The Linguistic Universe

PrincetonLinguistics

She asked what Mandarin sounded like in the court of the Kangxi Emperor. Then she built it.

Linguistics · VR

No good answer was available to a high school student: which dialects coexisted at court, what cultural nuance sat inside a pronunciation, what any of it actually sounded like. So the project became a way to hear it: The Linguistic Universe, a virtual reality space for traveling back through Chinese dialects and learning them by being inside them.

A Qing Dynasty marketplace lets a learner practice Beijing-accented phrases with vendors. A Ming Dynasty scholar's studio reconstructs literary Chinese pronunciation from rhyming dictionaries and rime tables. A "Time Wall" switches between Wu, Hakka, Min and Cantonese. Underneath it sit speech-to-text tonal feedback, dialogue trees tied to historical figures, and a simulator that walks a sound from Middle Chinese to modern Mandarin, built in Unity and Figma with native-speaker audio and AI phonetics engines.

She was later accepted to Princeton, where she majors in Linguistics. We framed the project differently depending on the reader: interdisciplinary history, linguistics and anthropology for Columbia, Yale, Princeton and Brown; design thinking and technology-for-preservation for Stanford.

2,300+ beta users across 12 countries
Featured at the Stanford East Asian Languages Student Symposium
Two university professors of Chinese linguistics on its advisory board
Piloted as a teaching tool by a language school in Taiwan

What It Is

A sea of qualified applicants, and one student they remember.

Every year the most selective universities turn away thousands of applicants with perfect transcripts. Once everyone in the pile has the grades, the grades stop telling an admissions officer anything. What they look for instead is evidence that a student has already done something real with what they care about. The Hook Program exists to produce that evidence: an original project, built by the student, substantial enough that an admissions officer can see the person behind it.

Why Ours Is Different

Most programs hand students a template. We start from a blank page.

I

Genuinely one-on-one

One student and one mentor, for the length of the project. There is no cohort moving through a shared curriculum, so no two projects come out looking like each other with the names swapped. The work belongs entirely to the student, because nobody else was building the same thing.

II

Ideation is the hard part, and it's our strongest

Almost anyone can execute a project once the idea exists. The rare skill is finding an idea that is original, that belongs to the student, and that will hold a reader at Harvard. We spend real time there before any work begins, and it is why our projects don't look like anyone else's.

III

We can help you build almost anything

With more than a hundred mentors across research, engineering, the arts, policy, medicine, finance and the humanities, we shape the project around the student instead of steering the student toward whatever we happen to have staffed. If the idea is good, we can find the person to build it with.

Schedule a Consultation

Ready to find your student's idea?

Schedule a time to meet with one of our college admissions experts. We'll tell you honestly where your student's application stands and what a project could do for it.

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