A powerful way to prove intellectual curiosity
Two weeks ago, our newsletter shared how (surprisingly) important the Personal score is to students’ chances of admission. We followed-up last week with the #1 question to ask high performers: “What did you do that other applicants could not have done?” This question helps students focus their essays on showing off their college potential, thus greatly improving their Personal scores.
Now, let’s get even more advanced: one thing you can encourage your students to do that will supercharge their Personal scores, their Academic scores, their Extracurricular scores, or some combination. What is it?
Passion projects.
In this issue, we’ll discuss:
How passion projects make students stand out
How students can realistically pursue passion projects
Why colleges love them, and
How to showcase them in the application.
Passion projects make students stand out
Here’s how a Cornell admissions officer put it:
Even for academically stellar students, their applications often “lacked tangible indicators of their passions: a project, experiment, portfolio, or an endeavor on which they spent substantial time learning, tinkering, or creating.” (Emphasis added.)
Encourage your students to develop that “tangible indicator of their passions,” by accomplishing something beyond what a typical high school student can do. These projects can be almost anything, so long as they show deep and sustained interest (ie: a “passion”). For example:
Writing a research paper
Being a maker
Writing music
Creating impact through community service
Or almost anything … for example, a weather station.
The Cornell admission officer held up one student as distinguishing himself through a passion project:
[T]his student's fit with the program really came to life as he described the weather station he had built at home. … After reading, I thought, this student clearly will get my recommendation for admission, because he has the grades, the test scores, and a demonstrated intellectual interest in his chosen program. Trifecta! He had hit the nail on the head in expressing "fit and match."
Another indicator is that Harvard only awards its top academic score (a 1 out of 4) to 0.4% of its applicant pool. Applicants with an academic 1 rating have a 67% chance of admission, compared to 8.6% for those with an academic 2 rating.
In sources made public by litigation, Harvard has said that, generally, “an applicant receiving a ‘1’ academic rating has submitted academic work of some kind that is reviewed by a faculty member.” That is, “If the applicant has submitted material that Admissions Office staff believe would be best evaluated by a Harvard faculty member, such as an academic paper or a recording of a musical performance, the application may be sent to a faculty member [...] for review and assessment.” (Emphasis added.)
By contrast, the next-highest academic rating — a 2+ — means that, though the student has “perfect, or near-perfect, grades and testing,” their application lacks evidence of “substantial scholarship or academic creativity.”
These examples show that colleges are hungry for students with passion projects. But how can students deliver?
How students can realistically pursue passion projects
We find that many of our students do have passions — but what they haven’t yet done is put in the time and focused energy to turn that passion into a project worthy of admission. Often, “just” by adding another 80-100+ hours of effort to a portfolio or project, they’d be able to create something that would truly stand out.
Encouraging students to get teachers to work with them independently on projects such as:
research papers or science research
artistic or musical projects or
community service
is one relatively achievable path to passion projects that matter.
Another way is by looking into companies that specialize in supporting high schoolers in their own projects, such as Polygence and Lumiere (you can get a sense of the diversity of projects from Polygence’s project gallery).
Colleges love passion projects because they show academic rigor and the 5 traits
College admissions teams are looking for something highly specific when they read through essays — the 5 traits that show the student will succeed in college and beyond:
Drive (or grit)
Initiative
Intellectual Curiosity
Contribution
Diversity of Experiences
One benefit of a passion project is that it tends to display all of these. For example, in boasting of its admitted class, UPenn described how many admits had done research projects, saying they “displayed ingenuity.” They also described students who contributed to community service projects, saying they “displayed flexibility and creativity.” UPenn’s language shows that they believe these projects reveal important character traits.
Take the Cornell-impressing weather-obsessed kid who built his own weather station as an example! The article also says:
[The student] had been collecting data and providing information to a cable news station, who then used his data in their weather forecasts.
The weather station story shows:
Initiative — the student decided to make something happen by himself. He went beyond following a curriculum or doing what his teacher told him.
Drive — just a guess, but building your own weather station is probably hard. Things probably didn’t work right when he first set them up. He probably had to keep working hard until he was able to collect accurate data. He probably showed grit.
Intellectual Curiosity — building your own weather station easily shows this student’s deep interest in a specific topic.
Diversity of Experiences — how many students collect data to send to a cable news station? Pulling this off gave this student a unique perspective.
While this story omits “Contribution,” many passion projects, particularly those with a community service bent, would also have this angle to them.
The point is that passion projects propel applications forward because they greatly increase the Personal score. In addition, applicants who do academic-related passion projects (e.g., research, coding) are also proving they can do the academic work required to succeed in college.
Showcasing a passion project
Finally, applications have many places to showcase passion projects:
The portfolio option, available at some schools, such as MIT, Yale, Columbia, and UChicago
Another supplemental essay
The Additional Info section (which students can also use to create a “portfolio option”)
It’s also okay to use two of these venues: for example, sharing a piece of research using the Additional Info Section, and also talking about what drew the student to the research, how they did the research, and what they learned from the experience in an essay.
Choosing how to showcase the passion project is a judgment call, but if it showcases the student’s ability to succeed in college, they will want to present it as fully as possible to the admissions readers.
In our next issue, The best Common App Essay Prompts and why.
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