Curtis WestbaySummary:
This will be a long post. So before we start, here are the most important takeaways of this blog:
- Think about the goal
- Activities won't overshadow poor academic performance
- For selective college admission, become a specialist
- Quantifiable activities carry context
- The application tells a story, and activities are the action of the story
- Activities have value beyond the application
Think about the goal
We are trying to help students thoughtfully construct college applications beginning early in high school— "from the ground up." The first step is to answer the question, from the ground up to what?
When a student is approaching the college application, they need to focus on their goal. This is challenging at first, but for students who are rank-motivated (i.e. who wish to gain admission at a college of a certain rank), the counselors at BIPH can offer clear targets, both in terms of scores and in terms of activities. Not all students are rank-motivated, however. Many students are more concerned with one or more other factors, such as:
- location
- strength of major
- diversity
- accessibility of undergraduate research
- alumni network
- number of international students
- career or graduate school outcomes
- campus life
- average class size
- quality of food in campus cafeterias
Once your student has established a goal or determined the sort of colleges which appeal to them, we know what kind of activity goals are appropriate and sensible.
Activities won't overshadow poor academic performance
This is more of a disclaimer than anything— highly selective colleges, which most of our students at BIPH hope to attend, have no reason to compromise on the students they accept. In the fall 2018 application cycle, no school in the Top 10 of the U.S. News and World Report Top Universities ranking had an admission rate higher than 9%; the average admission rate of Top 50 universities was 21.3%. On top of this, it's important to note that some of the admitted students at top universities were admitted by several schools, further inflating these figures.
The message is clear— there's no reason for these schools to take students who don't offer tremendous evidence of their college readiness. This was covered in detail in our blog post in late September titled "The Truth about GPA", so I won't elaborate further here. In sum, successful applicants for top universities around the world need to have it all— strong GPA, test scores, activities, essays, and letters of recommendations. If a student has low performance in the classroom, what they do outside of the classroom won't matter much for highly selective colleges.
For selective college admission, become a specialist
A student's activity list is one of the components of the college application that I call a "separating factor." Academic factors, like grade point average and standardized test scores, are "foundational factors." For selective colleges, activities alone won't get students in. No activity is a "silver bullet"— a singular and simple solution— for selective college admission. Nor can a tremendous essay, letter of recommendation, or interview undo the harm of poor grades and test scores at Top 50 American universities (or similarly-selective colleges). Activities can, however, elevate a student above those who are similar to them in terms of academic performance. Most high school students are generalists. To stand out, students should become specialists.
There are a lot of students who fare well in the review of academic performance. This is not enough to make them stand out in selective college admission. Top colleges will accept students who can provide evidence of future college and career success. They will accept those they believe to be future researchers, inventors, scientists, and writers. Grade point averages and standardized test scores show potential generally, and when there are more generally-strong students than a college can accept, the best way to stand out is to specialize.
Academic activities carry the greatest impact in the college application because, after all, colleges are academic institutions. There are a lot of students applying to college who are unsure of what they want to study. There are a lot of students applying to college who have an idea of what they want to study without evidence of potential. The most competitive students will have taken the time to develop and explore an academic interest, which makes a few impressions on the application reader:
- This student is able to persist through challenges— they won't give up easily.
- This student isn't romanticizing an academic subject or career path— they know what day-to-day life will be like in this major.
- This student has a foundational knowledge— they will add value to lectures and labs.
- This student understands the process of exploration— they will make use of the research resources available to them.
College applications aren't scientific. They are reviewed by real people. That's why there is no definitive answer to how useful a specific activity may be in a student's application. But specialization stands out. Application readers encounter many students with strong test scores in AP exams or students who have participated in student interest groups. For example, even though relatively few students earn a score of 5, there are many students with high achievement on the AP Biology exam (18,800 students in 2019, or 7.2% of those who took the exam). When many of these students are competing for the same spots at selective universities, even a 5 doesn't stand out. To stand out, students should go deeper than this.
A score of 5 shows a broad mastery in an exam that reflects a college-level survey course. To add layers of depth to that mastery, competitive applicants should isolate the areas of that course that interested them most and pursue further studies. Biology is a broad subject that contains many sub-fields: cell or molecular biology, virology, biochemistry, quantum biology, genetics, population genetics, bioinformatics, developmental biology, anatomy, physiology, immunology, biomedical research, biotechnology, synthetic biology, neuroscience, pharmacology, pathology, epidemiology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, zoology, marine biology, botany, ecology, environmental biology, astrobiology. No one expects high school students to become an expert in any one of these things, as that is the sort of mastery that can only be obtained over a lifetime of commitment, only through advanced study. However, students applying from southern China can't expect to be successful without showing some investigation beyond an interest in the impossibly-broad subject of biology when the target is a Top 30 American university.
In this tier of selectivity, there are hundreds of rejected applications that can boast a high GPA, high SAT scores, and a 5 in AP Biology at elite colleges. To elevate an application, students should show that they are more than just a biologist, or at least that they know why biology interests them. For example, a student with interests in statistics and biology could investigate bioinformatics. Activities that would show exploration here may include a free open source course in R, a programming language that is used by biological statisticians. There are MOOCs (massive open online courses) that carry a certificate of completion, and to be able to offer evidence of effort is crucial in the college activity list. A student interested in biomedical technology could work independently on a submission for the Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair. For marine biology, students may benefit from volunteering at the Shekou Shenzhen Maritime Museum as a docent or from various ocean clean-up service. Aspiring zoologists can volunteer at the Sachin-Karuna dog rescue in Nanshan. Potential neuroscientists can compete in International Brain Bee, geneticists in iGEM, astrobiologists in the US Astronomy and Astrophysics Olympiad.
If your child doesn't know what interests them, ask them to see their counselor.
If your child ends up not enjoying the things that they had pursued, that's not always the worst thing. Here are some advantages, even in the college application, for exploring an interest that doesn't end in either a career or a college degree:
- Your student knows what doesn't interest them. They won't waste more time on a potential college major in the future, and they can isolate the features of that academic field that don't appeal to them and avoid similar sorts of work in the future. This is more valuable than you may realize.
- For American universities, students can usually change majors easily. Historically, around 90% of BASIS students in China have been focused primarily on colleges in the U.S. In the U.S., where it takes four years to obtain a Bachelor degree, many students enter college undecided about their major.
- Not everything that students do in pursuit of a dead-end interest will be without benefit. As J.R.R. Tolkein wrote, "Not all those who wander are lost," and this applies to high school students. For instance, maybe a student explores computer science but doesn't end up majoring in it. That doesn't mean they won't have learned valuable skills that they can apply to nearly any college major or career path.
Quantifiable activities carry context
When students write their first draft of activity lists, usually the biggest mistake is favoring quality over quantity. A student might write something like "I started a Biology Club where I inspired other students to study the subject more deeply than they could in class." This is pretty bad, even if it sounds pretty good. Instead, students should write something like "founded a Biology Club, recruited 25 members, organized and led 12 labs about the scientific efficacy of Chinese traditional medicine compared with Western pharmaceuticals." Quantity is more valuable to application readers because quantity is verifiable and clear. The context of a student's commitment in an activity is important to an application reader, as they attempt to understand a student's mastery relative to other applicants; their value to academic, social, and volunteer communities; or their time commitment beyond academic work in high school.
Students can approach quantifiability no matter the activity, but when it comes to academic achievement, competitions are the most valuable. Competitive academic achievement carries an immediate and clear context that something like an AP exam score does not. Remember those 18,800 AP Biology students who earned a 5 in 2019? Some of them will change the world with biology: they will propose cures for yet-uncured diseases, engineer biotechnology solutions that improve the quality of life for millions, and theorize solutions to global climate change issues. Some of them just had a great AP Biology teacher and are generally intelligent. And yet, from an AP score alone, who's to say who is the former and who is the latter? Activities can help complete the picture.
The application tells a story, and activities are the action of the story
Students can purport to be interested in a great many things, and there's no end to the things our students might achieve. But colleges have been fooled before by students with big aspirations. Especially from our market— the most competitive undergraduate college market in the world— actions speak louder than words. Application readers will be trying to figure out who their applicants are in a short amount of time, so as much as a touching essay about a student's intended career path may be nice to read, activities will provide the evidence of a student's capacity to keep going when the going gets tough.
Activities have value beyond the application
Many of the things I did in high school outside of the classroom did not lead to a career or to college acceptances. These things didn't give me an edge over other students or lead to an impressive internship. They did, however, persist into adulthood. They add value to my life, even to this day.
Take, for example, athletic involvement. Participation in sports rarely moves the needle on college admission chances for undergraduate applicants from southern China. In order to have an impact, a student has to be a national-level athlete being actively recruited by American high schools— a rare occurrence, to be sure. In high school, I played a variety of sports competitively. In college, I didn't play any of them competitively. Nevertheless, they taught me the value of persistence and practice; the perspective that improvement can be measured and celebrated, even in failures; the joy that can be found in discipline and refinement of one's own skill. To have cast aside these interests because of their minimal value on my college application would have been a missed opportunity, a failure to realize that there is value outside of the practical concerns of getting to the next step in life.
In our department, we will primarily point students to academic activities because of their value on the college application. We will explain the implications of having few or no academic activities on a student's activity résumé. There is clear pressure on our students to make a great number of decisions about the opportunity cost of choosing one activity over another. Sometimes, a student loves an activity so much that, despite its small value, they can't keep themselves away from it. I would advise you, as parents, to delight in their commitment. Even if it doesn't contribute to your child's college admission outcomes, this pursuit of passion will have greater impacts on their life for years to come.