Curtis Westbay“Can you recommend some activities?”
Sigh. In my head, I am thinking “Yes… but I don’t need to.”
Students and parents often ask some variation of this question. In this request, I feel it is implied that I know best what a student should do to build a strong college application, that there is some superior résumé item that will sharply increase a student’s odds of admission. This may be true. Activities like this are few and far between, and it’s never so easy as saying I’ll just do that, then! There are those few activities that, like some national sporting achievement, will get the attention of an application reader just off their name alone. Getting to that summit, though, where you have completed an activity that is bound to impress is not so easy.
It’s also not the only way to approach making a strong college application. Arguably, it’s the hardest way. Doing something like winning a high-profile academic competition is tough, because no matter how good you are, there are others who are also very good, striving for the same thing. It’s not just the intellectual challenge of these things that must be overcome, but also the competitive challenge.
Why do students gravitate toward academic competitions? Well, they are very impactful. That should be noted: academic competitions carry with them an inherent and easy-to-understand context for that achievement. Accordingly, I often do recommend them to students. Especially when it is the case that a student doesn’t have something else they would prefer doing, the parameters, clear guidelines, and obvious goals make academic competitions oddly comforting to students who want to build a strong college application, but don’t have any grand designs about how they would prefer to do so. Many students, even when given license to do what they want how they want to do it, would rather just be given straightforward, clear objectives. And there’s nothing wrong with this.
On the flip side of this, though, there’s nothing wrong with going the other direction. Students should feel emboldened to put effort toward building a college application in exactly the way they prefer. Last week’s blog post featured a discussion of 10 ways that students may misunderstand what constitutes a strong activity list. In the last parent event, I discussed six qualities that make a student’s academic identity strong (i.e. innateness, coherence, fit, production, substantiation, and intellectuality). For now, I want to focus on just one of these: production.
By production, I mean that a student does work related to their intended major. This production, yes, can come in the form of competitive success in a structured setting. It can also come in the form of unstructured, entirely independent work. As long as students are exploring this subject that may become their college major, it doesn’t really matter how formal that exploration is. That’s the nice thing about being a student in the 21st Century— you don’t have to go to the library to find a world of information.
In order to make their college applications more believable, though, students have to produce something. They can’t just claim an interest in something and write about it. The reason they must produce is that this production will lend credibility to their claimed interest: there are plenty of students who have received excessive help in preparing college application materials, and it’s no longer assumed that a student’s essays are a perfectly trustworthy vehicle for the expression of academic interest. It’s just the world we live in— students need to explore and produce for selective college admission.
But… if students can receive excessive help with essays, couldn’t they also receive excessive help with whatever they “produce”? Sure. I think that activities, too, can come under scrutiny by application readers when they appear out of place with a student’s academic and standardized testing performance. In the application, though, students will have the opportunity to conduct interviews, where they can show a college their interest in their own words. They can provide a portfolio, where they can show a college their production. They can provide links to resources that substantiate their production, such as personal websites and social media accounts. In combination, these application features will serve as a testament to the authenticity of a student’s exploration. Authenticity, as I said in the first parent event this year, is the key to strong college applications.
These six features of a strong academic identity are meant to increase the feeling of authenticity in a student’s application. And as the saying goes, “talk is cheap.” By producing on their own, students show their intellectuality, yes. This is a strong indication of a student’s preparedness for success in the college classroom, lab, and discussion group. They also show “soft skills”— the ability to construct, revise, and execute a plan; the strength to endure amidst challenges; the willingness to seek guidance, support, and collaboration. While it may be true that some competitions lend themselves to academic growth and personal growth in this way, as well, it’s hard to produce on one’s own. When there is no guidebook, no list of things to study, no natural terminus, students encounter work more similar to that which they will find on a college campus or in a workplace.
So when an aspiring computer science student, for example, asks me for activity recommendations, I will certainly offer them. They might be a hackathon or a coding competition, but as any computer scientist understands, there’s no need to wait for such an occasion to learn more. Students can make programs, web applications, and data visualizations; they can construct data structures, assessing the schema of their backend infrastructure; they can automate, both for fun and for function, using coding to do things as trivial as making a “20 Questions” program or as clinical as scraping the web for stock market data. I don’t mean to diminish the potential importance of an academic competition to a student’s application, just to say that there are many things a student can do entirely of their own design.
Their academic identity will be stronger. They just have to build something.