What looks good on a college application? If I had a nickel for every time a parent or student asked me this question, I’d be a very rich man.
This is the key question, isn’t it? After all, in the United States, our admissions process is very subjective. Colleges talk about how the process is “holistic.” But that’s just a kinder way of saying, “we don’t really have any solid, firm criteria, so we sort of follow our nose and make decisions on each applicant as they cross our desk.” Of course, colleges and universities do have rubrics and scoring systems and the like, but they don’t divulge what those are–unless they are sued and their case goes to the Supreme Court (looking at you, Harvard and University of North Carolina).
So given the subjective nature of the process, it isn’t entirely unreasonable to ask–over and over–what looks good on a college application?
Here’s what looks good on a college application
It’s not what you do, but how well you do it
Many folks think that there is some secret check list that one follows to get into selective colleges: community service, academic research, leadership, sports, the arts, an internship. But colleges care much less about the actual activity you pursue than the impact you make and the level of achievement you are able to reach.
While it’s nice to play a sport–and American culture certainly emphasizes sports in our schools–the more selective colleges won’t care that much unless you are able to play for their own teams and help them win the conference title. Of course there are other benefits to sports other than the college application process, but if you want the sport to “look good” on the college application, you have to play well enough to get onto the college or university team.
The situation is similar with community service. Many people ask me how many hours of community service look good on a college application. But it’s not about the number of hours. It’s about the impact. For example, a student who spends 4 hours every Saturday for four years shelving books at the local library performs an important service to the community. However, the impact is minimal: if that student didn’t shelve the books, someone else would–eventually. If, on the other hand, the student worked only a few hours a week over the summer to develop a new reading program for kindergartners and helped the library to write a successful grant proposal to fund it, the impact on the community would be much greater. And imagine the two different recommendations the head librarian might write for these two students: one was loyal and dependable and responsible, while the other was creative, innovative, and was able to envision a project and move it toward realization. It’s not the time you put in but the results you achieve.
Similarly, internships are not about the time one spends or the prestige of the company. It’s about what you do during your time on the job. It can be very useful for a young person to do a “job shadow for a couple of weeks to learn about life as an engineer or a marketing director or sales manager. But that is a very passive sort of internship: the student follows the principal around, attends meetings, and gets a feel for the world of work. But what is that young person accomplishing? In some instances (though relatively rare), a high school intern is given a specific project to complete while on the job, and may also get some good supervision and access to various tools and systems that the young person can utilize to add value to the company. What colleges are looking for on the college application is your contribution, your agency, your impact on the organization. Most internships, to be frank, are of little value on the college application because most companies don’t have the wherewithal to conceptualize a meaningful experience for a high school intern–especially if the intern is going to be there only for a couple of weeks.
Jobs on the college application
Having a job while in high school can look great on the college application. But here again, not every job is of equal impact. The student who slings ice cream a few evenings a week makes some good money and learns the value of punctuality, responsibility, loyalty, and adhering to the rules and regulations of the ice cream shop. However, the student who works very hard, goes above and beyond to build the confidence of the business owner may be promoted.
I once worked with a young woman who worked at In-N-Out Burger 20 hours a week all the way through high school. By the time she was a junior, she had been promoted to assistant manager and regularly opened or closed the store, handled all the money and receipts, and was trusted by the owner of the franchise to manage entire shifts on her own. Unsurprisingly, this young woman got a full tuition scholarship–in large part because of the outstanding letter of recommendation the franchise owner wrote on her behalf. She clearly had a huge impact on this person’s business, and he was glad to tell the world what a responsible, considerate, diligent, and dependable human this young woman had become. So if you do get a job, and you want it to look good on a college application, look for ways to contribute above and beyond the expectations.
A case study of what looks good on a college application
Not too long ago I was working with a young man whose father insisted that he get a job. The father really loved the world of cycling, and he helped his son get an after school job at the local bicycle shop. The young man was not very enthusiastic, but he was tasked with assembling bikes. By his own admission, he wasn’t very good at it, nor did he like it much. But he showed up, day after day, and his coworkers liked him and engaged him in conversation. During these conversations in the shop, the owner learned that the young man was a computer whiz and enjoyed playing around with all sorts of programming software and had taken a computer science course in high school. The owner then took him aside and showed him the inventory software they were using, and explained that nobody else in the shop could figure out how to work certain aspects of the software, and the inventory and sales data and reports weren’t matching up correctly.
So the young man offered to help. And by the time he was done, he had completely reworked the software for the bike shop and created systems that the owner and other workers could use in a way that improved accuracy and efficiency–and profitability! And, incidentally, he never assembled another bicycle.
Simply by showing up regularly, showing responsibility and a willingness to help, this young man made a tangible and useful contribution to the business he worked for. When he put this job on the application, he could say much more about his work at the bike shop than reporting the number of hours worked and bicycles assembled. And his boss? Just think of that glowing recommendation that was submitted along with the college application.
Start ups can look good on a college application
The web is full of instances in which high school students started up new ventures, whether for profit or not-for-profit. These can definitely look good on a college application. Usually.
In the past, I’ve worked with a young man who started up their own medical equipment donation organization–collecting supplies in the US and delivering them to clinics in Tanzania. Another young woman solicited donations to create back-to-school backpacks for elementary school students in low income neighborhoods. And another young man started up his own lawn care business that employed two other kids and made tens of thousands of dollars in a summer. Yet another young man was written up in the New York Times because he refused to hear the word “no” when officials at this school said he could not create a film festival (he did it anyway).
These are enterprises that the student conceived, planned, and executed themselves. Their motivations were sometimes different. The young woman did her activity expressly to look good on her college application. The young man with the lawn business need to pay for his car insurance, gas, and new tires. What mattered, however, is that the students were firmly in charge of the programs they began, and had to resolve problems, react to setbacks, and interact with all manner of other people–almost exclusively adults–to achieve their aims.
Less impressive start ups
Some start ups are less impressive, especially when it becomes apparent that parents are heavily involved in the success of the business, or provided the necessary seed capital to get it going (my lawn mowing guy had to take out a loan from his dad to buy a mower), or otherwise provided too much support to make the venture go. Sometimes it’s hard to discern, from the outside, whether the venture is truly the brainchild of the child or the parent. But admissions officers have clues, most of which have to do with family income, social class, and privilege. Kids whose ventures lie well outside the experience of the parents are most likely to be seen as creations of their own efforts–and not a result of parental guidance (or interference!).
Frankly, I think that college admissions folks have become just a bit wary of the high number of start-up ventures that kids pursue. It’s so easy in the US to set up a company or a non-profit company. The barriers to establishing a venture are pretty low. Here, as with any other activity, what’s important is not the establishment of the venture but the other metrics of success that the student is able to show: number of shipping containers delivered, number of kids who received backpacks, or the number of lawns mown and dollars earned. Some ventures are able to show this sort of success, while others look good on paper, but don’t have the results to back up the claims.
Intellectual inquiry and curiosity is what looks good on a college application
These days, many kids are pursuing academic research as part of their college applications. They want to show that they have true intellectual interests and the skills and abilities to craft their own research. There are even programs out there for which families can pay to get the personalized guidance in developing and executing an academic research project. Other students make contact with academic researchers at local universities (or sometimes at far away universities) and develop research project with professors.
Here again, however, not all academic research is treated equally in the college admissions process. What’s important here–as in everything–is the impact, the substances, the quality of the research–and not the amount of time put in. It’s also not about the “prestige” of the university, the professor, or the department for which one works. In some cases, what is reported as “research” is nothing more than the student working in a lab cleaning test tubes or preparing samples. It is not substantive work.
In other cases, however, students are given quite a bit of responsibility within a structured laboratory environment, and they can actually contribute to the success of the research project.
Sometimes the student is able to publish the results of the academic work they did, either as a co-author on a published research paper, or as a student author in publications like The Concord Review.
Research is not just for science, either. I’ve worked with students who have performed substantive historical research. In one case it was with a professor, and in other cases it was with the guidance of a graduate student. One ended up being recognized in the publication the professor later published, while the other submitted his lengthy research paper for publication on his own.
Reading looks good on a college application
Read. A lot. I can’t emphasize this enough. Reading not only will help your test scores improve. But it will both be a demonstration of your intellectual curiosity. I am so often dismayed when I ask high school students what they are reading. Very seldom are they reading outside the school curriculum. 
It is particularly disheartening when a student who swear she wants to do academic research is not reading in their professed field of interest. I have met kids who swear they are interested in neuroscience who have not ever read an article or book on the subject. Or kids who want me to help them find a research project in biomedical engineering who cannot share anything they have read about it.
But when a student tells me that they are intellectually interested in something like military aircraft, and can show me (on Zoom) the bookshelf full of books about Japanese kamikazes, the Red Baron, the history of commercial aircraft, air battles over Europe, and the use of rockets in warfare, I was duly impressed. And so were college leaders. After this young man was interviewed by the Vice President of Enrollment for a college to which he was applying, the Vice President gave me a call to tell me how impressed he was. The young man’s enthusiasm and knowledge for his little hobby was contagious. Needless to say, that college accepted him with a huge scholarship.
The fact is that colleges want to accept learners. And learners are not just people who get good grades in school. They are not just people who sign up for summer programs or do “academic research” with the guidance of a professor or graduate student.
Learners are people who read, who teach themselves things. They are people who have curiosities about the world, and then set out to satisfy that curiosity–whatever it is. Yes, watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts can be informative.
But exploring the world’s libraries is really where we can find the repository of human intellectual inquiry. If you can’t find your library card or haven’t used it since you were reading Hop on Pop, now is the time.
Do summer programs look good on a college application?
Sometimes.
The thing about the vast majority of summer programs is that they are relatively passive. Someone else sets the syllabus. Someone else defines the parameters of inquiry. Someone else scaffolds the learning in ways that are digestible for younger learners (who have the attention span of a YouTube video rather than a 300-page book). And if there is a performance or assessment at the end of the experience, someone else has decided what that shall be, too.
Summer programs can be a great way to advance your knowledge of a subject or get a taste of life or introduce you to an entirely new domain of knowledge.
But, to return to the points above–isn’t that what the library is for?
The other thing about summer programs is that they tend to be expensive. In this way, they are beyond the reach of many, many students and their families. And in some cases, the summer programs are great moneymakers for the colleges that offer them. The Summer at Brown program is full of interesting intellectual offerings. But thing of the profits Brown is spinning every summer. The overwhelming majority of participants in the Summer at Brown program will have absolutely no chance of getting into Brown, while the kid who spend his summer reading histories of Civil War battles from the confines of his back yard may have a much better chance of acceptance.
Intellectual curiosity on the college application
What’s my point? Intellectual curiosity comes from within. You can purchase ready-made programs to learn, and it can be helpful to learn in this way (after all, this is what college is all about–enter a classroom, learn from an expert, and perform an assessment to show you have enhanced your knowledge). But the most selective colleges in the land are seeking young people whose intellectual curiosity is self-driven, not externally driven. The self-motivated intellect is more desired–because those students are most likely to take best advantage of the resources at a place like Brown–rather than the kid whose parents paid a pretty penny for them to spend two-weeks on the Brown campus safely inside a college classroom learning whatever some graduate student cooked up on the syllabus.
All this said, there are some summer programs that are very valuable and difficult to get into. Examples include the Iowa Young Writers Studio, the Telluride Association Summer Seminar (TASS), and MIT’s MITES program and Research Science Institute (RSI). And these programs may not even cost anything at all–but are offered on a competitive basis to the best of the best.
Summary: What looks good on a college application?
As you can see, there are lots and lots of things that “look good.” But as the team at Great College Advice advises, it’s not about the amount of time put in, the “prestige” of the activity, or the variety of activities you pursue.
What matters is how well you do it.
What matters is whether it is something that animates you or excites you.
What matters is the impact you are able to contribute to an organization or the community at large.
What matters is how your curiosity is ignited–and what you do with it upon ignition.
The world is for exploring. The world is waiting for you to contribute. There are problems that need solving. Think less about “what looks good on a college application”and more about the activities, the topics, the people, the puzzles that attract your attention–and move boldly in whatever direction these things lead you. If you follow your talents and your curiosity, your college application will look just great.
Need help with that college application (and what looks good on it)?
The team at Great College Advice can help guide you in making choices about how to spend your time and how to ignite those inner curiosities. If you want chat with a counselor to learn more about how we help young people craft interesting lives–and good college applications–give us a call or reach out to us via our website. We look forward to the conversation.
