Creating a winning extracurricular profile for 9th and 10th graders

KENNEDY: Oh, great.

GLEN: Keep trickling, keep trickling. Yep, yep. You should be able to see that Q&A function at the bottom, there should be a tab. If you have any burning questions, I think someone’s using it. Good. Someone has found it.

KENNEDY: Yes. This will be recorded and we’re able to share it with you directly afterwards.

GLEN: Cool. That was an easy question.

KENNEDY: Yeah.

GLEN: Don’t even have to.

KENNEDY: Yeah, and we also have our previous webinar recordings on our website, as well, if you’re interested to take a look. We’ve done a number on specific topics, whether that be the personal statement, getting into top schools, we’ve had some that are pre-med specific, as well. So a variety if you’d like to take a look.

GLEN: I think we’re actually starting to stabilize attendees. So Kenn, you want to jump in? Should we wait a little bit longer? Because we appreciate you being on time. We want to make sure that we are out at the top of the hour because we know you have many things you could be doing on a Thursday night, and so we are happy that you chose to spend this time with us. Let’s dive into this. We’ll start a little early, a little early. Look at us, not on Miami time here. If you’re wondering who we are, what do we keep talking about? What am I about? This is creating a winning extracurricular profile for 9th and 10th graders. My name is Glen Water. I’m the Learning and Development Director here at Prepory, which means I’m responsible for making sure that all of our outcomes match what we’re doing.

More relevantly for you. I am a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and I have a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’ve been doing this work for over 15 years, getting kids accepted to their dream schools across the board from schools like MIT, Columbia, Chicago, UCLA, but it’s not just me that you have to listen to. You also get Kennedy, a graduate of Columbia University, our Enrollment Manager, and she’ll be able to answer a bunch of questions about Prepory, but also give us some insight into her own college process and what it takes to get into college.

KENNEDY: Cool.

GLEN: So Kenn, turning it over to you for a second.

KENNEDY: Thank you. Yeah, as Glen mentioned, I’m an Enrollment Manager and what that means for your purposes is I speak with families like yourselves. After our conversation today, you’ll be prompted to schedule an initial consultation. It’s like a free session where you come in, 25 minutes. We delve deeper into your student’s particular profile and discuss more in depth how we can help you. So, I lead those conversations alongside a few of my colleagues who also work on the Enrollment team. But first, who is Prepory? So, we are a college admissions consulting company. We work with families like yourselves. We’ve been doing this since our inception in 2012 and in that time we’ve worked with over 14,000 students. So, we have a decade plus of admissions data that we rely on, and we work with students throughout grade levels. So, 9th through 12th, in addition to transfer and grad students, as well. So, if you have older students, we work with them as well. Other presentations, 9th and 10th grade specific, we work with students throughout all grades of high school and at various points throughout the process. This past cycle, one of our success metrics that I’m personally most proud of, and I think Glen is as well, is that 94% of our students were admitted into one or more of their top five choices, which means our students were happy. From the ones who wanted the Ivy League school to the ones who wanted the flagship state university, or top Liberal Arts, you name it, we have students there. And overall, Prepory students were about 3.4 times more likely to be admitted to schools with acceptance rates below 15%. So that’s encompassing all eight Ivies and other Top 20 schools like Stanford, MIT, Caltech.

This past cycle, we’ve had a variety of acceptances. These are just a handful of the ones that we’ve gotten so far. We’ve done really well and we’re hoping to even beat our results next cycle with our students. We’re really proud of the work that our coaches are doing alongside our families to help them build winning profiles. And of course, at this stage, that focus is more so on candidacy-building, thinking about how we can select the right extracurriculars, both during the school year and in our summers, to set our students up for success since this is really the foundation and the content that they’re going to use and reference in their essays once they hit senior year.

GLEN: Absolutely, yeah. With that, I honestly think these 9th and 10th grade years are the most important. Whenever I get a student in 11th grade or 12th grade even, I’m just like, “Oh man, I wish I could have had you earlier,” because the amount of influence on their profile and trajectory that you have is just so much more, right? If it’s like a lever that you’re trying to use to get into college, it’s all those math nerds out there, these physics nerds out there, right? When you have that long lever where you have a lot of time, you can really put a lot into it, versus if you apply in 12th grade, you just at the end of the lever with time, you can’t move as much. So, if you’re a 9th and 10th grader, you’re in the right spot. We want to make sure that we are getting you on that path so you can maximize that lever if you’re like, “Oh, I just need to learn about extracurricular profiles. I’m an 11th or 12th grader, but I just signed up for this because hopefully I’ll learn something.” You’ll still have some information, it might create a bit of panic, in which case, if that’s you, make sure you sign up immediately because you’re going to need the help. 9th and 10th graders, you should also, because the sooner we get you, the sooner we’re able to apply that leverage. And in this webinar, I’m going to show why that leverage is so important and how we actually apply that leverage. How do we create the depth of your extracurricular profile? And so what I mean by depth, I hope we to answer these four questions that I think will really help you to be able to create that profile and the depth that can get you accepted to any of those dream schools we just mentioned on the previous slide.

So it’s first, like how and why are admissions officers evaluating extracurriculars? Why do these even matter? Why are we talking about this? Why is there a webinar? What are meaningful activities that can influence that? We’ll get to that. How to develop those meaningful activities? And then also, why summers are so important for this. And finally, we’ll end with explaining how we can help you to maximize all of these things, and hopefully we’ll leave some time for some Q&A, but please continue. This is the beauty of doing this online is that you can do this live through the Q&A function, so continue to use that.

GLEN: We will get to that sports question, for sure. So, I’m going to dive into that as soon as this clicks the first question here. So, the first thing to get everyone on the same page, we got over a hundred of you, we want to make sure we’re starting the same point, is to note that colleges in the U.S. use a process called holistic admissions, which means they are going to analyze or evaluate the entire student, not just these quantitative academic marks. So, this is different than any other country. If you were here and you went to school in another country where it’s entirely dependent on the Gaokao or the tests where it’s like if you place at the top of your test at the end of your junior or senior year, then you get to go to the best schools and you get to choose whatever that major is because it is highly selective just on that test. Even in the U.K. where it really depends on how well you do on those A levels, nothing like that here. It is much more holistic where you’re doing more than just the quantitative because they recognize AOs, admissions officers, colleges recognize that how well you do is more than just in life is more than how well you do on tests. Kenn, when was the last time you took a test in life? You just don’t.

KENNEDY: It’s been a while. Yeah.

GLEN: It’s been a while because you stopped doing it. So like, wait a minute, maybe there’s other metrics here, and that’s what admissions officers are looking for. So, they’re evaluating your activities, they’re evaluating your writing, and both the content and the depth and a lot of, not just the quality of the writing, but what you’re putting in there. They’re evaluating what your teachers say about you. They’re evaluating how you show up in interviews. And if you’re like, “Woah, that’s a lot of things. I want to learn about that,” you’re going to have to go listen to another webinar, we’re just going to really dive into the activities or you’re going to have to sign up probably to get the real depth on that. But this is going to be just on those activities. And it’s more than just doing certain activities. They’re looking for something deeper here.

This isn’t just the fact that, okay, if I’m doing business, I got to be doing DECA. It’s more complicated than that or it’s more complicated than, “Okay, I want to do business. The key to success in getting into Harvard is winning at nationals for DECA.” It would be nice if it were that easy, but instead, they’re actually looking for deeper things, deeper traits, which also gets at that sports question there. They’re trying to evaluate the qualities that you have of the qualities of the student based on having these meaningful activities. So, the bolded words in that line indicate we need to really unpack what this means. What are the qualities they are looking for, that AOs really value? And what are those meaningful activities that can actually show that you have those values? Which, if you’re an active listener, you remember, “Wait, those were the two points that were on the table of contents.”

GLEN: So, let’s first get into the first part here, the qualities of a desired applicant. These qualities, everything that on this list is things that AOs are actively trying to assess about you. At the top, is that academic ability. If you’re like, “Oh, quality on tests, being able to perform on the SAT, GPA,” like, “Oh, maybe that doesn’t matter.” No, that is still first and foremost, you have to have that. It’s also, though, inclusive of these other things. We need to know that you are going to be able to succeed at Harvard, pass their tests, pass their assignments. That is going to be still the main metric, but then they also want to see that you’re interested in different topics; that you’re curious about these topics; that you can contribute to the community that you care about; that you make an impact on others; that there’s a bit of like dynamics, dynamism to you; that you have maybe some creativity; that you’re interesting to talk to; that you’re reflective or introspective.

They know that these traits are connected to success. They’d want to know that you can actually grow, that this isn’t where you’re stopping or you haven’t reached a peak, you are continuing to grow, that you learn from your mistakes. We’re going to come back to that idea; that you can be a leader; that you can take initiative; that you can follow through on things, and then also this college intentionality and fit that you are actually aligned to what they are going to. And I would say this list is roughly in order of priorities. So, if you’re really focused on like, “Oh, I’ve really got to make sure that Harvard likes me and that I am a Harvard person,” you’re actually missing the memo and that you have to be someone that has all these other traits here and then you’re like, “Oh, Harvard and I match.” But Kenn, what do you think like, of these values that AOs really value, what are the ones that you think are like underrated and students should emphasize more?

KENNEDY: I would say the dynamism piece specifically as it manifests as passion in the process. I think often, I’ll meet with families in initial consultations, and they’ll sort of ask me like, “Am I doing enough?” Or some version of “Is there a list of things I can do to make sure I’m competitive in this major at this school?” And like you were saying, the truth is no, I can’t give you a list. I wish I could. It would make it easier, but I can’t give you a list. And the reason is you have to have something authentic. And I think that students will often select things because they feel like they’ll look good on their application or they’ll be perceived well, and while that may be true, it’s not the entire story. And I think that curiosity for the sake of curiosity is important, and you should have that in your application. And it should feel like when you’re writing your essays that if you really enjoy chemistry, it should be because you really enjoy chemistry. You could really lose yourself in it given a day by yourself in your room. And that sort of passion is really exciting to admissions officers on campus. They don’t want students that are chasing prestige. They want students following their curiosity.

GLEN: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s so true that authenticity is such a key thing that they have, and if you don’t actually show it, it’s not going to show up in the essays. The AOs will know it. They want to see that genuine interest in it, and there are many different ways. It’s kind of harder. It would be nice if there’s just one test and then it’s a very clear path. This is actually a very complicated path on how to get in because there are so many potential ways that you can do this to get into those dream schools. I understand why it’s confusing. So that is what they are looking for. These are the qualities they want to see in these meaningful activities that create enough depth and create enough chance for reflection. And that is ultimately what we’re trying to get into with when we’re talking about what are meaningful activities, they’re the activities that can foster, that can allow you to have demonstrated success in something and then reflect on why you have that success.

Because those are the things, those are indicative of those traits that we were just talking about. So, you’re like, “Okay, I get this in theory, but what do I actually do with it? How do I actually build this winning profile?” Well, the first thing for you all to think about, no matter where you are, if you’re the 11th grader who’s like, “I just snuck in here to the 9th and 10th grader,” this is the first part that you should be thinking about is making sure that you have activities in each of these categories. These categories, there are these buckets that you’re trying to fulfill but also fulfill in some ways. The first one is intellectual curiosity. These are activities that are connected to your major and almost more importantly, your long-term career interests. Because colleges know that the major is often connected to some larger passion beyond. College is not an end.

If you were like, “Well, I just really want to study at Harvard.” They’ll be like, “No, Harvard is a means to something else.” So, they want to see that there are activities that are connected to this bigger interest, this bigger passion that Kennedy was talking about. So that’s the first thing, and I would argue it’s the most important bucket for colleges because they’re schools. They’re trying to teach you something. It’s going to be rooted in academic discipline. The second bucket, which you really should also have, is this community impact. These are activities that involve a community you care about, it doesn’t matter the community honestly, but you identify that matters to you and that you do something to make a substantial impact in. So that’s the second thing. If you don’t have anything connected to something that’s doing something for someone else, beyond yourself, college are like, “Does this person just care about themselves, or do they care about others?” Right? Colleges are bringing people together. If this were just about learning, go do it online. Go take an EdX course, right? Go to the public library and just read a bunch. You don’t need a degree if you’re not trying to be about somebody and something else. And then this third one, this is the one that really makes it stand out. These are the activities rooted in creativity and joy that you just do for the sake of this activity, which kind of connects to the question in the chat there about sports, and we’ll come back to this, about “should I be doing sports even if I’m mediocre?” If you’re doing it because it gives you joy. If there’s something that you can get out of leadership, that community from it, yeah, absolutely. That can be a part of how you can fill that third bucket with sports.

Sports can take up a lot of time though, so we’ll talk about making sure that you’re not just doing one thing because if you’re only sports, you’re missing these two other buckets. But also, if you’re like, “Oh, what about these other sports or these other activities?” We do want to make sure you have a balanced approach to this and that’s where it’s really helpful to get feedback on. So, these are the types. Let’s dive into them a little bit more in depth so that you can see what you’re looking for. So, baseline intellectual curiosity, what we are looking for. This is something that I would say that if you were trying to be competitive at your flagship schools with any of your top fifties, this is the baseline that we expect you to see to be competitive here. It is having that authentic interest that Kennedy was talking about.

If given a day to study chemistry, would you be able to just dive in on a day and be like, “Wow, that day was great.” That’s what they’re looking for. If you want to be competitive at those things, an authentic interest. And so, anyone can say, I can say right now, “I have an authentic interest in chemistry,” and people are like, “Show me.” You can easily tell me, but they need to see the evidence of that. And the way they will see that is the activities you do in school, the things, the courses or activities you do outside of school, the honors that you have achieved in chemistry, and they’re ultimately going to see it in that essay, right? If you say you’ve done chemistry, but then actually haven’t done anything in chemistry, the concepts that you talk about and how you talk about it, it shows. It just feels flat. So, this is what they need to see.

Some examples of this, show me one of the things like, oh, you could be joining chemistry as in the Science Olympiad. You could be taking these outside EdX courses. Anyone can do these things. You can go and shadow at a hospital because you’re interested in drug things. Drug things, that sounds weird, but like drug therapies, pharmaceuticals. You could be interested in music therapy, and ultimately, what this is going to show up, and I’ve seen it done, is like you’re writing your essays ultimately about this desire to use music, its effect on chemistry in the brain and how this might impact Alzheimer’s.

The quality of those essays will actually reflect that you are doing these things, but this is just baseline. This is if you want to get into a Top 50, this is what we’re expecting to see from everybody. If you’re trying to get in beyond that, if you’re really trying to push it to be more advanced intellectual curiosity, we’re looking for you to be doing something even more. So, it breaks down into two categories, this advanced intellectual curiosity. The first one, this research vitality. This is more of the theoretical. For those of you who are super nerds who are like, “Yeah, I want to discover something. I want to be a professor at some point, I want to be a researcher. I want to get that Nobel Prize for discovering something within string theory or proving like the combined universe theorem.” Where the combined, that’s the ultimate goal in physics, grand universe there I’m messing it up or mathematical theorems. You saw Good Will Hunting, that really old movie and you’re like, “Wow, I want to be doing that, right?” This is for you. These are the things that schools like Caltech, like Chicago, like Johns Hopkins, they eat this stuff up. This is that. What they are really expecting you to be doing, if you’re trying to go to these schools, is that you are doing that level of research. This is that gold standard within that: Where you are part of a university research team, where you are actually publishing results in something that can high impact journal. If you can do that, they’re like, “Well, this kid is doing this already. They’ve shown me they can do it. I’m sure they’re going to be able to do it in college and beyond.” You are demonstrating that success. Also, you could be conducting independent research on this and publishing it in mainstream think pieces.

You’re getting your name out there. You are becoming a person in the field who has demonstrated interest. All of these are examples of successful students who have done this, right? You were working in a research lab on studying zebrafish neurological diseases. You’re doing summer programs and computational physics. This stuff is nerdy, but that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for the ultimate nerds. You’re understanding, this would be more of the social sciences like biphobia and Asian literature, oh, that’s some deep concepts there, and they’re submitting into the New York Times. They’re actually making contributions to the field: Research vitality. The other half of that is not the theoretical, it’s more of the applied. This is more common at schools like Cornell, like Carnegie Mellon, like Penn. They want to see that it’s not just theory for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge to address something, to be about something.

It’s much more innovative spirit is why we call that this. It’s making that practical application, and we often see this most in what is called a passion project where you’re building your own prototypes, you’re running your own experiments, you’re creating startups. Those things are also great ways to be able to show intellectual curiosity, advance. You can be doing either, you can be doing a mix of them if you want, but you do you. If you’re trying to be competitive at these top schools, we’re going to want to see at least one of these gold standard activities by the time you are applying. You’re founding your own DIY microbial fuel cell, this was one of my kids, you founded an import export company. You’re doing the things where it’s actually shown. You’re in the weeds. You’re experiencing the challenges, and you’re then able to write about it, is the key thing with this intellectual curiosity.

So, that’s just bucket one. So, you’re saying like, “Oh, there’s a lot of stuff I got to be doing.” That’s just bucket one, and now you’re like, “Oh, okay. I get why I need to start early on this because if that’s what I’m trying to get to, and that’s just one bucket, I got some things to be doing here.” So, the second bucket is community impact. A little bit simpler. Only one slide for this one. They’re looking for leaders who will make an impact on their world. What they’re really hoping to do this is through community impact projects where you were part of a larger movement, a larger organization, a larger campaign to make some sort of larger change. And honestly, it doesn’t matter your political orientation on it, it doesn’t matter the issue on it. It’s just like, are you doing something because you believe that it will make the world better? In whichever way you define ‘better’.

They’re universities. They want you to have your own perspectives on that and then come together and then debate them, right? I’m sure Kennedy at Columbia, you were debating people who have very different perspectives from you, and they were there, too. That is what a university is about because they believe in debate and then coming to a final conclusion from that or at least the next step. So, that is key. That you care about something. All of these things will be great examples on the left here of actual community impact projects that are going to stand out because there’s depth there. There’s meaning there where you’ve got to wrestle with things. You’ve come into challenges. And then the third one, nope, got ahead of myself, Kennedy’s favorite here is this dynamism.

At Stanford, they classify or how they teach their admissions officers to assess this is when reading this profile, does this seem like somebody that you want to have lunch with? And if they don’t seem interesting, if they’re like blasé, then they’re like, “We don’t want him at Stanford.” I think the technical term is like zhuzh, you have to have a little bit of zhuzh to you. We want to see that actual genuine passion that is outside of your impact on others, and it is outside of your career goals. There’s just something else about you that makes you a full, whole person, right? These holistic admissions, they want to see this. These are examples of my students who have done this. This was memorizing all the national anthems in their native tongue. Yep, my kid did that. You got into Yale? Nope. That one was at Harvard. Producing his own music on Spotify, did his own things, did it from start to finish, produced it to fanfare, great songs, still listened to it. Got into Yale. This kid who was collecting these unique keys from every place that he visited, got into Chicago. Started a rose garden with his mom. At first, it was this whole thing and they’re like, “Oh, let’s make this a big rose garden.” Got into Cornell. There are just these things that like, “Oh, there’s some texture to you. You’re a real person.” There’s an authentic part of you, so you also have, this is that third bucket there that you need to have, and you need to have projects in all of them in order to be competitive at these top schools. Kenn, is there a project that you’ve really liked in the past that you’ve seen?

KENNEDY: Yes, so we’re presently working with a junior or rising junior, rather, and she intends to major in CS and is targeting top computer science programs. However, outside of that academic interest, she writes poetry, and her Prepory Coach is presently working with her on publishing her third book, which is super exciting. It’s kind of forming into a collection and they’re thinking about how each book can speak to each other and just what place that can hold in her profile, which is so incredibly interesting. And it was funny, I remember when that came up on our IC when I initially enrolled her, and I just thought, “Wow, I never would’ve guessed.” And that’s the exact feeling, I think that you were saying with Stanford, you want to feel like, “I want to know more about this person. I would love to have lunch with her and learn more about her poetry. That seems interesting.” And I imagine we discussed her interest in CS too, but I’m especially interested in the poetry because it just seems so different and clearly something that she spent some time on. I mean, she’s on her third book and we’re working with her on that one, so she’s done this before and clearly is excited about it, and I think it’s that longevity that’s so special in this process and just showing who she’s outside of it and also practicing her writing ability. That’s always great, especially for STEM students, too, in the process to be able to reflect in that way. I think it signals all of the right things about her as a person.

GLEN: Absolutely. At schools like Stanford, where they really want that fuzzy tech, you do this, but you can also write about yourself important and this commitment. That was one of the qualities that it was at the top named that, but yeah, they did it and they’re refining it. They’re getting better at it. We’re going to come back to that idea over and over again because it’s important. Looking at some of these questions in the chat, but I’ll just answer live here because they’re related to it. One of the questions is about a gold award for Girl Scouts. “How does that fit in?” Ideally, you are making that gold award fit into something else. You’re going to get a gold award, you’re a Girl Scout, right? If you’re doing well in that, cool, but how can you double-dip on that? How can you align that activity to be about a community impact and make that about an issue that you care about?

You’re going to have to do it for the hours regardless, get in there and make it something that’s meaningful to you. I think those can be really good things for that second bucket, that community impact thing. Don’t just make a bench, do something that’s a little bit more meaningful. I feel like I’ve seen so many. Same thing for Eagle Scouts, right? Okay, you made a bench in a park. Cool, kid. You had an opportunity to do something special, could make an impact long-term, and why did you choose that? It’s useful. And this other question is like, “What if the student doesn’t have a passion?”

You’ve got to find the passion. That is something that we need to find the interest as soon as possible so that we can start this process and it’s a lot of exploration and a lot of reflection. This is what our coaches do best. I think it’s the thing that we love the most is helping kids define these things but dig into who they are. Ask all these prying and introspective questions, see their responses, and then pivot on that, and then sometimes we’re still, it gets kids like, we’re not getting anything, so then you start throwing things at them and seeing what sticks, and then refining from that, which is, it’s a beautiful process to see a kid, is this what you’re getting at? And the kid’s like, “Oh, that is exactly what I’m passionate about.” Okay, let’s explore it and see if that’s a momentary passion or just something that can be sustained for the rest of your life. Because that’s the cool stuff, when you hear it from not just in college but 10 years down the road when they’re like, “I’ve been doing this forever.”

KENNEDY: And Glen, to your point about just with the passionate and finding it, I will say having met with families from 9th all the way through 12th, I will say this is best in 9th grade when you can start this process, and the reason being that when we get a rising junior or even someone in the middle of 10th grade who needs to go through that exploration, we simply cannot do it for as much time because it’s just not strategic. The 9th grader can conceivably take the full 9th grade year to do direct exploration, and that’s okay, but a 10th grader cannot, and it does need to be shorter. Just strategically speaking, it’s the first three years of high school that colleges are evaluating, so just for context for families on the call, depending on what age your students are, of course we can do it, but the best time would be 9th because that’s the most time that we are going to have in this process compared to later years, even if you’re in 10th.

GLEN: Yeah, absolutely, and let me get back to the slide. Our data actually proves me. I said, I’m the Learning Development Director, making sure the data actually matches what we’re doing. The data shows that the kids who started with us before 11th grade were 45% more likely to get into the highly selective institutions than those who started after. 45% more likely if you start before 11th grade, and the highly selective schools are anything that has a sub 15% acceptance rate. So that’s exactly what Kennedy was talking about. The lever, if you can start earlier, you can answer these questions. You can start filling those buckets. The earlier you start that, the better it is, the more likely you can get in. So, yeah. Now, let me get into some of this other, we’ve talked about, this is what you need to show. Let’s actually talk about ways that you can show it.

GLEN: How do I develop these meaningful activities? So, in order to do this, we’re going to do what’s called some backwards planning. By the time you’re applying, and this might answer some of these questions that are coming up in the chat, what we need to see from you is that you have four activities connected to your major. So, if you’re in engineering, you have that Formula One, great. That’s one of your activities. That can just be an activity connected to your major. You want to do mechanical engineering. That’s great. That fills up one bucket. You should also have another activity connected to the community impact, something that is aligned to some sort of issue you care about. So, it’s not that you have to drop Formula One, you should just also have something because you’re going to have 10 activities on your activity list when you’re applying. So, four of those could be connected to your major. One or two of those should be connected to an issue that you care about, something, some issue, whatever it might be, be it environmentalism, be it something, whatever the issue is—environmental just like across the board, people tend to care about it— it needs to be something. And then, you should have one to two activities that are that dynamic part of you. It could be a sport, it could be collecting something, it could be a hobby. We’ll get into some of these things here. I will stress though, that if you were doing, I’ve seen too many, I think 9th and 10th graders were the four things they’re doing is like, “Oh, well, I got piano, because brain science from 10 years ago said that this is the most important thing to increase my intelligence—was doing piano.” “I have a job because I read that one study that a job builds resilience.” “I do chess.” Same thing about the study, and “I have a sport because who doesn’t love sport?” It’s great. If you’re doing all four of those, any one of those things could fill the bucket. All four of them are way too much and way too common. We would encourage you to be dropping some of those things. Absolutely. They just don’t have the same impact. If you really love it though, and you’re like, “This is something that gives me my sense of who I am. It is how I build community. It is how I see myself.” Keep that sport. Even if you’re mediocre at it, just don’t make sure it takes over and keeps you from filling the other buckets. This is just one of the two. You got to have those other eight filled up. So, this is by the time you’re applying. Let’s backwards plan from that. 11th grade, what you should be doing are these capstone projects. That is the sort of core activities, everything that you saw on those previous slides were examples of capstone projects that filled the different types of buckets, right? There are three different buckets. All of them should have a capstone at the end. You’re building towards this piece. They tend to be really prestigious programs, competitive programs, extensive passion projects, some larger like campaigns, this creative project, a deep involvement where you were doing something extensive.

You’ve actually built that rose garden. You’ve created a website to showcase all the cool rocks that you’ve collected. Okay, cool. You have a family cookbook, right? That would all be in this DY part. You have a neighborhood memoir, whatever it is, you are doing something at the end that is larger and more important. That’s what we’re trying to build to by 11th grade, these capstones, but we’ll talk a little bit more about that when we get to the summers and how important those are. That’s by 11th grade. You’re like, “Cool. I know that’s where I’m going. What should I be doing now?” Well, 10th grade, continuing to backwards plan this. If this success, if this point in this bucket gets full, that’s when you’re like, “Oh, I know that I have maximized my chances of going to Columbia or going to—I don’t know I keep using Harvard, Yale, whatever it is, Florida—when I’ve maximized my chance is when that bucket’s filled.” So, I got my capstone, 10th grade. How did I get there?

Well, in 10th grade, I was developing the content and context for that. These research projects don’t come out of nowhere. If you’re getting selected to a very prestigious program, they’re not just accepting you because you’re excited about it. You have already done something on an earlier level that shows you are already on that trajectory of success. So, you want to be doing some sort of work, some sort of project that you can get out there. You really should have at this point, narrowed in on a field where you are like, I know the question of “What if I don’t have a passion yet?” That came up in the chat, like no. By 10th grade, we need to know that you have some sort of passion, that you have some sort of interest in a major, and it’s honestly okay if that major shifts, but you should be able to say, “I have this interest” and that you are actually starting to do something.

It’s critical that this is actually a bit more project, right? They’re projects, projects, projects that you’re doing something by 10th grade, that you have chosen and ideated an early form of a project, because the key reason is they expect you to fail a little bit. They don’t expect you to win an award in 10th grade. They don’t expect you to automatically have figured out the solution to chargers getting new chargers in your city by 10th grade. They know that even if you were a startup, even as an adult, the success rate of a startup in the United States is 10%. 90% of the startups in the United States founded by full people with MBAs, fail.

They know that you are not likely going to succeed on your first time. So, if you wait until junior year and you’re trying to get some demonstrated success of these projects, it is very unlikely you’re going to be successful. You need to have some combats. So, our goal is to get you some early things, and then you’re working with your coach to be like, “Yo, I either hated this, and why did I hate this?” or “This didn’t go well. How can I tweak and modify it so that when I’m applying next year again to an even more prestigious program, I can be like, I did X, Y, and Z things. They failed and I learned A, B, and C things and I can’t wait to apply it at this next research academy.” Oh, but wait. That is also exactly what the “why this major” essay looks like in college. You were literally demonstrating that you have what it takes to succeed in college because that’s the research process. It is failure after failure until you get to success, and so they want to see that resilience. They want to see that commitment. They want to see that you have the curiosity to figure out what the answer is, even if you’ve messed up 10 times. That’s what they’re looking for. So, it’s critical, that by 10th grade you are starting, so you have enough runway to be able to actually see success by 11th grade.

Now with 9th grade, this is when you should be doing the exploring. This is when you should be doing, making sure that what you’re about to dive into and see that I have a passion for and do that hard work of getting failures and writing papers on it. You want to make sure that it’s genuine, that authenticity. So, 9th grade is really about exploring a lot of things. It is making sure that by the time you choose, you’ve actually done content to know that it’s something that you want to be doing. I think I’ve seen too many students as 11th graders come in and be like, “What do you want to study?” “Business.” “Why do you want to study it?” “Well, I want to make money.” Honey, everybody wants to make money. The last time I checked, money still mattered in this world.

So, colleges know you want to make money. Everybody knows you want to make money. Why? “What part of business are you interested in?” “Finance.” Well, finance is a lot of different things. It’s literally just moving money around. In what ways do you hope that finance to be doing something? There are so many ways we need you to have depth. An example would be the CS kid. It can’t just be that you’re interested in CS. You need to have that depth of going from CS to large language models. Okay, that’s the next level. I’m interested in that. Why that? Well, I’m interested in sentiment analysis because from sentiment analysis, I know I want to do something with low resource languages. There’s depth to that. Unless you’re actually diving into the field, you won’t be able to answer, and you won’t be able to have good essays. You won’t be able to have good projects.

So, this is a lot of exploration. What it looks like in terms of your sessions is like you are literally going out and exploring things. You’re diving and you’re reading things. You’re reading these books. You’re going into clubs. You’re trying it out, and then you’re coming back to your coach and you’re debriefing, and then the coach is like, “Okay, I’m hearing all these things, blah, blah, blah.” “I’m pushing you to think in different ways, and now I’m assigning you a new task to go explore something else.” or “We found a deep passion. Here’s the next step.” It’s a lot of project managing and kind of like book reporting, but you’re also learning content from it, so the coach might give you something to be reading about so that you actually have concepts and understanding to dive into it because these essays require you to be talking about something substantially. So, we want to make sure that you are doing that now, so that when you get into 10th grade, it’s actually developed. I think 9th grade is the most fun because you get to do more like teaching the kids because literally you are having them read and shockingly, or actually it shouldn’t come out of shock at this point, some schools even ask what you have read because they’re looking to see that you have demonstrated. One of those schools, I could wait, but there’s also Columbia. Kenn, so they asked you about that. What did you put for, what was one of the books you put for this, Kennedy?

KENNEDY: They very much ask you to make a list. One of the books that I put is Jazz by Toni Morrison. I really enjoyed her writing all throughout my high school English class and explored her books and her work on my own a lot outside of school because I just found her to be interesting and I liked her style of writing, which I like to think maybe informed how I wrote my college essay. Who knows? But I enjoyed her writing a lot and yeah, I think that was the one book, there might’ve been others that made it into other lists when they asked about in-school books too, because I liked a lot of her work.

GLEN: Yea, I mean, I would say, I would be shocked if it didn’t show up in the personal statement. You know when you’ve got kids who have actually read and learned about life because of the quality of their personal statements, those books give them language by which to name, identify, and develop those thoughts. So yeah, one hundred percent, it must’ve been. So, that is the sort of backwards plan. I’ve alluded to this: summers, the importance of summers in this. Summers are a key part because what we are trying to do is continually elevate, continually elevate towards “how do I amp this participation?” to get you to the most prestigious activities so that you can have rich intellectual activities or rich, engaging community activities where there’s enough happening where you’re challenged and you’re growing and you’re reflecting on it. So, the highest tier for when you’re, this is the summer before, sorry, the summer before senior year, the last thing that’ll actually go on your college applications senior year after you’ve gotten in, nothing matters. Just go have a grand time.

This summer is really important, and for any students who are in 10th grade who are going to 11th grade like, yeah, your summer has become work. They’re no longer fun. This one is if you’re getting into RSI, you’re getting into Telluride, you’re getting into Clarks Scholars programs, SIMR, these programs, if you can get into them, they’re harder to get into than Yale. They’re harder to get into than Stanford. Their acceptance rates are crazy low, and the people who you’re competing against are crazy competitive. If you can get that, that is that rubber stamp of, “Oh wow, this kid is on their track to being the next incredible researcher.” Any of these are our goal for 11th grade to have this real-world research experience where you’re doing that same level of research that you would be doing, honestly, and it’s like late college, grad school type research. That’s what they’re expecting you to be able to see and do.

10th grade, if we’re trying to get you to that, it should be that productive entry. They want to see that there’s some sort of project so that you can then report on that project, report what you learned and how you grew when you’re applying to these things. So any of these things are going to be a little bit more project based, right? You’re not necessarily doing research, but there is some sort of tangible outcome. So that’s the difference between RMP. If you’re Cali based, the research ventures program and SRA, that’s just way much more intense research in RMP than it is in SRA. Same school, but just a higher level of intensity there. We want those. And then in 9th grade, we want some more of these activities where you’re actually going to see if it’s an activity that you’re passionate about.

If you can’t get through a CTY course, or if you can’t get through a course at a community college, if you want to do a summer course at UCLA and you want to spend that money, that would be the time to do it in 9th grade. It’s not really worth it after that, because what we’re wanting to see is projects and then we’re wanting to see research. So, all of those courses, which you could also just do it online and get the same value in terms of colleges, can happen in 9th grade. They just want to see that you actually have something that you can then put on your application for these next ones and then continually climb because this is what you’re like, imagine this timeline also slanted, right? You’re getting better and better. So, Sue’s a real person. Well, yeah, this person.

Sue’s profile when she joined Prepory, we’re just getting her involved. We’re having her join band. “Okay, I’m interested in band. I might be interested in comedy. I’m exploring things. I’m reflecting a lot. I’m trying out with the food bank.” I’m seeing, “Okay, I’m actually liking the food bank.” “Okay, what do you like about the food bank? What do you like about the food bank? What is food insecurity? What are those things? Why does it matter?” Getting those things. Maybe she’s doing some readings on that. Maybe she’s reading about chemistry. Both of those books. Well, these were actual recommendations about The Disappearing Spoon, Napoleon’s Buttons, so you actually learn something about chemistry. We’ve identified these are real passions. She’s sticking with them. Great.

Let’s dive in and make sure that summer between 9th and 10th grade they’ve gone in for a music camp. They’ve got this internship where they’re doing more sustained volunteering. They’re getting to meet with people. They’ve got some sort of deeper experience. They took an EdX course. They didn’t pay for the UCLA course. They say, “I want to learn about chemistry.” Cool. They did that bigger project in the food bank. They’re like, “I actually don’t really care about food insecurity. Like it’s important. People should be doing it. It’s just not for me. I think I have a passion for something else.” Maybe it’s with like, “I met elderly people there.” I was like, “Why are these people, how are our elderly hungry? This feels like we’ve failed.” “Maybe from that, I might want to do something actually in a retirement home.” Let me do it on retirement. Okay. We’ve also got them to, from that Science Olympiad, they’ve really dived in, they’ve joined their studying. They won at districts, cool. They’re volunteering now. And from the chemistry, the conversations that we’ve continued to have about Olympiad, about their chemistry course that they’re in now, about their extra readings, we’re like, “Oh, your passion actually is in nuclear engineering.”

We’ve gone from chemistry, and we’ve started to narrow in on a more specific, so from that, we then applied to NC State nuclear engineering camp between the 10th and 11th grade. This is an intensive camp. They’re there, they’re studying. They’re realizing that they hate nuclear engineering. They tried and they failed. Cool, okay. We’ve learned that. We’ve also got accepted to a prestigious program. They don’t like business. They don’t like engineering. We can adapt from this failure. “I’ve learned that it is elements of chemistry that I like and I’m continuing to succeed in 11th grade with it, but really I’m noticing these things about the old people and what’s going on with their memory and how does that…” you notice this if you are a keen listener. This was the capstone project from earlier. “I’m starting to shadow these music therapists because I’m still interested in this thing that I’ve been doing since 9th grade.” And our jobs, as coaches, we start to weave this tapestry together.

We’re like, “Oh, let’s connect these dots here soon. How can we merge them to do something so that we have these things that by the summer, they’re actually at this prestigious summer camp where they’re doing the research on zebrafish—which are connected to Alzheimer’s? In case you were wondering. They published an article outside of that. They’re using music therapy in retirement homes. They’re not just talking about it. They’re actually trying it out with real music therapists. They’re publishing their music, and what do you know? That helped them to get accepted to Yale. That is our course of what we hope to be doing here. That is how we can ultimately help, which to Kennedy, and I’ll jump into some of these questions here.

KENNEDY: Thank you. I’ve been answering some of the questions in the chat. The remaining ones we can do live. I think there’s a lot of value in you, Glen, just discussing them. I think there’s a lot of overlap, in terms of theme, but I answered a few in written form. So yes, how can we help you? So, as I mentioned at the beginning, we work with students at all stages in this process, so 9th through 12th and transfer and grad students. How we work more specifically is by pairing you with your coach, and as Glen mentioned, this is sort of the person that’s going to be responsible for building your roadmap throughout the years in high school and guiding you through this exploration process that is going to be so key in building the theme throughout your application and demonstrating both your academic and personal passions.

GLEN: Sorry.

KENNEDY: That’s okay. You can go to the next slide. Yeah. Thank you. So how we’re structured in terms of work is our coaches work with our students live via Zoom. We do hour-long one-on-one advising sessions. At the younger stages, like 9th and 10th, it’s more so focused on the candidacy building, so like the summers, the passion projects, the other high value extracurriculars, identifying those and guiding students through this process of reflection, really honing in on their passions and building their narrative. And our programs also feature dedicated parent check-ins. So, opportunities for you guys to connect with your students’ coaches and get a sense of what they’re covering and ask questions to get a progress update. We also do unlimited essay and resume reviews, and for the extracurricular portion, that’s most relevant in terms of those applications, typically the more selective ones will have rigorous applications that in many ways mimic college apps and that they want essays and other materials to be submitted.

But this will, of course, still relate to the formal college applications once the students are in their senior year. We’ll also do our mock admissions Committee Review process, which is a space where our students are reviewed by our team of former AOs from schools like Columbia, Berkeley, NYU, Rice, places like that, to get sort of an insider perspective on how their applications and profile would be evaluated by a true admissions committee. And this is something we do for our younger students too, not just for our seniors. We do it in the spring, and it’s kind of like an additional checkpoint in the process. And ultimately, by working with Prepory, you have our full team support. Beyond your dedicated individual coach, you have access to the entire brain trust and coaches from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to get more insight into the college application process and just continue to be sharpened from different angles.

GLEN: Yeah. You want me to dive into some of these questions?

KENNEDY: Can you go to the next one?

GLEN: Next slide?

KENNEDY: Yeah. So just in case anyone has to hop off, I know we’re coming up on time, please scan the QR code to book your free initial consultation. If you do so, by tomorrow, you’ll be able to enroll in our next cohort of students, which will come up on Monday, August 25th. So that’d be when you’re able to get started working on this process, regardless of which grade you’re in. I’ll likely be the person on the call, so we can discuss your students’ profiles in a bit more depth, and I can give you perhaps some more tailored guidance and we can discuss how our program will be a strong fit for your family.

GLEN: One of the themes that I’m noticing coming up in some of these questions is the switch. “How do I find out these interests? How often does it happen that my interest switches?” Colleges know that your interests will likely change.

They are expecting them to change in college because you are coming into this university where you’re getting exposed to so much more, and they know. That’s why most colleges don’t even have you declare until later on, like sophomore year, because they know you’re going to get exposed to things. They realize you just haven’t gotten a Duke education yet. Then you learn about this this year, you’ll find it. So, that is understood that it might shift. The example kid that you saw, they shifted, they had this overall interest, but it’s shifted a number of times. Will they actually continue that in college? Colleges don’t know. They’re not going to back check, but what they see in that profile is a kid who has the ability to reflect on the “why” they shifted and that is the most important thing. There’s a reason why three of the six Common App statements allow you to reflect on a challenge you had, a failure you had, and how you grew from it because they know that this ability to understand how you put yourself out there, you tried something and then you pivoted, you grew from it, that’s one of those qualities on the top of that activity list or they’re looking for is so important for your success at college.

Now being able to understand your “why” as a 17-year-old or a 16-year-old or 15-year-old is really hard. They are asking for you to have, as I put this one in this chat, this high level of—what is the term—social emotional intelligence. How well do you understand who you are? Honestly, and kids, if you’re like, “I don’t know if I have a lot of that.” Yeah, the brain development isn’t there yet all the time. But the brain is a muscle, like anything else, and it requires practice. That is what our coaches are hired for because they demonstrate that ability and it is how they are trained and it is how they implement their practice over and over again: Is for you to get very good at answering the questions “why” a lot and getting help and answering what those whys are. So yeah, it is definitely okay for things to shift. It’s expected, but the learning alongside it is the key thing and that’s where we really shine and help you to create that narrative.

So that was on some of these questions on the “What happens when you switch?” “How are you amping up this participation?” Again, there are many ways to increase the quality of your activities. It’s making sure that you are having a quantitative impact on things, like that demonstrated success, that you’re diving into the field and having results. So, whatever the club is, whatever the mission of that club is, you have a deep understanding of what it’s trying to do, why you are a part of it, and you are showing somehow that you have taken it to the next level. If that’s engineering, it’s like getting to the next level in a contest, it’s applying your club and getting to the next level of building a better robot and it’s just better progression there and learning about how. If it’s a science club, it’s winning contests and being able to understand how you got there. It’s demonstrated success plus reflection. That’s the key, sort of, ingredients for meaningful activity.

In terms of the Common App, you can add more than 10. Typically, though it typically doesn’t move the needle. If it wasn’t important enough in your own mind to add it to the top 10, it’s probably not going to be the key thing that shifts you from getting in to not. We will often encourage students to put something in there about just more than often about, it’s like adding in extra characters to explain the most important activity that you had above. I need to give a little bit more information on that just so it shows that interest, but that’s very in the weeds. Honestly, the key thing is to zoom in on major activity in each of those buckets and then do that really well and then have some supplemental summer activities around it. That’s your key to success there. Are there any other questions that we really want to uplift here? We know we’re at the top of the hour.

KENNEDY: The one that’s about the son who’s interested in engineering, it’s Kuma Friedman at the bottom, that very specific case. I think it’d be interesting.

GLEN: So yeah, I mean with that one it’s going to be a question. This is where the sports come in can be a challenge and weighing what his deeper passions are. What is he really trying to do? What are his long-term goals and is there a way to make basketball…? Is basketball the core identity of it? If so, why? What are you trying to do with that? That requires deeper assessment. And if it’s just like, “Oh, basketball and robotics, these interfere in terms of those competitions.” The real thing is then the summer. How can you be using that? And if basketball is taking over that time, then it’s having some difficult conversations about “What do you want to do with your life, kid?” “Do you want to be a basketball player the rest of your life or do you want to also make some time for engineering?” And that can be hard, but it’s where it’s helpful that someone other than mom or dad is saying it. It can be a useful thing because honestly, their psychological development right now is that they’ll listen to someone else more than you, frequently at this age. All of the kids are nodding “yes,” and all the parents are aghast in the chat right now, but that’s the way it is. It’s just brain development. So, we can have those conversations with kids, if necessary. It’s a hard conversation, but necessary.

KENNEDY: Yeah, I feel like I have it a lot in initial consultations and my short answer on it that I think actually fits into this time is I usually say if your long-term goal is to go to a top school and your long-term goals are academic sports, we have to reframe sports. That’s just a conversation you have to happen in high school and the sooner you have it, the better. It’s actually really sad. I’ve met with a lot of rising seniors in the past maybe three weeks who have spent the first three years of high school heavily pursuing a sport that they’re not being recruited for and it really limits your options even if your grades are strong and you have strong SATs because you’ll be competing against students who have the extracurricular profile and that’s going to become challenging because you’re not in the athletic pool if you’re not being recruited. And while it’s great, it’s just not really enough at these top schools and just what we’re seeing and how steep the competition is at this point.

GLEN: Yeah, yeah, it is, and it requires you to be very purposeful on these. For any of the unanswered questions we didn’t get to, I highly recommend signing up for a consultation. Honestly, Kennedy is that first person that will be able to give you initial insight, or anyone else on the team about, what to do and ultimately how we can help you to be very strategic within it. Most of these questions about, I mean, they’re existential questions about life and what you’re trying to do with them and why you’re trying to do them, they can’t get answered in a one-hour webinar. They can’t get answered in a two-hour webinar. This is why it takes a lot of time because life is life, and that’s what we get to be partners with is you getting to be determining what that life looks like. So, I highly encourage you all to sign up for that next consultation and hopefully you get to work with one of our incredible coaches to do that deep dive.

KENNEDY: Absolutely.

GLEN: Thank you. I do recognize that if we continue to stay on, people will continue to ask questions and then no one’s going to leave even though we all got stuff to do. So, we will end it here. Appreciate your time, Kennedy, appreciate all your insight from Columbia and just you as a person.

KENNEDY: Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, please feel free to scan the QR code on your way out.

GLEN: Bye!