SAM LUBY: Just about.

DANIEL: He is an absolute admissions guru. Worked in admissions at UC Berkeley and has just as much experience, if not a little bit more, than I do in the admissions world in terms of years. But I’ll let Sam share a little more about himself before we kick it off.

SAM LUBY: Thank you, Daniel. So, everybody, my name is Sam Luby. I’ll be running the webinar tonight, talking the nuts and bolts of passion projects and what they mean for admissions officers. This is my thirteenth undergraduate cycle, which is kind of wild. I’ve served as the head of university counseling for an IB World School. I’ve worked in admissions at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley. I teach college counseling at UCLA. And most importantly, I work with Prepory as a coach and a client success associate.

I’m really excited to be here and talk about this topic. It’s very timely — we’re starting the school year, getting ready, getting the cobwebs of summer off, and trying to enjoy the last bits of summer as we think about this upcoming academic year.

Tonight, we’re going to go through what makes a passion project meaningful, and especially for ninth and tenth graders, how to turn a genuine interest into a passion project. We’re also going to talk about types of passion projects that can strengthen an application and really how to develop this project as we go on, common pitfalls, and how to avoid them. We’ll show some examples and then do some live Q&A.

I do want to point out: we have a QR code on the screen. This is going to allow you to schedule an initial consultation with our team. I’ll periodically bring it up as a reminder, but I want to say right at the beginning — this is how you will get started working with us and working with a coach, and especially talking about your own passion project.

SAM LUBY: Getting into this main idea of what makes a passion project meaningful to admissions officers. We see this thrown around a lot on social media or with family members or even teachers at your school or your peers and friends — this idea of a passion project. The idea is that there are so many different features that could be counted as a passion project, mostly because holistic admission drives this idea that a passion project is very viable and changing and ever-moving. So to really understand this, we have to look at what admissions officers are looking for: academic ability, initiative, growth, leadership. Some of these are probably pretty familiar. But things like college intentionality and fit, commitment, community contribution — these are the kinds of things that get lost in the high school preparation process and the eventual passion project creation process, and something we want to be reminding you: a great way to demonstrate these features is through passion projects.

There’s going to be a lot of text on each of these slides, so feel free to take notes or screenshots. But for this one in particular — demonstrating passion projects in four clear ways. You want this related to your academic or professional goal. The ideal passion project is one you’re able to highlight in your application, in your essays, your activity list. You’re able to make a clear connection: ‘This is something I spent a lot of time building up in high school and here’s how it connects to what I want to do in the future.’

You need to have measurable impact. Doing it at the last minute right before the summer of your senior year is a hard way to have measurable impact. Doing it as a solo activity that’s really only for you can be nice, but it’s not going to hit the community contribution we’re looking for. The ideal passion project shows what kind of impact you can have — and you can literally use numbers to talk about what that impact looks like.

You also need to showcase growth — how it’s growth for you, for the project itself, and especially for the communities you impact. And then you want it to be dynamic. At its essence, you want to make sure your passion project is something unique to you, something you are genuinely passionate about, interested in doing, and that reflects your genuine interests, abilities, and characteristics.

DANIEL: Sam, if I could just add here on the measurable impact and showcasing growth. You mentioned how it’s so important that you’re doing this over a course that allows you to create that measurable impact and that maybe starting a passion project right before senior year isn’t the best idea.

I do want to share transparently: for students who are thinking about starting a passion project, ideally you are getting this started at freshman year or sophomore year, and at the absolute latest, January of eleventh grade. Otherwise, it’s really difficult and, frankly, unlikely that you’ll have enough measurable impact, enough runway to actually create that sustained year-over-year growth that admissions officers want to see and that makes your passion project authentic and compelling versus something that comes across as fabricated or only done because you want to get into a top school.

SAM LUBY: And we’ll talk a lot more about that with common pitfalls, but Daniel’s absolutely right — having that measurable impact is important. The last thing I’ll touch on: yes, we want this to be good for your application and have you ready for the admissions process. But having a passion project with measurable impact, goals, and showcased growth is good for you as a student. There’s a reason admissions officers want this — it demonstrates all those things I talked about in the slide before, but also because it shows actual preparation for college readiness, which is really what universities are looking for.

SAM LUBY: I’m going to share an example of one of my students. Lisa is a pseudonym, but she’s a student I worked with who just finished up this application season. I’ve broadly labeled her passion project as ‘the women’s sports advocate.’ The final result: she created a new volleyball club in her city that promoted women’s health and safety and women’s sports.

Steps one through five show a kind of order of operations of development. Starting with number one, in January of ninth grade — just wrapping up that first semester — she had an interest in sports management, leadership, and event planning. We talked about what she could be doing with that, quickly identified an issue in her community and in her own previous volleyball club, and then used that summer going into tenth grade to start working through the next steps.

She ended up launching a club with 150-plus members and a coach. She learned the nuts and bolts of the economics of starting a club — how to actually legally do it — but at the same time how to combat toxic sports culture. She drafted legal documents. She had ownership of it. She really took it to be an experience that she owned, and it was wonderful — the different opportunities and communities that came out of it that she impacted.

If I had asked her at that time if that’s how she thought it would end up, it probably would not have been. She wanted to do culinary science or had a lot of different ideas. But she had this issue in her own community, wanted to solve it, took initiative, and we worked together to figure out how to actually do that.

SAM LUBY: The next slides show how she explained it in her application. This is one of the UC essays — PIQ number seven. She ended up getting into UC Berkeley, so it worked out for her. I’m not going to read through the whole essay, but it’s an example of her ability to contextualize her passion project — what she did, what she learned, the development of it. It took many drafts to get to this point. But you aren’t able to write an essay like this if it doesn’t have that long measurable impact, sustained commitment, challenges and iterations you have to work through, and failures as you’re developing your passion project.

She was able to demonstrate it via her essay and her activity list. These are the two key parts in your application where you can demonstrate passion projects — essays and the activity list. It’s not limited to there. You have a full resume you can submit. You have recommendation letters. You can do interviews. But these are the two key spaces.

Key takeaways: passion projects show up in activities and essays. They reflect a genuine interest. You can get values and passions out of them. A lot of the best projects have multiple iterations. With Lisa in particular, we weren’t able to get a club right away. She realized all these legal issues, and both of us had no idea that complication would come. She had to get a resource at her school, and I helped her talk through the questions to address with the teacher in order to get past the hurdles and find the right resources.

They’re also not done alone. Co-founding, doing something together with your friends is awesome. Universities want you to be doing that. Don’t feel like this has to be a lone-wolf experience. We want you engaged with other people.

And lastly, and maybe most importantly, you have a quantifiable impact on a topic, an issue, a community that matters to you. That’s what we’re trying to demonstrate: we have something we’re passionate about, we found a way to tie in our academic or professional interest to pursue that issue, and then we show how we made a difference. Lisa did a great job with that.

DANIEL: Sam, if I could chime in on two parts. First, the point about passion projects not having to be done alone. I think this is really important, and I want to emphasize it because, especially at smaller private schools or really competitive public schools, students and parents can be apprehensive about working with other students. You are sort of competing with your peers for seats at maybe the same schools. But around passion projects, and especially for academically ambitious students, being able to collaborate with other students and work with other people is so important for admissions officers. They want to see that students can orchestrate things with their peers, that they can operate things at scale. It’s very hard to demonstrate that you’re a collaborator if you don’t have projects like this where you’re working toward — and I would argue leading — other people toward a shared mission.

And on the multiple iterations piece: a lot of times students come to us with really big ideas for passion projects. They say, ‘I’m a freshman or an eighth grader, and I want to solve world hunger.’ And we say, ‘Okay, that’s a very big challenge. But how do we distill that into something you can legitimately achieve and break it down into much smaller milestones?’ That’s such an important part of the work we do with students.

SAM LUBY: That leads into what we see for younger grades — turning a genuine interest into a passion project and the initial steps of development.

First, your passion projects can demonstrate intellectual curiosity. Here are three examples of final results, and you can see in the parentheses which sort of major they connect to. For all three, this is not what they originally started on — that’s what we mean about building up iterations.

In particular, the last one — building the algorithm with differentiated diseases with 90% accuracy. That student’s whole interest was in computational studies — a coding enthusiast who liked building websites and video games. In ninth and tenth grade, he tried to build his own video game and did DigiPen, an online coding camp and workshop, where he was teaching students video game development. It was really cool.

Then in eleventh grade, we talked seriously about majors and where computer science might lead. We discussed computational biology and how the intersection of computation and coding is vast and unlimited, especially with generative AI. He went through computational biology, and it hooked him. He took a free course over winter break in eleventh grade, I helped him apply to research programs that following spring, and then he just ran with it. I read the abstract of his research paper and thought, ‘I don’t know half of this,’ but he was able to build up to it — starting from just wanting to get better at coding for computer games.

He still talks about the video game creation in his application — still very valuable. But through the iterations, he arrived at a flagship project attached to a major interest. That’s how passion projects can demonstrate intellectual curiosity.

SAM LUBY: Passion projects that center community are also very effective. Here are more examples from previous Prepory students. As Daniel mentioned, we have a treasure trove of data on what previous students have done. We have a huge coaching roster that gives feedback. It’s a great collaborative effort where we hear about your student’s passions and go back to our larger team to see if anyone’s had experiences with similar passions and get ideas. You are working one-on-one with your coach, but you absolutely have support from the Prepory ecosystem at large.

For community impact, there are great focuses for your passion project. The community impact is pretty incredible — we’re seeing a lot of numbers in these examples. Quantifying impact is really important. But a lot of the time, your passion projects carry blending characteristics. Not only do you have intellectual curiosity, but you can find community impact as well.

These three examples of community impact can all be related to a major. The first related to public health or sociology. The second to coding, computer science, or potentially a premed pathway. The third to policy, social sciences, or even communications and leadership. There are a lot of ways to align your passion projects with your major and academic interest while having great results in different areas.

DANIEL: Sam, I actually want to jump in here because I think your first and third examples are a great indication of what passion projects can also do. I remember the third student — I think I sat in his committee review. His profile was actually — and a lot of students probably have profiles like this — that he was interested in both political science and environmental science, and he had what felt like a competing profile. When you read his application, it was really hard to figure out: are you a political science kid, or are you an engineering kid?

This passion project was actually a way for us to combine those interests and say, ‘I’m a public policy student whose main interest is environmental policy.’ And I think that is so attractive to an admissions committee. When you’re an eleventh-grade student and you know that you’re not just interested in political science but specifically in environmental policy, and you’re applying to a school because it has a really special environmental policy department — that is so helpful for an admissions committee. They can say, ‘You really want to come to our school because you know we have this amazing program, and you’ve demonstrated that you’re really interested in this niche part of public policy.’

And on the authenticity point — how do you present this as something an admissions committee can legitimately believe in? When it’s that specific, it’s so convincing. It’s not a passion project they’ve seen before. It’s this really niche combination of interests. That’s a big thing we work toward, especially with students who have differing or competing academic subject areas throughout their profile.

SAM LUBY: I love that. A hundred percent to all of it. Two quick things. One, it’s AI-proof. You can’t really fake this. By having that authenticity and being able to articulate the specifics, it’s really going to stand out.

The other thing: this is not organic. We would like to think all of our students are perfect and have amazing ideas and know exactly what to do, and they just run with it. You have to work with them. As a coach, you really have to help motivate them, scaffold it for them, give them ideas — sharing links, doing a little research yourself on the town council, what things have already happened. It’s necessary. Not because the student is a bad student or unmotivated, but most of them haven’t done something like this, and we’re giving them the tools and the knowledge of how they can do it. A lot of the time, they don’t have the confidence that they can do stuff like this, and we really want to help bring that out, show models, and help make the project come alive. It’s very powerful for the application and powerful for their own learning journey.

SAM LUBY: The last thing I want to talk about is this idea of dynamism. I really like this slide because it shows that authentic sense of self, but also that passion projects can be related to hobbies and interests. You can use your interest in music or calligraphy, or maybe something quirky like memorizing 50 national anthems in their native tongue. One of our coaches just loves this topic and the student who did this.

We share it because we want to make sure you understand what we’re trying to do: empower your student. If their passion project is related to hobbies or something they do in their free time or something that doesn’t seem professional, we can really help advance it and find ways to give it a great story — help them build it out and turn it from ‘this is just a fun thing I do’ to ‘you actually have an Etsy shop and literally make money as a high school student selling your homemade greeting cards.’ That is just such a great story and a great passion project.

Key takeaways: visible outcomes, very quantitative. Projects have different aspects of growth and development combined — curiosity and community. The last one I want to highlight is legacy and next steps. This is so underrated in the application process — if you’re able to articulate what’s coming in twelfth grade for your project and what the legacy is. Who’s going to carry it on when you go off to university? What does that look like?

One of my students this year had this really beautiful essay about starting science fairs in his elementary community, creating a trainer handbook for high school students to learn how to run these science fairs, and making it an annual tradition at two of the elementary schools. That’s legacy. And that is the stuff that gets universities really excited, because they’re all about legacy, culture, tradition, and community. You demonstrating that in your passion project is super valuable and great material for your application.

SAM LUBY: What are the types of passion projects that can strengthen an application? A lot of text here for you to read on your own, but as Daniel and I have been going back and forth about — it has a lot of depth and follow-through. Starting from the bottom up: it’s tangible, there’s measurable impact, it connects to your academic direction, it’s self-started initiative, and it fills a gap in your activity profile.

Daniel was touching on the idea of ‘Am I a political science or an environmental science kid?’ This is also really helpful for sports students or students with a clear music interest that takes up a lot of time. We don’t want to tell you, ‘Three sports is way too much — drop one and find something else.’ Instead, we’re trying to help you develop a dimension that’s not covered in your other activities. Passion projects are a great way to fill that gap and make up for the time spent in other places.

DANIEL: I want to give a quick rule of thumb here, which is what I tell every family when I’m explaining passion projects. All passion projects are four things.

Number one: they are novel — unique, something that hasn’t been done before. We got a Q&A question asking, ‘Can I publish a book?’ I was honest and said this alone isn’t a passion project because many students do this. If we guided you toward just publishing that book, it’s insufficiently novel to be authentic or impressive to an admissions committee.

Number two: all passion projects are independent. They’re self-started, initiative-driven. You are starting this from the ground up — maybe not a whole organization, but at least a very particular initiative within an organization.

Number three: they are multi-year. In order for this to be multi-year, the latest you can start a passion project is eleventh grade. The earlier you start in high school, the larger this project will be and the more opportunity you’ll have.

Number four, and the most important quality: impact. All passion projects should be impact-oriented. If it’s a thing you’re doing on your own that no one connects with, that doesn’t serve anyone else, that no one else reads or experiences — that alone isn’t a passion project. The impact piece of bringing in other community members, benefiting others, and having others be part of this experience is really important. And that’s fundamentally because universities are communities, and that is what they’re looking to assess. How will you be an active member of our community? The best way to prove that is by being an active member in your existing community — your high school, your school district, your county, your church, whatever it might be.

SAM LUBY: I like that a lot. And I feel like we’re sharing a lot of information about what a passion project is, and there are a lot of different things. That’s on purpose — it should be a lot of things. It’s meant to be robust and dense. We can squeeze a lot out of this as far as essays and activities and main ideas and values and purpose, because it is multiple iterations, self-driven, and shows a lot of different values and characteristics.

We’re happy you’re here because it means you’re taking the first step in thinking about this, but you’ve got to get going. It’s really important because there’s a lot of work to be doing.

SAM LUBY: How do you develop a project that shows initiative and growth over time? Let’s look at a student example from ninth to twelfth grade. I want you to read through it on your own — I’m not going to go through every single box. What I want to point out is what we did as a firm to help this student.

He joined in ninth grade, getting involved in a lot of different things. One of the things his coach specifically did was recommend joining a local food bank to get some volunteering hours. As a ninth grader, you can’t really do too much, but ensuring there’s something you can be doing is important.

That upcoming summer, he ended up thinking food science might be interesting. He continued volunteering and did a summer camp on it. In tenth grade, he doesn’t like food science. He realizes it’s limiting in a lot of ways but still likes the idea of volunteering and seeing the makeup of different sciences. Through conversations with his Prepory coach, he identifies an interest in neuroscience — more so than food science.

Because of that, we help align him with great summer programs. He attended a bioengineering and brain science camp, found out he really liked this topic, and grew his involvement at the library. You’re seeing the steady progression in all of his activities. There’s not a super clear passion project yet, but the pillars are getting built up — done with his coach, seeing what he likes, what he doesn’t like, identifying programs and opportunities.

Eleventh grade: he gets great Olympiad results for nationals, really starts to lean into neuroscience and specifically cognitive psychology, really liking the technical science side and seeing the chemistry aspects come alive. We could see hints of that back in ninth grade with the food science interest.

The summer going into twelfth grade, we’re doing a research camp, finding ways to do published research, and really making that his clear passion project. At the same time, he’s working on his music on Spotify, working with his coach to understand what makes sense for him. And he ended up getting into Yale.

We share this because it’s an up-and-down process. There are going to be highs and lows as you develop your passion project. Absolutely the case with this student — switching academic interests and focuses — but there are pillars being built throughout, sustained and worked on through his coach to understand what he should be spending time on and how to pivot. Then he had this really clear research output where he got to participate at the camp, work with other students, do group projects, publish a paper. This doesn’t have to be the passion project for every student, but it really worked out for him. And he’s pretty happy at Yale, so that obviously worked out too.

The key takeaway is that it is a process. There are multiple iterations going into building who you are and what you’re really interested in, and it takes time to get to that final result.

DANIEL: What I think is really important that Sam is sharing here, and what makes Prepory so special in this admissions process, is that a lot of other consultancies — you might come to them and say, ‘I have a freshman, this is the school I want to go to,’ and they’ll say, ‘Okay, here is a checklist so you can build a profile that’s winning for that school.’ Maybe that works for those consultancies, but that’s not our process.

As Sam said, we are really focused on getting to know your student and what their actual interests are. And more importantly, I saw this in the Q&A — someone asked, ‘What if we don’t know what we want to do?’ That’s our job to help you figure out. And the story we start to tell in your admissions process is an authentic, real story of who you are. The reason you are competitive is because your profile is authentic and honest versus fabricating a story that isn’t you or applying to a major you don’t care about because, supposedly, a certain major is less selective at a particular school.

This exercise that Sam just walked you through is not only important for being a competitive applicant but is the reason our students, when they get admitted to these amazing schools — like in this example, Yale — don’t change their major. They know what career they want, and they really understand themselves more deeply than the average 18-year-old because we’ve gone through so many of these exercises, getting students to build a profile that is representative of who they are.

SAM LUBY: That was spot-on, Daniel. And we have to say that out loud because it’s clearly very important to all of us in this space. We’re trying to wholesomely develop your student and figure out what those answers are. Frankly, it would have been really easy to just stick with the food science thing. He already did it in ninth and tenth grade — just run with it, even if you’re not super interested. Make a passion project out of it. It just wouldn’t have been authentic. It wouldn’t have been that journey that’s so necessary.

SAM LUBY: Okay, so how are we going to do this? Backwards planning is going to be really key. It comes through having your end goals in mind and then, with help from your coach, understanding how to build through that — identifying long-term objectives, understanding what situational activities you can be doing, and assessing how you’re going to get prepared to meet those objectives. That self-assessment that we’re helping you through in those first couple sessions: what are you interested in, what values you have, what are your goals.

I like to tell families in the orientation process that the first session, your coach is going to have 837 questions for you. It’s really because they want to dig in deep and figure out what kind of things you can be doing.

From there, we’re trying to break it down into manageable goals. We’ve had the long-term objectives — now let’s break it down into short-term objectives. What are mini projects to be going through? Who can you start getting to join you? What resources can you acquire to prepare for this process? Using SMART goals or SWOT analysis to understand what your project’s going to look like — teaching students how to do that skill, how to do these analyses, how to go through the planning process, while at the same time getting feedback from your coach on direction.

SAM LUBY: Additional tips and tricks: starting early, aligning your values, stepping outside of your comfort zone. A couple new ones I want to highlight.

Don’t be afraid of being quirky, nerdy, or weird. I really like to highlight this for students — celebrate your weirdness. Universities want to hear that. I have a student this year who makes salsas. He grows vegetables in a garden. He enters salsa competitions. He’s exactly who you think he is — he’s vegan, he’s granola, he wears thrift shop clothes. It’s great. It’s his personality, and it comes through in his application.

What we’ve been working on is his passion project to actually enter farmers’ markets, try to build a business, and enter competitions. It took a little coaching to give him confidence and help identify things in his neighborhood to get started. But it was great — this hobby that really became a passion project. He wants to study environmental science, so it aligned nicely. All because we’re celebrating that he loves gardening.

Fail big instead of writing safe ‘challenge faced’ essays. You need to face challenges. You have to understand that you’re going to lose motivation for the passion project at some point in this process. You’re going to face walls or get told you can’t do something, and that’s where you come back with your coach, go back to the drawing board. We’ve seen a lot of these roadblocks in the past, so there aren’t really any surprises. You’re working one-on-one with your coach, but you have the whole Prepory team as well.

Using tech tools is also really important — getting familiar with Google Calendar, email, generative AI, and how to use them. We’re encouraging this in our coaching sessions as we develop passion projects. It’s part of being an adult.

SAM LUBY: Common pitfalls. We started talking about this earlier, and now it’s good to make it really clear.

Choosing something just for the resume: these admissions officers read so many activities and essays and applications that it’s really easy to tell when it’s not a genuine passion or when there wasn’t enough depth. Luckily, by working with your Prepory coach, we’ll tell you right off the bat. We also have a lot of experience with this and are the first line of defense.

Starting too late — we’ve hit on this a lot. If there’s one takeaway, it’s that you need to start early.

Making sure you have clear outcomes. You may not know today what that measurable outcome will be in two years, but you can have a decent game plan or options available that you’re working through with your coach.

Abandoning it midway. It’s almost guaranteed you’re going to lose motivation or face a challenge. Abandoning it means you’ve given up on pursuing projects entirely — not communicating with your coach or making tangible progress. There’s a difference between taking pauses, stepping back, or shifting initiative versus just falling through.

And confusing busy with impactful. This comes up a lot with students who are in 17 different things and hyper-involved. Doing all these small different tasks, contributing to different activities — it’s great exploration. We want you to see your fit. But we’re going to help you narrow down where your focus should be, especially as it relates to your passion project. You only need a handful of outcomes to make it impactful. You don’t need seven different things.

SAM LUBY: How can Prepory help? Here’s one of our students — you can read their academic profile, which is quite strong. Member of the crew team, founded a design club, completed a summer internship. These are all things we’re making sure get into their profile as we go along. The challenge was she didn’t really know how to set up her college list to work for her educational aspirations and how to accentuate her activities, extracurriculars, and passion project to align with that.

We helped with her writing, crafted her portfolio, made sure her college list was solid. These are just a handful of things we can do with your students, and the outcomes speak for themselves.

The thing I want to highlight is that 94% — we’re really focused on helping to ensure your student is admitted into one of their top five schools, because ultimately it’s all about best fit. It’s something we’re really proud of.

DANIEL: Thanks, Sam. So I want to talk a little bit about what it is we do here at Prepory. I saw this question come up earlier in the Q&A — someone asked, ‘Are we a passion project consulting company?’ The answer is that we are a college admissions counseling company. We work with students from eighth grade all the way through PhD applicants — law school, medical school, graduate admissions. The majority of what we do is supporting high school students applying to undergraduate programs. Passion projects is a part of what we do, especially for our eighth- through eleventh-grade students working on developing a winning admissions profile, but it’s not all of what we do.

We do comprehensive college admissions counseling. We help students identify what schools they want to apply to, what their academic and career interests are, help them set up plans for SAT and ACT, help them apply to competitive summer programs, and of course develop winning passion projects — taking a project from an idea to something with quantitative, measurable impact.

All of our programs include one-on-one advising sessions — whether that’s to take your really big idea and turn it into something more bite-sized that a ninth grader can legitimately achieve in a one-month period, or to talk about ‘I don’t know what subject I want to pursue’ and complete aptitude assessments and explore careers together.

Every student has a dedicated college admissions coach. Sam mentioned this earlier — he works with a handful of students every year to personally guide them through this process. And because parents really care about this process — you are likely funding their college education and, of course, funding Prepory if you’d work with us — we set up parent meetings so that you stay in the loop. Dinner-table conversation doesn’t have to become ‘Did you launch your passion project yet?’ — which is probably not fun for you and definitely not fun for your kids.

And then that mock committee application process: we actually recreate admissions committees with our team of former admissions officers to act as a point of escalation for reviewing your student’s applications before they hit submit. This isn’t something we only do for twelfth-grade students — we start committee review from ninth grade on. We create mock admissions simulations even for ninth graders to say, ‘If you were applying today, what would these eight other people — who aren’t your coach, who don’t know you as well as the person you see every other week — think about you?’ Based on their feedback, you and your coach work together to level up and get even more competitive.

And of course, unlimited essay and resume reviews. You are often submitting 15 to 30, 40 essays depending on what schools you’re applying to. Making sure that, as Sam said, this is a very iterative process — we go through many essay drafts to make sure the stories you’re submitting are the most compelling ones. Our program includes unlimited essay edits. That’s a general overview. Of course, it’s customized by grade level and what your student’s needs are.

SAM LUBY: Great. At this point, I think we can still do a live Q&A — we still have some time. But ultimately, thank you for joining us. We have a QR code here for you again to schedule a consultation, get your questions answered by our expert team, and get started in your own process. Thank you all for joining. Really appreciate it.

DANIEL: Thank you, Sam. I want to kick off by taking this first question. Someone asked, ‘There are so many different education consulting companies doing what we do — what makes us stand out? Why should you choose Prepory?’

There are so many reasons, but I’ll share maybe my two favorites. First, as I mentioned, a lot of consultancies — I’d argue most — are fabricating versions of the same student. You want to go to this school, and they say, ‘This is arguably the least competitive major at Brown, so we’re going to pretend to be this major, and when you get there, you’ll transfer.’ Sometimes that works — sometimes that is a strategy that can get your student in. But that’s only half the battle.

We are so much more focused on developing full students — helping our students from ninth and tenth grade figure out who they are, what they care about, what kinds of careers they want to have. Myself, I changed my major probably five times in undergrad. I was a biomedical science major — obviously I’m not a doctor. But that’s because I didn’t have a Prepory coach who really challenged me to figure out that I really liked building communities and working with people, and that biomedical science wasn’t for me. If I’d had a Prepory coach help me realize that early on, I would have gone to a school that was a much better fit.

Second: we simply cannot be out-cared. We argue that we are the most trusted college admissions consulting company in our industry. I’m going to have Rebekah, who’s backstage, drop a link in the chat to our Trustpilot. These are third-party verified reviews from families who’ve worked with us. And the single biggest overarching theme is, ‘These people really cared about my family. They really cared about my student. They really helped them figure out who they are, and that’s the reason my kid got into Brown, Yale, UT Austin, UF, Emory, whatever your student’s goals might be.’ Those are probably the two biggest differentiators that are my favorites.

SAM LUBY: I’ll just add really quickly — I believe in all those things. All of us counselors on the team have our origin story of why we got into this. But the biggest thing to me is the community that Prepory provides. You are working with your coach and your Prepory team, but it’s really the entire organization behind you — whether it’s helping your coach get ideas and feedback or the mock application review.

We’re really different because it is a very together company. A lot of firms in this industry are lone wolves — someone who’s been a specialist in a really high-level role for decades and comes in with their experience. Those can be really good counselors. But with Prepory, what you’re getting is the entire community behind you and a lot of different interests and backgrounds. The cohesiveness of it is really nice.

DANIEL: I agree, Sam. And I want to address another question I’m seeing a lot. People are asking, ‘Is policy advocacy considered a passion project? I’m interested in my culture — I’m Lebanese — is this a passion project? Or dance, or all of these different things?’

The truth is, and I hope we highlighted this through our examples: everything to some degree can be considered a passion project. Your passion project can be about Hindi, about your Lebanese culture, about things related to orthopedic surgery if that’s something you’re interested in. But what’s really important is what I mentioned. A passion project is novel and unique — so if it’s about orthopedic surgery, great, but now the question is how do we make that novel and unique? It has to be multi-year. It has to be impact-oriented — you have to engage with other people, and many people have to contribute or receive benefits. And it has to be self-started.

There’s no single thing that could disqualify your passion project unless it’s not multi-year — like, ‘I’m going to do this one event one time for my community.’ That alone isn’t a passion project, unless you’ve maybe worked for four years to put that event together, and even then you could probably do a lot more than just one event in four years. You really can make your passion project about a ton of different topics.

SAM LUBY: I would say, Daniel, that’s a pretty novel answer, because most firms wouldn’t say that. Most firms would have a very boilerplate response — ‘This is a passion project, and here are the objectives, and if you’re interested in this major, here are your three passion project ideas.’ And it’s just so limiting. Not only is it not strategic because it’s not novel or original, but students rarely buy into it. They aren’t motivated to work through it. They’re not being educated and learning how to see a project through and put their ideas into action. So it really can be anything, in a lot of ways.

DANIEL: I agree, Sam. I think that brings us to 9:05 p.m. Eastern time. Both Sam and I actually have two tiny little babies — they’re really close in age. Sam has, I think, a four-year-old.

SAM LUBY: And two.

DANIEL: I’ve got a three-year-old and a one-year-old. We are going to be wrapping up our night to put our kids to sleep. But our QR code to schedule an initial consultation is on the screen. If you enjoyed tonight’s webinar, if you have really specific questions about how we can support your family throughout the process, please go ahead and scan that QR code to connect with a member of our team who can individually get to know your student, make specific recommendations, and help you understand what Prepory does throughout this process. Thank you again, everyone, for being here. Really enjoyed getting to know everyone, and a big thank you to you, Sam, for sharing all of your knowledge and genius with us tonight.

SAM LUBY: Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it, Daniel.