Leadership Roles That Give Students a Competitive Edge in College Admissions

KATIE: That’s fantastic.

SAM: Okay, great. So, I’m going to go to the first slide. This is our introduction slide. So, good evening, everybody. My name is Sam Luby. I am a Client Success Associate here at Prepory. I’m also a coach and I’ll do a little bit of introduction here in a second, but tonight we’re talking about leadership roles, so specifically, leadership roles that give students a competitive edge in college admissions. I’m really excited to go through tonight’s conversation just because leadership has been shown empirically to be really conducive to college success and college readiness, and that’s ultimately what we all want from you here at Prepory, is not only to get admitted to your top university and be really excited about that, but to find success at that university. So, I will be hosting tonight’s conversation. I’m also joined by Katie, which I’ll let her introduce herself here in a second.

We are going to be doing an introduction about Prepory a little bit, but mostly about this topic. We do have an active Q&A that will be going, so you guys are welcome to ask questions in the chat for that. That will be intermittently answered, but I’m hoping to save some time towards the end to do a little bit of live Q&A, if that makes sense. So, we’re really excited to get started. Just a little bit about me, like I said, I am a Client Success Associate, so I work with all of our families here at Prepory. I am also a coach, so I do work with students. I’ve been doing college admissions for a little over a decade now, both as an in-school counselor and also as an independent counselor. And I’ve also worked in admissions at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, and I’m currently finishing my PhD in higher education policy at Florida State University. So, really excited to go through this topic specifically, just because this is kind of my study area. It is how to find success in university and college readiness, and leadership is going to be a really big deal. But first I do want to give just a little introduction, shout out to who is Prepory, and with that I am going to pass it over to Katie. So, Katie, we would love to hear a little bit about you and then about Prepory in general.

KATIE: Absolutely glad to be here with you, Sam, tonight and with everyone in the chat, I’ll be in there answering questions as well. And if you book an initial consultation with Prepory at the end of the webinar or on our website, you’re very likely to get on the phone with me and I’d love to talk to you and answer really specific questions about who you are, your specific profile, your questions about leadership, or anything else at all. I am a Senior Enrollment Manager here at Prepory and me or my team would love to talk to you. So, a little bit more about Prepory. We are a college admissions counseling firm, so we work with students 9th, 10th, and 11th and 12th grade all the way through the process when it comes to profile development, thinking about exploring the areas that you’re interested in inside the classroom, outside of the classroom, and how you build on that to really stand out in the college admissions process and make you competitive for the top schools that so many of you mentioned you are interested in, in the poll.

We have been doing this work for over a decade. We’ve helped over 14,000 students, so we have a lot of data and a lot of knowledge to share with you both in this presentation and hopefully beyond. We have used this expertise to help students get accepted to all kinds of different schools. Here are some of the many. In just this last admission cycle, we had acceptances to all Top 50 schools in the country and you’re also seeing a lot of wonderful Florida schools represented here. We’re having an in-person event as well coming up that we will talk about a little bit later. So, whether you’re in Florida, looking at Florida schools, in particular, or all across the country, we have a lot of ideas for how to help you achieve those goals.

SAM: I may or may not have influenced FSU going right in the middle there. So, “Go Noles!” Thank you for that Katie, really appreciate that. So, we’ll talk a little bit more about Prepory later on in the conversation, but I definitely want to get to our agenda in tonight’s conversation, which is about leadership. So, we’re going to look at why leadership is probably the most important admissions quality, why leadership matters, what leadership looks like, how to do leadership, and then with Prepory, how can Prepory support you in this leadership process and communicate your leadership expertise in the admission cycle, and then we’ll kind of end with a Q&A. As we said though, we do have a live Q&A going that we do have a couple of team members including Katie, answering. I am realistically not going to be answering and looking at it right away, but Katie, do interrupt me if there is a good question or a good topic to get at.

SAM: So, I’m going to dive right into it. Leadership as the most important admissions quality. We really do believe that, I think, in a lot of different senses, mostly because that’s what universities tell us. So, this is an actual screenshot from the UC Berkeley website as far as how they do holistic admissions. When I worked in admissions at UC Berkeley, these are the qualities, you can see the screenshot here, that we would be looking for and literally have a rubric to score your application on these qualities. What’s the first one? Leadership ability. Leadership is absolutely essential in the admissions process. You need to be able to communicate it and showcase why you’re a leader and what that actually looks like. So, it is a very important quality. Of course, every university kind of has different metrics and different ways to score holistic admissions and what they’re looking for, but we can confidently say that leadership is going to be included in pretty much every holistic admissions evaluation.

So, we’re going to get into why leadership is going to be so important, but it’s seen as the most important quality to communicate in the admissions process, but it’s defined in a lot of different ways and it speaks to a lot of different places of your character and your values and the progressions you’ve had in high school in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. And really your interests, right? It’s hard to be a leader in something you’re not actually interested in. And so, it’s a great kind of tool to use to communicate what that actually looks like. With communication, though, it is difficult to communicate and there are a lot of considering differences in the opportunities you can have in leadership and what that style looks like, impact, importance. For my parents in the room, we have all seen different kinds of leadership in the workplace at different schools that our students go to.

We know leadership comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. So yes, it is the most important quality, but it’s kind of hard to define in a lot of ways. So, let’s get into why leadership actually matters in this process. I’m going to be using two sources tonight to really talk about this. So, the first one is from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the Making Caring Common project. It’s been going on for about a decade. It’s a way to introduce equity and ethics into the college admissions process and college readiness process. They very much highlight leadership as an important quality when it comes to the college readiness process and transition from high school to university. The Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program is also a reference we’re using tonight from Stanford University. This is one of the most impactful and competitive scholarship programs in the country, maybe even globally honestly, and talking about why they see leadership as being so important.

So, let’s talk about these things, why it actually matters. The first one is just going to be character development. We’ve all seen leadership in different students and adults and what that looks like, but it really is going to reveal a lot of important traits to be a really strong leader. Things like resilience, initiative, integrity, these are qualities that are going to communicate future success, and so it really matters to have leadership in your application because you want these characteristics to be shining. It also talks about just your impact and influence. Universities want students that are going to be successful at their university. I like to tell my students all the time what universities are looking for is to admit students where after they graduate from the university, they’re on the homepage of the university as a successful alumnus.

A lot of the time that’s coming from leadership. And so, leadership is about making a difference. We’re trying to look at ways of how you can influence your communities and drive impactful and meaningful change. And so, leadership is really important because it’s showcasing your ability to make an impact and have an influence in whichever spaces you are influencing. It also shows a lot of values in action. So, what we mean by this is that you are not stationary in this process, right? Leadership is a very active role that you’re consistently doing, and so it demonstrates a lot of values as far as service and equity and collaboration. These things again, are going to be really valued highly by universities themselves and admission officers because they want students who are ready to hit the ground running when it comes to university and ready to get involved and to contribute and find different ways to collaborate and make things happen.

So, character development, impact and influence, values and action. We do have a couple more. The exploration of interest piece that I was talking about a little bit earlier, leadership is communicating what you’re actually interested in because again, you’re not really going to be leading things that you’re not interested in or if you are, it’s not going to show really well. So, showing that leadership, demonstrating what interests you actually have, clubs, projects, initiatives, is just a way to deepen your particular passion and clarify your academic or career goals. So, leadership is going to just speak about how invested you are in that particular topic and how important that is for you. Because again, you wouldn’t be given leadership or seeking leadership in this particular interest if you weren’t passionate about it. It’s also going to demonstrate the progressions and growth that you’ve had in high school.

So, it’s showing how you evolve over time, take on responsibility, and learn from challenges. This is going to really highlight the maturity and self-awareness that universities crave. This part is, I probably would argue is the most important part about leadership and why it matters, because you really in your application want to show this progression in your activities that you become a member and then a vice president or a supporting member to a president and showing that growth and that maturity is so attractive because universities want students who are finding ways and figuring out pathways and opportunities to upskill themselves, to continuing to be more mature and grow in these different areas. And so, leadership absolutely matters because that’s the easiest way to show your growth and maturity as a student.

Lastly, this one’s kind of obvious, but we do have to say it out loud. Leadership matters because it shows how you collaborate and how you work as a team member. Effective leaders work well with others. Leadership roles are going to demonstrate those sorts of important collaboration and teamwork. Things like empathy, interpersonal skills and ability to build a consensus that you’re kind of drawing people together to lead towards a particular pathway. So, leadership is much more than just, it’s important because it’s a signal of your aptitude and your ability to kind of rise above your peers and that’s going to be attractive to universities. But ultimately, there are so many indirect things that leadership is communicating these ideas of character, your impact and influence, the values that you have, your interests, your progressions, your ability to work in teams and collaborate, that that’s why we dedicated a whole hour to talk about it because it is so valuable in a lot of different ways.

KATIE: Something else I think that you’re touching on here, Sam, is that these are all things that colleges also want you to be doing when you get there. So, when you’re demonstrating that in high school, you’re also showing them that you’re going to take advantage of their resources, you’re going to grow there, you’re going to demonstrate this progression once again, and you’re going to be a collaborative part of that community that they’re building, as well.

SAM: I think what we kind of forget is that ultimately universities are businesses. They need to grow, they need to find revenue, they need to be successful and show ways to advance themselves. They want leaders because leaders are the ones that do those things. And so your ability in high school, as Katie was saying, to demonstrate that, to sort of provide that evidence of your aptitude and examples that you’ve been able to do that already, is so powerful because that’s just going to give them an easy window of, “Okay, well they can easily translate into this club or this service or this program or provide leadership in that way.” So absolutely. It’s maybe one of the easier skills or roles that we see in high school students that pass along in university because leaders naturally want to continue leading. So, it’s such a great thing to show in your application.

SAM: So what does it look like, right? We’ve talked about a lot of why it’s really important, so let’s kind of go through what it actually looks like. So, these are kind of eight different categories that we’ve identified to give you all a sense that leadership can really look different in a lot of different ways. I think the easy one is captain of the football team or the captain of the theater program and leading that group, whatever that might be, but someone who’s been elected a specific role, president of student council, those are kind of the obvious examples of leadership. It doesn’t make them bad. That’s very impressive, but it’s sort of the immediate example that students and parents point to of like, “Oh, we got to have that thing.” I think that’s great if you can have that thing and strive for it and go for it, but it’s much more than just being the captain.

Organizers of events and fundraising drives, right? That’s absolutely a leadership thing. Maybe it’s not a specific activity, it definitely could be, but it’s something that’s communicated in your essays or in your interviews or in your recommendation letters that your ability to lead events and raise money and do these different things, get people together for a specific initiative is really good. Founders, we really like that. A lot of it can come from passion projects as well, too, but founders of clubs or initiatives on campus in your high school, that’s going to look great. So even if it’s not this huge club or it’s not as significant as, significant is not the right word, it doesn’t take as much space as captain of the football team, being a founder of a club or an initiative is you’re starting a specific community at your high school and that’s going to look really, really good.

Project leader in class or extracurriculars. I think this one kind of goes by the wayside for students and parents because they think it’s something that I do in a class or it’s just a small project that’s part of a bigger goal. So, I have a lot of robotics students, right? Being the leader of a particular area in your extracurricular robotics, like you own the mechanical piece of it, or you own the software piece of it, that’s leadership. Absolutely. Because you’re kind of directing your particular contribution. And so, being that project leader in an extracurricular or being the one that always leads the presentations and having to pick everybody else up to get through the finish line—it was always me, Katie, I always got the members in the group that just didn’t pull their weight, so I had to bring everybody to the forefront—that is something you need to communicate in your applications. It needs to come in your essays and your activities that you took on those roles of always being the one who’s the leader in your groups for these kinds of things.

Mentoring or being a peer tutor, this is probably one of my favorite ways to be a leader because you are leading younger students, and that part is really cool. You’re either directly leading them by helping them upskill themselves or giving them tutoring support or whatever it might be. You’re also leading by example by showcasing “this is what it means to be an 11th or 12th grader” and being that mentor to a 9th or 10th grader. Leadership absolutely in that mentoring, peer tutoring role is really valuable. Family responsibility, luckily the Common App now has a specific space for this to talk about family responsibility, that didn’t use to be the case and we would have to find different ways to communicate that. The UC, the University of California application, does a pretty good job with it, but family responsibility absolutely is leadership. And this is one that a lot of the time working with our students at Prepory that we have to kind of dig out because the students themselves don’t really realize that, right?

You, as the eldest sibling having to drive your 7th, 8th, 9th graders, siblings to soccer practice three times a week because your parents don’t get off work until 6:00 PM, you’re having to provide meals and help cook for your siblings because of this, maybe you have an elderly grandparent that lives at your home and you support them in driving them to and from doctor’s appointments, that’s absolutely leadership. You’re leading your family in different areas and that’s incredibly valuable and important. So, being able to showcase and communicate that is really, really helpful. Student council president or member, we love government. We love contributing to your own community, and love finding ways to improve the school aspect as a whole. President is like a catchall be-all of leadership and student council but being a member and talking about different initiatives that you’re pushing, that’s also leadership. So, if you’re the one that’s supporting the sustainability initiatives at your school, so you’re not the president of student council but maybe you are leading the sustainability initiatives and whatever’s going on campus, that’s going to look good as leadership.

The last one is one that really, we strive to help students discover about themselves through a lot of reflection and understanding about their interests and hobbies and why they matter, is leadership in your specific or unique interest. I have a really unique example from a student a year ago really into anime figurine painting. So, using the microscope and painting little figurines and anime and stuff like that. They spent a lot of time, probably too much time, he should’ve been doing his homework, but that was okay, but he had this specific interest and I’m like, “Dude, that’s a great interest and there’s a lot of other people that also have their own interests at your school and how great would it be to showcase these different things.” And so, what he ended up doing was creating kind of a mini fundraiser. They had an art sale at their school that they ended up donating proceeds and selling their art and showcasing their unique interests and stuff like that.

And that’s such a great example of leadership of showing that like, “Yes, I have these talents or unique interests or skill sets,” and showing that it’s awesome to have those things and bragging about them and finding different ways that they can provide value. And so, leadership in your own interest area looks really good. So, there were a lot of, through these eight things of typical leadership that we see in high school or maybe that we kind of all sort of understand like “that’s a leader,” but there’s a lot of sort of indirect ways of leadership that are absolutely just as important.

KATIE: I really like looking at this slide because I love talking to our coaches about all of the different ways this is showing up in student profiles. We have a coach on our team who always says students are doing more than they think they are. And I find this is so true when I take consultations with families, you will see this because I’ll start to talk about different things and you’ll say, “Oh wait, I do that too and I do this too.” And “Oh, I’ve done a little bit of that also.” So, I’m hoping that some of you, as you’re starting to look at these things, either some of these things are things that you’ve thought about doing that you’re curious about or maybe are things that you’re already doing that you didn’t realize actually counted and that you’re giving yourself a little pat on the back. And from here it’s going to be about deepening that and thinking about how it’s really going to show up when you apply. I know you’re going to get into some examples of that, too.

SAM: Absolutely, yes. No, that was really, really helpful. What’s another, not to hype on the Prepory train too much, but it is helpful in our ecosystem of counselors and working with students is that sometimes as a coach you get really caught up with working with your student, but there are different opportunities like Committee Review or our lead coach sessions and training our younger coaches or less experienced coaches to find ways that maybe they see leadership in your student that you as a coach didn’t immediately see right away, and that is super valuable of having those extra set of eyes and perspectives to really show that’s a great leadership role. That’s a great opportunity to showcase and talk about that because a lot of students are leaders in certain ways. They just need to find out not only how to grow that, but also how to communicate that, which is what I’m going to get through here. But at this point I’m going to take a little bit of a break and let Katie introduce a little bit more about what our students say about Prepory.

KATIE: Sure. This is just a wonderful moment to, again, Sam’s already been talking about our team a little bit and you can see him showing up very well represented here, working with individual students and their success. And I know a lot of you in the chat are underclassmen. So, something we wanted to really highlight is that when you start working with a counselor prior to 11th grade or at the start of 11th grade, you’re more likely to be admitted to highly selective schools. And the reason for that is because you’re really doing that reflective work. You’re understanding what you’re doing in a deeper way and maybe you’ve founded a club and you’ve just been getting it off the ground, getting members, but what’s next? Right? What’s going to come after that? And this is where impactful guidance, meaningful conversations with people who have been through this so many times and reviewed thousands of applications, understand where those seeds are and how to help you grow those things.

SAM: I think what we have alluded to is a lot of students, pretty much every student, has some sort of leadership in them or ability or opportunity to become leaders. And so, it is about providing them—and this is what we do as coaches—providing them a platform to realize that leadership and kind of take control of that and own it and be proud and happy about it and find different ways to keep accelerating it. So how to actually do leadership then. We’re going to go through three student examples because this is my presentation, these were all my students, but I promise a lot of other Prepory coaches and students have gone through leadership in different ways. It’s just easier to talk about my own students that I’ve worked with at Prepory. So, this is a student actually from last year, Rick, great guy, IB student, really interested in business and had a lot of extracurriculars in different ways.

He was the captain of the tennis team, pretty good GPA, but not top of the class. So, he’s in that sweet spot of being really above average where he’s going to get into a great university and probably do really well, but to get into the very selective universities you need to find extra unique pushes. So, he really wanted to find a meaningful way to connect his personal interests with community impact. We were kind of seeing that as a shortcoming in his application: what sort of community impacts could he really be communicating? And so, he was really passionate about photography and social media. He was running school social media accounts, but really unsure of what that looks like as far as leadership goes. So, he ended up creating a passion project that was about creating marketing reels and photography for NGOs and charities in St. Louis.

And so, what he was doing is kind of connecting with those organizations that don’t really have the financial means to pay for these sorts of things, but really need these sorts of things to make their organizations lift off. So, what he ended up doing was kind of connecting with them and getting them really excited and then he started recruiting students at his school to help him grow this opportunity and really help these NGOs and charities. And so, he was kind of leading by example, and then his school counseling team actually asked him to give a speech to younger students about what he was doing, and it really became a symbol of, at his school, of what you can do in your own community, how you can go beyond just your high school to make an impact. So, his leadership was really framed as a kind of action and inspiration, highlighting ideas like mentorship and community impact, and he was connecting his personal interests—which he was really into photography and social media—with kind of a broader purpose like how to make an impact with that. He got into Berkeley at the Haas Business School and kind of really focused on social entrepreneurship and he’s there now and loving it. Obviously, Berkeley’s a great place and so it ended up working out really well for him. But I think what ultimately showed him was that he didn’t need to go in a specific box or route in order to be a leader. He could be doing it through his own initiatives and finding his own sort of passions to be pursuing.

Alright. Now I want to talk about Yusef. So, Yusef was from a couple of years ago, a really high achieving AP student, really into music, was like on an all-state band and had some leadership in that area, but he was really into sciences. He wanted to go to med school and didn’t really have science-related activities other than his APs and scores and stuff like this. So, as some of you who are in California may be aware, hospital volunteer waitlists are ridiculously long. It’s really hard to get involved at hospitals, public hospitals in California, actually one of my counselor friends said that once you have a child and have a baby, you should put them on the waitlist to become a volunteer in California just because everybody is wanting to get involved and realizes how important this opportunity is. So, he couldn’t really access that sort of traditional pre-med experience of volunteering in a hospital. So, what they really wanted to do is kind of pursue CPR certification as their way to get involved with healthcare and kind of see what that looks like in action. So, he ended up finding a CPR certification program that he ended up doing. So, he talked about now that he has this CPR thing, how can he grow it, what to do with it? And so, he ended up finding a CPR club at school and creating a student-led emergency response team. This was something that he and I were kind of talking about as far as what a school does and doesn’t have and realized that they don’t really have an emergency response protocol and that student council didn’t really have a sort of support in place at their school for this stuff. So, it was kind of accidentally found that through this CPR initiative and getting this certification and realizing other people maybe would be interested in becoming CPR certified, that his school was really lacking a particular area.

And so, he really wanted to empower his peers with these lifesaving skills. And so, they used their college application to highlight this small personal step of getting CPR certified and feeling pretty confident about it. This was a cool interesting skill for him, his friends finding out about it, wanting to create a club. It actually became this meaningful leadership initiative where he ended up really solving a community issue at his school. So, it demonstrated initiative and problem solving and also just passions for public health and kind of public community health. And so now he’s studying biology at Johns Hopkins. We had a really big debate, he got into UCLA for biology as well, too, as a California kid, and so, going back and forth. He ended up going to JHU, which he’s really liking even though a West Coast kid going to the East Coast is always kind of a challenge, but he’s liking it, so they continued to pursue public health, which is really, really cool. So, this was this idea of how his own interests of wanting healthcare and health initiatives really grew into something that neither of us really saw at the beginning, but became really cool as he kind of leaned into this.

KATIE: Something I love here is not only what came from this, it’s so much more unique than his experience would have been volunteering. He would’ve gone this traditional route and that would’ve been valuable for him, but in terms of something that’s going to really stand out on a college application, this is so much more and so much deeper in the leadership department, in particular. And I think sometimes when families are thinking about college admissions counseling and getting on the phone with us and thinking about “What is Sam going to do for me?” Right? They’re like, “Why can’t you call the hospital, Sam? Like, “Why can’t you get on the phone with them and put me on the top?” But is that even the outcome that would be as good as what you’re seeing here?

SAM: Well, we were just, at the beginning, I was talking about how hard it’s hard to be a leader in things you’re not passionate about. And so, if Yusef got off the waiting list and did actual volunteering, he probably just would’ve done sort of the bare minimum, like done his volunteering hours and been at the hospital and been like, “Okay, cool. Now it’s my fifth activity on the Common App,” where instead, taking what was something kind of small and this initial interest in really growing into a big initiative and it was part of its supplemental essays, became a really big deal. Absolutely. Absolutely right.

Alright, so now we’re going to talk about Emma. And so, I really like introducing Emma just because this is a really average and typical student of just above average grades, maybe low achieving a little bit, no formal leadership roles, more introspective and quiet, they live in a single-parent household and mom was gone quite a bit because of work. So, they didn’t really have the opportunity to join all these after-school-extracurriculars and certainly didn’t have the means to pay for certain things to get involved in. And so, she was really struggling to find these typical leadership activities. So, what she was also responsible for is her younger siblings. And so, she was really having a hard time coordinating daily school pickups. The state that she was living in ended up changing the start times for the elementary school versus the high school, which made that also really complicated and so really needed to coordinate daily pickups for the two younger siblings. Ended up finding out that some neighboring families also were having this issue and so created sort of an informal after school session for these four middle schoolers. I can promise you it’s not like she heard about the two neighboring families and was like, “Oh yeah, I will create an after-school program and create a curriculum. That’s exactly what I want to do.” Right?

No, it’s sort of a building process of 9th and 10th, 11th grade of talking about, “Hey, this is what you’re already doing, why don’t we try to find some value and kind of grow out of this?” So, what ended up happening is they created this support system for these kids in a place for them to be supported and have ways to get involved in help with their homework and have activities. I mean, it’s not something amazing, it’s not like she helped mentor these four kids to be amazing at math or create these amazing art projects, but provided a space for these students to be with each other and feel safe in a particular area, but also kind of developed logistical and interpersonal skills working with these other neighboring families and they didn’t really realize this was a great leadership example in the first place.

So, they ended up highlighting this experience through their school’s link club, which is kind of like a “welcome to the school club” that we see at a lot of schools around the country where they’ve helped incoming 9th graders transition to high school, and they realized that they own a lot of these skills already through their family responsibilities. And so, it helped them reframe their caregiving and organization as leadership and really made that a clear narrative in their application. So, she’s studying communications at UCLA, this is actually her last year. And so, really happy to see that she used kind of what she saw as just a normal family experience and really grew from that and found value in that. So, our case studies and the ones that I was thinking about as far as leadership and what it looks like is what we’re really trying to do is show that leadership can come in a lot of different ways and a lot of different examples. So, it’s really important to kind of remember just as a student or as a parent that you got to think outside the box and leadership can come in a lot of different ways. I do have some really key takeaways, but I don’t know why they’re not showing. Give me a second guys. I’m going to take this off-screen. See, I do have texts, I promise you. Why isn’t the text showing?

KATIE: Yeah, go for it. It’s showing up on my side too, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t popping up there. But yeah, see what happens when you present.

SAM: There. Sometimes a classic restart.

KATIE: Aha, that was weird. It’s showing up now.

SAM: I see. Okay, cool. Very important key takeaways. So, kind of what I was alluding to, you don’t need this formal title to be considered a leader. It really is about initiative and impact, starting a club, mentoring others, doing family responsibilities, that’s all leadership. It can be quiet and thoughtful. It doesn’t have to be this loud title or part of a pep rally in front of everybody. It can be this quiet, supporting peers in the background, leading through creativity and being an example or a role model, so it can come in a lot of different ways that way. Colleges are really looking for that evidence of initiative, collaboration, problem solving, impact, these really important phrases that they see as direct translations to their own university, and they want to see how you’ve made a difference in your school, community at large, and your personal life. The depth, oh sorry Katie, were you going to say something?

KATIE: Nope, was just going to tell you that they were missing again, but we popped back up. So.

SAM: The depth of our leadership matters way more than the breadth of it. So, you don’t need six different leadership roles and frankly, once you get further down on the activity list, they sort of lose their impact just because they’ve already seen the first couple. And so that depth of a particular leadership role in your two or three activities is really important. I don’t want to say don’t be a leader in your other things, of course, go for it, but what is important for you guys to realize is that you don’t have to be a leader in every single thing that you do. You can do things just for the fun of it or the support or whatever it might be. And focusing on the depth of leadership in your particular 1, 2, 3, 4 things is going to be really important because it creates that sustained meaningful development. Essays and activity descriptions are the easiest way to explain what that leadership actually looks like; what you did, why it mattered, and what you learned to talk about in leadership in your application. So, your ability to focus on the growth and the impact that your leadership had, that’s what’s going to make the biggest deal in the application and it comes through on those essays and the activity descriptions.

KATIE: Thinking about those activity descriptions, just a note for everyone here as you’re looking at this process, there might be a lot that you’re doing already, but remember you have very little space to describe some of the things that you’re doing. So, how you make sure that leadership is coming across—even though you have space to put a title, if you’re the president of a club—what’s going to come underneath that? There are a lot of different ways to be the president of a club and you might have particular initiatives that you’re working on and if you don’t use that space to really communicate how you are framing that role and what it means to you, it’s not going to come across the same way and that is where meticulous expertise with those details really matters.

SAM: Yes, Katie’s very aware of this, of having to review a bunch of them and just being like, “Okay, how can we actually showcase what they did?” And it’s frustrating, too, as a coach, because you know how important this is for your student and what your student’s done, but you have this limited space on how to do it, so it really is taking the time and energy and creativity to figure out how this is going to be communicated and being thoughtful and organized of where it’s going to be communicated and how you’re going to do that. Which I think is what my next slide is going to say, yes, is how Prepory actually does this, right? So again, kind of this last one helps you craft how to communicate your leadership. That’s what we were just talking about. The application is going to be sort of our bread and butter of—this is the main thing in a lot of ways of what we’re going to do is help you figure out how to communicate that, but if you don’t put in the time and energy in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade to actually develop that leadership, then there’s not much to communicate about. And so, that’s where we’re going to be really helpful in our younger years and younger students are helping to identify opportunities based on what you’re currently involved in. What I do as a coach is really when I start working with a student immediately, and one of my first tasks is just to write in what are all the things that you’re involved with, like formal activities, hobbies, do you take trips? What do you do for fun with your friends and family members? Just so I can have a sense of where you spend your time and energy so we can talk about how to upskill those things, how to create leadership in those things and how to identify those kinds of growth opportunities.

This is really important in 9th and 10th grade. 11th grade, you absolutely have time to do that as well too, especially as we turn to spring semester and the summer, but we’re here as a thought partner to establish leadership and project initiatives and action project developments. That’s the key thing for us and something we really strive for in our 9th and 10th grade programming is kind of what a passion project looks like, how to help you develop it and what that translates to as far as leadership, but in even kind of applying for leadership programs. So there are a lot of traditional pre-college programs and the Brown Leadership Institute comes to mind right away, Notre Dame has one as well too, really hard and competitive to get into and we certainly will help you craft those essays to have those summer experiences, but even positions like the student council president— actually last spring, one of my seniors right now, Laura, I helped write her speech with her and gave her editing advice about how she was going to pitch to be president of student council, which she did get, which was exciting. I’m sure it had nothing to do with me though, she’s excellent—but we’ll absolutely as a coach kind of help in a lot of those different ways.

So how Prepory can help you get admitted. Yeah. Katie, can you take it from here for us?

KATIE: Sure, yeah. We’ve been talking about this all throughout and you can see even with just this one role we’ve been talking about just the leadership components of your application, how many ways having outside support, who understands really what admissions committees are really looking for all of the different ways that you can be a leader, how that is going to come to life in your final application materials. So, when you work with Prepory, we offer comprehensive programming that covers everything that you need in this process from whenever it is you start with us. So, if you’re a 9th grader, we have a 9th grade program, 10th grade, and then 11th and 12th through the application process. Not only could you get on the phone with someone like Sam and do that reflective work, have those thoughtful conversations, but there’s also full team support at Prepory, right? So that Committee Review process we were talking about where you’re going to have that added layer where other people are offering their perspectives, and then that really meticulous feedback we were talking about, as well. Unlimited essay review is so unusual in this space and so important you have no idea—except for the two seniors who are in our room right now—how much work goes into those essays.

And when you’re really being careful and dedicated about it, how many drafts are really going to make that difference to make your story stand out in this process and your leadership, whatever it is that you did. I always say to families, “It is not going to matter for college admissions if you don’t know how to talk about it.” And that is where expertise is really so, so important. So, drop some questions in our chat if you have those for us. We’d love to talk through a few more questions with you and I hope you’ll get on the phone with me. Also, we can talk about the ways you are already somewhat of a leader in some capacity and how we might grow that further.

If you are local to Prepory’s HQ, we are having an event in Miami. It’s about building your extracurricular profile. Of course, leadership’s a part of that, just one small piece. So that bigger picture really gives you a tangible example and meeting with the team, even better if you go to our in-person events, you can get 10% off your program and you’ll get to meet other members of our really fun and cool team and ask them individual questions. So, I hope you’ll join Prepory there if you are local and we’ve put that information for you in the chat, as well. If you’re not, we’ll land on our QR code also for booking a virtual consultation. So, if you’re not able to come in person to Miami, you can book a virtual initial consultation with me and my team that is in the chat as well. And we’ll be here a few more minutes answering your questions.

SAM: This is kind of a good excuse to fly to Miami, right? If you’re not local, why don’t you just hop on the plane, you can come to our events at 10:00 AM on November 15th and still have time for the beach later. So never a bad reason.

KATIE: I don’t know if it’s leadership, but it’s certainly initiative.

SAM: Very much initiative, very much initiative. Thank you everybody for coming tonight. I think I have an end slide, right? So yeah, this is the QR code to book your free consultation. I know there are a bunch of staff messages going into the webinar chat as well too for all of you to look at it. I’m taking a look at the Q&A session. So not a lot of questions tonight, which I’m going to assume means we did a great job, Katie. If you would, like we said, you can stick around, you can ask them questions, otherwise feel free to drop off. Have a wonderful Thursday evening. It’s Thursday, right? Yes. Yeah, it’s Thursday. Okay, cool. Have a wonderful Thursday evening and thank you all for coming tonight.

KATIE: Nothing like Thursday to be thinking about leadership and starting your next leadership role. So, I’m really glad you all were here for this tonight and I hope we get to talk to you more and a few thank-yous in the chat and our Q&A. So, thank you so much guys. Really appreciate you being here. I know you said, Sam, that you have a couple cases that you’ve been thinking about with a couple, a few of our minutes here, was there one that you wanted to talk about maybe?

SAM: Yeah, sure. I can definitely bring up a current student I’m working with. So, he is a grade 10 student right now. Their high school system, he’s an international student. Their high school system is 10, 11, 12. So he’s just entering high school kind of figuring out how to get involved. So, we’re looking for different projects on campus and community involvements and stuff like this. And so, I’m helping him look at what activities are going on and what he wants to be doing. He’s really interested in engineering and science-based stuff. So, robotics is kind of that sort of catchall for that topic. And he’s dabbled a little bit in it, but frankly that’s not really what he wants to get into. So yeah, we’re trying to look at local opportunities. One of the things that we did, he’s based in Hong Kong, is kind of look out to the universities in the area that have high school opportunities or high school competitions related to engineering and maker space projects and seeing if he can get involved that way and gather some students and to rally with him and do these kinds of cool things. It’s this issue of, especially with leadership in general, there are so many different pathways to go down and so it’s a matter of choosing which ones make sense. So, he’s definitely in this evaluation process of figuring it out. But yeah, no, it is a work in progress and it’s something that hopefully as we get closer to Christmas break to figure out which one he’s going to land on and move forward with.

KATIE: Yeah, you’re making me think about—I don’t know if we have international students in our midst tonight, but even if you are local to Miami or you’re around the country, not all schools are created equal, in terms of the resources that they have after school. And I get on the phone with a lot of students who are like, “I need to be the president of a club. The end. Or I’m not going to go to college.” So I know we shared some ideas about that tonight, but when there is nothing going on at your school or none of the things that you’re interested in, can you talk a little bit about some of the first steps that you might suggest to someone about the first resources they go to or questions they might ask if after school or a club is kind of not the route they’re going to go?

SAM: Yeah, definitely. And I think one thing is making sure if that door is officially closed or not. So, just ensuring that they’ve talked to the school and they’ve talked to either their academic dean or their head of grade or homeroom teacher, whoever it might be to determine if it is possible to start different clubs on campuses and things like that—as Katie mentioned, not all schools are created equal, so they have different policies and everything—but it is important to kind of thoroughly investigate that. I actually have one of my seniors right now who through persistent efforts, started a whole pep rally event at their school that didn’t really exist beforehand where they kind of celebrated the sports teams in the fall. They didn’t have anything like that before and the school always kind of pushed back like “No, we don’t have the funds or the ability to host it and everything.” And what she did was just kind of be very persistent and ask the finance department if there was money there or ask to get signatures of other students who’d be interested in getting involved. So, I’d say that would be the first thing I would do is really make sure if that door is closed or not. If it is closed, which can definitely be the case, is figuring out what’s available in your community and what you can do in your city or in your apartment complex, if there are a lot of homes or neighborhoods, whatever it might be, but also online. And I think sometimes online communities or online leadership gets a bad rap sometimes just because we see in the news kind of negative examples of that. But really leadership and activity development and building community online is really attractive and it’s a little easier in some senses and accessible. You need to thoughtfully do it and have it in a good place, but absolutely, that can definitely be an idea. So, thinking of whatever they’re interested in, what kind of passions that they have and interests that they have, and then finding ways of if it’s going to be at the school, if it’s going to be kind of more local, or if it’s going to be online and how to do that kind of appropriately and tastefully.

KATIE: Really smart. I love that you’re not just thinking about initiative there, but it’s not just asking once and then the answer was no. That persistence, who else is there to ask and what other resources might there be, that you have it. What rock haven’t you turned over? And you’re also making me think about with the online example, I don’t just think about students who maybe don’t have resources but also are just incredibly busy. I talk to a lot of students who are involved maybe with athletics, but they want some way to showcase a connection to something they care about academically, but they can’t join another club right after school because they’re so involved in one particular area, extracurricularly, that capacity just isn’t there. And so, when you think about ways to access those other pockets of time that they have in a really meaningful way, it’s such a smart way to get around that problem of just that window of time.

SAM: I think too, as I was mentioning, one of the leadership examples was through organizing events or fundraising or things like this. Leadership doesn’t have to be every day; it doesn’t have to be even within a particular season. And so, I have one senior right now, I feel like I have been bringing up, they’re just on my mind, because we are just seeing all these applications, but he is really involved with, he created his own initiative. There’s kind of a lot of backstory on it and I won’t get to it right now, but they raise money for families that have a cancer patient in their family and kind of raise money to help those families sort of have the necessities as their family member goes through treatment and everything like this. It’s a huge kind of thing that he does, but ultimately, as we were talking more about it, it’s really about three or four events a year and it will take place over a weekend.

He’s really involved in a lot of different things and these events are very time heavy and spend a lot of time, but really, it’s condensed into a week or two weeks. And so, what is a really impactful event and great leadership and getting a lot of people involved is actually a small amount of time. And so, I think what you’re getting to as far as taking advantage of the pockets of time you have available, knowing that yes, sustainable commitment, and progressive commitment of leadership is really important, but that doesn’t necessarily have to mean that it’s every day or within a particular semester. It can be spaced out in a thoughtful manner.

KATIE: That’s so smart. I really love all the examples that we were able to go through tonight and I hope we gave a lot of you some really interesting ideas for your own profiles. And you can see all the ways that we can get creative about all of the little pockets or gaps in your profile, the questions that you have, and we love to dive deep on these things, as you can tell, we could go on and on. So, I hope you will schedule a consultation with our team to talk further about all of the things connected to leadership or other aspects of your profile as you move through this process.

SAM: Alright, fantastic. We’ll have a great night everybody, and we’ll see you next time.

KATIE: Bye.