Every year, more than 47,000 people submit applications to Harvard every year.
On the Harvard admissions team, there are less than 40 people to read them.
The College Admissions Process is not a holistic review. It used to be but with more students than ever applying for a limited number of seats, it simply can’t be.
Now, it’s a War for Attention.
Every year, the task for admissions officers gets more difficult: record numbers of applicants competing for the same number of seats.
Schools and their admissions team sit down to sift through tens of thousands of applicants, all with near-perfect GPAs, optimized test scores, glowing recommendation letters, and a well-balanced constellation of extracurriculars.
Immediately, they begin categorizing students into the buckets they’ve become accustomed to:
- The STEM Wizard.
- The Arts Savant.
- The Renaissance Explorer.
- The Statistics Wiz.
- The Young Hemingway.
And you may be wondering, which is the right bucket for you to maximize your chances of admission?
The answer is: None.
Because the majority of applicants in each bucket will be rejected.
Think of the last movie you saw, book you read, song you listened to, that you couldn’t get out of your head? Something about it stuck with you because it was unlike anything else you had come across before.
Every word has already been written. Every chord progression has already been discovered ten times over. What makes it feel new and revolutionary is …
Its packaging.
When an Admissions Officer reads an application for a student they really want to accept, they assign that student a “1.”
This is a student that has stopped them in their tracks, has stood out from the tens of thousands of other qualified students vying for the same seat.
So how do you become a 1? How do you become undeniable?
You need to stop thinking of your application as an amalgamation of your accomplishments and start thinking of it as a meticulously crafted narrative that positions you as a One-of-One, Must Have student, in a package they’ve never seen before. A student Harvard *needs to have* because they don’t want Stanford or Yale to.
What makes somebody sit up and pay attention? What stops them in the tracks of the stream of life they’re accustomed to and makes me feel something? Feel something for someone else?
The answers lie in classical principles of storytelling.
Luckily, as an early graduate from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (with a minor in Creative Writing), my whole life has been dedicated to creating cold, calculated leverage out of the artform of Story.
A big mistake I see other families make is they think being good at everything, being perfect on paper, is their way in rather than just their foot through the door.
The only question that matters is this one:
Are they going to read your application like a terms and conditions section, or like a spy thriller?
There is so little within your control in the college application process but this is what is.
So what can you do?
Every year I help students get into their top school with the following principles:
#1: Opener, opener, opener.
Think of your Personal Statement Opener as a hook for an Instagram reel. What makes YOU stop in your scroll? That will get you closer to reverse-engineering an opener for your own essay.
Remember my opener up there? When I said College Admissions is a War for Attention? Don’t be afraid to sound dramatic. Don’t be afraid to speak in hyperbole.
#2: Treat your application as a caricature of yourself.
Exaggerate and amplify. Package elements of yourself so that they are more likely to burst off the page.
Do you like to code? Write your first sentence in Python.
Do you love art history and historical revolutions? Write about how the Death of Marat changed your life in an instant.
Find two things that are special about you – or even mundane – and combine them. Fun unique combinations leave a lasting memory. If you love cooking and biology, talk about the chemical reaction that takes place in a souffle. If you love Pokémon and ballet, talk about training your Pikachu the same way you train your calf muscles.
#3: Please, for the love of God, don’t be afraid to suck.
My students are always worried about immediately sounding perfect on the page. That’s the most natural feeling in the world.
And that’s a feeling you need to throw away for a couple weeks. Write, write, write some more. 97% of it will be quite bad but that is non-negotiable to getting to the remaining 3%, which is where the golden stuff always is. Set a timer for 10 minutes and just get your hands on the keyboard and see what comes out. Don’t expect it to be good. In fact, expect it to be bad. Give yourself that freedom to just be on the page.
Often, a student will find one raw nugget of gold at the very end that becomes the central idea for an application that gets them into their top-choice school.
Taylor M., Stanford Class of 2030.
I met Taylor in August before his senior year. He had a 3.6 GPA and a 33 on the ACT. He wanted to go to Stanford to study Economics, one of the most popular majors at Stanford. It was up to us to find an interesting angle that would differentiate him from the other students applying for Economics seats.
After a couple sessions, he mentioned in passing that his greatest hero is Eminem.
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh my god. No one can do what he does with the English language. I think it goes Eminem, then Shakespeare.”
Now there’s a sentence that no one on the Stanford Admissions Committee (or anyone else, for that matter) had heard before.
Taylor loved rap music, but he was told it didn’t have any place in his college application.
I encouraged him to look at it as an interesting angle that could differentiate him from other applicants vying for Economics seats – one we didn’t think the Admissions Committee had seen before.
We positioned his passion for the English language into packaging they’ve likely never seen before: a double-major in Economics and Linguistics.
His essay transformed into a love letter to the rhymes of Tupac, Eminem, SZA, and Duke Ellington. He was no longer another kid applying to study Economics at Stanford. He was the kid who thought Eminem belonged alongside Shakespeare.
We even concluded his essay with a short rap inspired by his heroes:
I want it for my mom, I want her to see me have it all
So with God’s blessings I’ll see you in Palo Alto this Fall
This is what makes a One-of-One application.
Taylor didn’t need to become more impressive. He didn’t need to get his ACT score up by another point or go viral on TikTok.
We just needed to find the magic that was already there, and package it in a way that made his application impossible to forget.
Want to know where to start?
I offer complimentary 30-minute sessions to families interested in my approach. After every call, I offer three potential story arcs for your student’s application – no obligation.
I’ll be back soon with more college tips and stories from the field.
Until next time,
