Where some pointy-ness pays off
Print Edition
Twenty years ago, the Harvard Crimson trumpeted “Acceptance Rate For Class of 2000 Lowest Ever” in what would become an annual tradition. This year, probably 1 in 20 applicants will gain admission to Harvard or Stanford. Those of us who work with students who are denied, are often amazed by the talent left behind. Princeton, for example, rejected over 90 percent of the students with a 4.0 who applied to them.
Ben Jones, a former admission officer at MIT advised on his blog “Of course you need good scores and good grades to get into MIT. But most people who apply to MIT have good grades and scores. Having bad grades or scores will certainly hurt you, but I’m sorry to say that having great grades and scores doesn’t really help you — it just means that you’re competitive with most of the rest of our applicants.”
So, if you are a top-performing student, how do you become a top applicant and win the heart of the admission dean? The elite colleges want a well-rounded class, not necessarily a well-rounded individual. Develop some pointy-ness, something that sticks out or what admission deans call a hook. Rather than ask what is the college looking for, ask yourself what interest can I cultivate and really take to the next level.
For Sam, he discovered composing orchestral pieces in Grade 9. A summer program and working with Academy Award winning composer Tan Dun took his passion to the next level, one that really caught the imagination of the Harvard admission committee. For Christina, her interest in science saw her qualify to the Intel Science Fair, leverage that to work in a research lab at a Chinese university, and get an academic paper published while in high school which Stanford found compelling. Columbia was fascinated by Timothy’s work with Rubik Cubes. Sure, he was fast but what distinguished him was that he designed and fabricated his own unique cube designs. Each of these students also had the academic record that gave confidence to the admission committee but these vignettes illustrate vastly different approaches of how these young people came into their own, what Ken Robinson calls their Element. “The Element is about discovering yourself, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.”
Ken speaks of being authentic to yourself. Timothy’s parents did not fret when he played with Rubic cubes; they even drove him to Chinese championships when he set records. And this is key: Students need to independently cultivate one area deeply and with passion, while parents need to actively support that pursuit. When time comes to look beyond the transcript in the admission committee, they see a kid who is already going intensely and authentically into an area of their choosing into the world.
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