They're searching for students who have transformed their big dreams into even bigger realities. Ivy League colleges want world-changers who are making positive marks on society with the resources available to them. World-changers drive change. They know what they want and go for it. They also know success doesn't happen overnight. Ivy League universities want to see growth, even if it means failing before succeeding.
Ivy Leagues are also looking for world-changers who can positively contribute to their university community.
Check out our free eBook written by our expert admission advisors on how to crush your US College application by building a personal profile that sets you apart from even the strongest competition!
This is the most exciting and easy part of the puzzle. This doesn't mean dabbling in a hobby. It means taking that hobby, talent, or expertise to the next level and using it to change the world. For example, maybe you were forced to take piano lessons as a child.
You may have mastered the technique, but you lack the passion. When you pursue a path only because you believe it will get you in, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. There will be students who are just as talented as you and more passionate about this path. Their applications will shine because they are doing what they love. What excites you? What drives you to keep wondering, exploring, and learning? Start there. Then, dive deep. When you discover your passion , spending time in it is not an obligation.
Ivy Leagues are not looking for students who participate in dozens of extracurriculars or receive a bunch of awards. They want to see that you chose a path, spent time in the pursuit, encountered and overcame obstacles, and found success in the end.
Choose something you love and pursue it like crazy! Your passion and drive will be evident throughout your application. It does take more than a deep passion for an extracurricular to get into an Ivy League school. You have to stand out from the rest of them. Use your grades, test scores, letters of recommendation, and essay to complement your present and future career goals. For example, Ivy League admissions committees look at the courses you took in high school to see if you chose classes that challenged, inspired, and encouraged you to learn more.
They may even favor a B in a challenging course over an A in an easy one. They love to see that you chose leadership positions and that your professors enjoyed your intelligent and unique insight in their classes. Strong test scores still play a critical role in your acceptance but so does your essay and your extracurriculars. The selection committee wants to see you come alive on paper. While the Ivy Leagues all share similar entrance objectives, their cultures and learning styles are not the same.
Do your research. Which college excites you? Does it offer programs and classes that will challenge you and help you grow? Do you prefer a college in a large city or a suburb? Communicate your answers throughout your application, and your passion for your dream school or schools will shine.
Book a free consultation to learn how Crimson can help you get into your dream Ivy League. To get you started on your research, here are some of the unique qualities, values, and attributes of each of the eight Ivy League schools below.
Brown is a major research and educational university known for its student-centered learning. Students who thrive at Brown navigate their intellectual journeys, have an intense curiosity, and want to make a difference in the world.
Brown is the only major research university in the nation where undergraduates can develop a personalized course of study.
Their admission process is holistic and contextual. To be a competitive applicant, you should spend your high school years challenging yourself both inside and outside the classroom. Successful applicants need to have a track record of being self-driven. Learn more about Brown University. Use our college admissions calculator to find out your chances of getting accepted into Brown. Undergraduates at Columbia University start with a common foundation of curriculum that includes literature, philosophy, science, art, history and music, and caps classes.
Each class is only 22 students, so students experience close interaction with faculty. STEM programs like engineering and computer science are popular at Columbia. Columbia takes a holistic approach to its admissions process. Columbia offers generous financial aid programs to qualified students. Learn more about Columbia University. A Day in the Life: Columbia Student. Use our college admissions calculator to find out your chances of getting accepted into Columbia. They do this by producing unique and creative work and reaching beyond the university and into the world.
If you're passionate about finding ways to enhance the lives of those around you and around the world, Cornell might be your school. They heavily promote outreach and public service in the New York area and beyond. Cornell also boasts world-class interdisciplinary research centers in nanotechnology, biotechnology, supercomputing, and genomics. They offer several financial aid options to students. Their admissions process is highly individualized. This means they evaluate the person as a whole.
The student body is a diverse mix of talented, open-minded, and empathetic individuals. Learn more about Cornell University.
A Day in the Life: Cornell Student. Use our college admissions calculator to find out your chances of getting accepted into Cornell. Dartmouth is one of the oldest and most respected colleges in the United States. Dartmouth's teacher-scholars are leaders in their fields and committed to teaching. Senior professors even teach first-year students.
Dartmouth professors rank among the most respected teachers in American higher education. Dartmouth strongly believes applicants should showcase all elements of their application. If you have a stand-out talent or passion, be sure to intertwine it throughout your application. Learn more about Dartmouth College. A Day in the Life: Dartmouth Student.
Use our college admissions calculator to find out your chances of getting accepted into Dartmouth. With access to world-renowned research opportunities, thought-provoking courses, and faculty mentors, Harvard provides individualized instruction for both those driven towards a passion and those still discovering their path. Harvard College has a House System that links learning and living and serves as a foundation for the undergraduate experience. Each House holds people and has a dining hall, common rooms, and facilities for academic, recreation, and cultural activities.
Learn more about Harvard University. A Day in the Life: Harvard Student. This second layer of insight and experience is one of the many ways that Powerful Prep ensures the most personalized service and the strongest results for its students. The overall acceptance rate varies between they Ivy League schools, but is still low even on the high end of the spectrum.
It is useful to think of your candidacy in terms of differentiation. Returning to the construct we presented in the first paragraph is helpful: elite academics, elite performance, or elite connections.
Any one of these would make a candidate very strong, but make no mistake, to be elite in those fields is extremely uncommon. For the purposes of most candidates, getting accepted to an Ivy League school requires a combination of these factors. But recognize that to gain Ivy League admission you will need to best students who have been in movies, who have published books that were well-reviewed, or who painted art that was featured and sold in prestigious galleries.
Similarly, you might have a relative who went to UPenn or even a relative who is active in the alumni community. But you must compete against the children of John Huntsman, Donald Trump, and their extended family, as well as the niece of the president of Mexico and Reese Witherspoon—all of whom were classmates of the author when he was at UPenn.
The aim of this section is not to discourage but to reframe the definitions of elite which may have served well in high school but are less powerful in a global setting. While you may not be a Tony-winning actress by 17, you almost certainly have a combination of characteristics that makes you elite. That Tony-winning actress probably did not have time to achieve elite academics, so she may be in the 99 th percentile in the performance category, but only in the 50 th percentile in terms of academics and connections.
Say that the goal of an Ivy League school is to have a class that is optimized in all areas of output: academics, connections, and performance. You can see that every student has six green squares to allocate—let these be the performance units. A student could theoretically maximize one category and minimize the others students A, B, and C , but this is rare and risky.
If a college had all applicants like that, they could achieve a fully optimized student body and have outperformers across the board. But applicants like this are exceedingly rare—think math prodigies who skipped grades, young movie actors, or the children of large donors.
In contrast, we have student D who is well-rounded, allocating six squares equally across three categories. However, this student does not serve the university well, as shown by the second scenario. The school is missing top performers. Now examine students E, F, and G who allocated their efforts by being a strong performer in one category, an average performer in another category, and a relatively week performer in the final category.
As we can see in the three last scenarios, such a student serves a strong need at a school, helping them fill gaps in different categories. It is the profile of students E, F, and G that is most achievable by students seeking admission into an Ivy League school.
We will provide recommendations on becoming this type of student in the subsequent sections. But if this seems like a new perspective to you, it may be because you were operating under the myth of the well-rounded student. This may have been accurate at the time, and might still be for less selective schools, but it is useless for the purposes of Ivy League admission. Ivy League admissions officers think in terms of well-rounded student bodies, not well-rounded students.
That is, they would rather have a class of award-winning poets, math prodigies, and polyglots than they would a class of students who all took the same classes, participated in the same clubs, volunteered at the same organizations, and played the same instruments.
Now that we have a target in mind: strong performance in one category, we will discuss what strong performance looks like in each and provide guidance on how to achieve it. While there is no definitive benchmark GPA that will ensure acceptance into an Ivy League school, there is a trend when it comes to coursework difficultly and GPA: respectively, the harder the better and the higher the better.
A competitive application shows that the applicant has taken the most challenging curriculum available to him or her, and that student has achieved high grades on top of that. The chart below shows the average GPA of accepted students, and as it demonstrates, only two universities have an average accepted GPA of lower than 4.
A weighted 4. Students should also remember that GPA takes his or her entire high school career into account and demonstrating either a steady increase in or consistently high performance.
As such, students should take extra care to maintain their grades in their junior and senior years. Unless a student can stand out in some exceptional way or fulfill an important institutional need, subpar test scores are a one-way trip to the rejection pile. If a student falls within these ranges, then he or she is on track for acceptance in an Ivy League school. When it comes to the performance section, we refer to extracurricular activities.
A student who took courses on political science, wrote articles for a poly-sci peer-reviewed journal, and who attended model UN camps would have an integrated extracurricular portfolio. A student who was a math Olympiad who spent weekends as a DJ and volunteered at a soup kitchen would paint a less integrated profile than a math Olympiad who spent weekends writing software to find the next large prime number and volunteered tutoring math to weak students.
Just as important as integration of an extracurricular is proof that a student has participated in said activity for a meaningful amount of time as well as the unspoken promise that that student will continue their extracurricular in college. For example, if a student starts a lobbying campaign through their local government, they need to have other activities from previous years that show interest in that same pursuit or cause.
Even if they had not been leading the charge during their Freshman or Sophomore year, they likely volunteered for other organizations, participated in internships, and so on.
Without that continuity of interest, at best, the activity looks like it is insignificant to the student, and at worst, it looks like a hollow grab for admissions brownie points. Significance, or credibility, is the part of an activity that truly sets an application apart. Getting the chance to work in a local laboratory as a research assistant is one thing. Doing that and being a co-author on a scientific article published in a peer-reviewed journal is another thing entirely.
Unfortunately, Ivy League admissions officers tend to be older and therefore more traditional. They value traditional forms of validation and credibility, such as patents, publications, and serious research experience. Being an influencer with , plus followers likely means little to them. However, being an influencer with , plus followers, using it to fight negative body-image messaging, and having a Huffington Post article written about your media platform will catch their interest. Being a top-ranked World of Warcraft gamer is indeed an accomplishment, but you could deepen it by donating a portion of your Twitch earnings to fight online bullying.
Any way that a student can establish that type of validity will strengthen their application. Maybe they can collect used computers, repurpose and donate them. Even better would be to combine it with another passion. One thing to beware of here is activities which sound interesting but which a lot of students already do. While it may be a great experience, unless something about that experience was truly exceptional and noteworthy, it will sound similar to the hundreds of students who participate in similar programs every year.
This goes for spending one-to-two weeks in a foreign country building houses or something similar. First, connections can be built, but you should start very early.
Otherwise, your attempt will look self-serving. Develop a relationship and ask them for their opinion on topical research. Try to nurture this connection over time, and it can turn into a very useful aid when application season comes.
Athletic connections can serve an applicant well, and they can be similarly created and nurtured. We will not discuss them further because being a recruited athlete is similar to being a math prodigy or a very well connected student, and these traits are often the outcome of paths started long before high school.
You may come from a single-parent family or you may have grown up in poverty. This is not what we traditionally think of in terms of connections, but it is organic, and it can serve you. Colleges recognize the hardship of growing up in adverse environments, and they recognize the difficulty of being the first person in your family to go to college.
But do think about the extra value you get from every half hour you spend on these activities. Again, the concept of diminishing marginal utility comes into play.
If you go an entire day without talking to any of your friends, it's probably pretty painful. When you talk to them, the first 10 minutes are awesome—"Did you see Mr.
Robinson's new haircut? Challenge yourself and question what you're spending your time doing. Analyze whether you're getting that much out of every extra minute. Between all of the above, you can cobble together 1, hours per year. This is immense. It's equivalent to half a year of full-time work. Apply this time to your dream project from step 1. In this time you could build a new organization, create a new mobile app, write 10 new essays to publish, or do any other notable achievement.
You can do a lot with 1, hours. Like I've said before, many students try to develop an application "hook," or spike, of some kind. But they don't spend enough time on it. They give up far too early before learning the critical best practices that make something work.
They have too many distractions in their life with things that don't help their application. Your aim is to accomplish more than the typical well-rounded student does by focusing your time and being smart about learning from your mistakes. Done correctly, this kind of thinking requires you to have insight into yourself and your weaknesses.
This is the kind of optimization in your life that you need to achieve deep success in high school and throughout your life. While it may seem daunting or painful at first, I bet that you'll quickly enjoy the time spent developing your spike a lot more than the time you spent just being comfortable.
Again, if you're not willing to do this, that's fine. Just accept that you will be well rounded and will fall into the crapshoot.
But if you're willing to put in the time, you will achieve great things. I know that developing a big spike can sound a lot like the result of "helicopter parenting. Helicopter parenting usually gets a bad rap because they're forcing their kids into doing something they don't want to do. This makes their kids miserable.
But the point of all my advice is to find something you're genuinely interested in. This is important because working really hard at something you don't care about can only get you so far. For eight years, I played the violin and practiced for at least an hour a day. I wasn't passionate about this, and my mom had to structure my practice time so that I was forced to do it every day. At the end, I became pretty good at it, but I was nowhere near as good as our concertmaster who truly treated it as his passion.
He worked harder at it and cared more about it, and to him I imagine each hour of practice was times less painful and 10 times more effective than it was for me. This concertmaster went to Juilliard and is now a professional violinist—something I wouldn't have been able to achieve no matter how much time I put in.
When you have passion for what you're working on, you accomplish more, you think more creatively, and you become more resilient in the face of failure. When you really enjoy what you're doing, you think about what you're doing in your free time. You spend your spare time walking and using the bathroom thinking about the problems you're facing.
You work harder because it doesn't feel like work. You're less likely to quit in the face of hardship, and that gets you through tough times. Because you're doing all of this, you come up with novel solutions and approaches that others don't. This is important because in whatever area you choose, you are competing against people for whom the same area is their true passion. If it's not your passion, too, they'll leave you in the dust. Furthermore, colleges are typically pretty good at noticing when students are doing something only because they want to buff up their applications, not because they truly enjoy it.
So don't think only about how to get into Yale or how to get into Princeton. That's now how you should be orienting your energy. You should instead be thinking about how to achieve something great in your interests—getting into Stanford is a mere consequence of this. By this point, I hope my main points are clear. To bring it all together with step-by-step logic, here is the high-level overview of what I've talked about:.
I'm the type of person for whom logical arguments are the best way to persuade. So I hope this makes logical sense to you in a step-by-step fashion. If you disagree with any of the fundamental points above, go ahead and let me know—I'd love to have a discussion.
You can leave a comment below with your situation and questions feel free to anonymize this if you like, though the more specific you are, the more helpful we can be. College admissions is really a microcosm of real life. If you don't care about what you're doing, don't work hard, and don't think too deeply about what you can improve about yourself, you'll have a pretty comfortable life.
If that's the way to make you happy, then that's awesome. But know that you also very likely won't achieve anything noteworthy. But if you dream big, take risks, and work extremely hard on something you're passionate about, you're in a much better position to do something great in this world. This is the way to accomplish things in the world, and it also happens to be the way to get into top schools. First, think big. Aim high. Be ambitious. Think of a world where you're unfettered from mundane concerns and envision what you could achieve.
That goal is closer than you think. Next, take small steps toward your goal. What are you most afraid of right now? What is most risky? Attack that first, head-on. Learn from your experiences and reflect on what you can do better next time.
Then attack the next thing, step by step. Keep your motivation high throughout. You won't always succeed. In fact, you'll fail often. Most people give up early on. That's why this is hard. But not you. You care too much to let that happen. If life is a track meet, you'll turn around and look behind to see other people on the ground, gasping for breath. But you keep soldiering on and improving because you care about what you're doing and what you want to achieve.
I promise you that if you take these steps, you will a chieve far more than you ever thought you were capable of. And along the way, you'll become an amazing young adult that every top school in the country would be thrilled to have in their next matriculating class. Now the hard work starts. Keep your head up, try your best, and let me know how it's going with a comment below. Here are a few other resources to help you out. I wrote guides on how to get a perfect SAT score and how to get a perfect ACT score , based on my own experiences getting full scores on both tests and working with thousands of students.
If your spike is academic in nature, doing well on these tests is consistent with your story, so it's important to do well.
I also wrote a guide on how to get a 4. Your coursework is one of the most important pieces of your application and by far where you'll spend the most time. If you're struggling to get good grades in challenging coursework, read this guide to learn the mindset and habits you'll need in order to get amazing grades. Wondering what my Spike was? In my complete Harvard application , you'll see every single page of the application I used to get into Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and more.
You'll even see my full letters of recommendation and the exact pen marks my admissions officer made on my application. This is certain to be eye-opening for you! Subscribe to our blog using the form below, and Like us on Facebook. If you like the advice here, there's a lot more coming. I'm planning to share my exact Harvard application that got me in, page by page, word for word. I think you'll like it.
I truly think we've built the best prep program available right now, and we have a 5-day free trial for you to check us out. At this point if you've been reading carefully and thinking critically, you probably have a bunch of questions. I'll answer the most likely ones here that come from the perspective of both student and parent. If you have any remaining questions, feel free to leave a comment below be specific enough so that we can give good advice.
I'd love to hear from you! I would argue that you have heard about this concept before. If you ever knew an older student—let's call him Brian McStudly—who got into Harvard and Princeton and every other school, and your response was, "Well, of course he did.
He was a superstar! The difference is, you probably thought this was out of reach to you. To you, Brian seemed like a demigod, perfect in every way. The reality is that he was probably unbalanced in specific ways, but you didn't know this since you didn't see his application and didn't have the global view of what the other 30, applications looked like. Nothing I'm saying here is a secret.
Thousands of world-class students every year know these concepts intuitively, and high-quality college counselors who cost a lot of money know them, too.
If you browse forums, such as College Confidential , you'll probably see parts of this advice scattered throughout. I just haven't seen anyone package it as completely and thoroughly as I did here in this guide. If I were to guess why this knowledge isn't more widespread, it'd be because of the following reasons:. In my case, it just so happens that my current job and vision is to help millions of students and parents around the world achieve academic success.
So I took the many hours it took to write this. Also, I'm not economically dis-incentivized from helping you out. I'm not selling a book about this, and I don't have any interest in keeping secrets behind closed doors. But frankly I don't care whether you buy PrepScholar or not—as long as this guide helps you and keeps you from steering your life in the wrong direction based on the other crap out there.
On a deeper, more existential level, it gives my work meaning to help out other people. But that's a topic for another time. You shouldn't—at least, not automatically. You shouldn't take my advice or anyone else's advice on faith alone. This is how you get sold bad products through infomercials and sucked into Ponzi schemes. If what I'm saying here makes logical sense to you, then believe it.
If someone else's advice makes more sense to you, then follow that instead. To justify my beliefs, I've also tried to substantiate my points with snippets from representatives of top schools. If you find anything that supports my arguments here, or anything that contradicts them, please send them to me.
I stand by everything I'm saying here, and if you want to get into top schools, I think this is the best thing you can do. Indeed, admissions officers do say that many of their acceptances are well rounded. However, he goes on to say that there are two caveats for groups of students who set themselves apart:.
There are also several hundred students who pursued some activity to an unusual degree. Such students—as well as those who are among the best potential scholars—have outstanding achievements largely because of their strong personal qualities. They have made a commitment to pursue something they love, believe in, and value—and to do so with singular energy, discipline and plain old hard work. Similarly, Princeton says the following:. In fact, one of Princeton's greatest strengths is the variety of talents, personal qualities, experiences and points of view in each incoming class.
There are some qualities we hope all Princeton students share: integrity, a deep interest in learning and a devotion to both academic and non-academic pursuits. Many students also bring distinctive academic and extracurricular talents and achievements.
Beyond those fundamental qualities, we consider how each candidate might contribute to the community we will bring together for that year's class. Once again, it's a fact that top schools do accept well-rounded students. To some extent, schools don't want their classes to be composed entirely of extreme spikes. But this does not mean that being well rounded is your best strategy for your application.
As I explained above, there are many more well-rounded applicants than there are spikes in the world. It truly is harder to differentiate well-rounded students from one other—which means you fall into the crapshoot. If, like most high school students, you're struggling to balance all your classwork, extracurriculars, social life, and sleep, this guide should actually help you out. Again, one of my main points is that it's OK to be unbalanced.
It's OK to make tradeoffs. Cut out everything you don't enjoy or that isn't meaningfully helping your college application. You'll buy yourself a ton of time—again, possibly up to 1, hours per year. With that time, you can refocus your energy on something you really enjoy, and accomplish way more than you ever thought possible.
And sleep. I think it's insane that high school students feel they're pressured to the point they can only sleep five hours a day. This is short-sighted thinking that actually worsens your performance overall and is incredibly unhealthy.
But this is a subject for another article. I agree that teens change a lot as they go into college. I'm a great example of this. Over my life I've had two major trajectory changes. Throughout most of my early, pre-college life, I wanted to be a doctor—specifically, a neurosurgeon.
The combination of these led me to medicine. When I got into college, I realized I wanted to have a more scalable, nonlinear impact with my time than being a practicing physician would let me do. I also really liked research and innovation. So I applied to MD-PhD programs dual-degree programs that combine medical and research training; yes, they're long—the average graduation time is eight years! I really enjoyed my time there and learned a lot, but I discovered something even better for my personal preferences: entrepreneurship.
I loved building products that solved people's problems; I loved fast iteration speeds unlike research often taking decades to get from bench to bedside ; and I loved the personal freedom. I don't regret any of my decisions, even though they took me on a different path from where I am now. I learned a ton about healthcare and bioengineering that normal people who go straight into startups don't know, and I still feel I achieved a good amount.
The point is, not knowing exactly what you want to do isn't a good excuse for avoiding exploring and diving deeply into something. When you choose a passion and work hard at it, you learn a lot of valuable lessons that are extensible to whatever you choose to do in the future.
You learn the value of discipline, how to motivate yourself, and how to prioritize your work on what's really important. You also see firsthand the result of hard work and perseverance in your achievement—and this sets the stage for positive feedback loops throughout your life. That's exactly against the point. If you're following the advice here, you won't need to be "forced" into doing anything. The idea is to work on something that's of such interest to you that spending time on it doesn't feel like work.
Not only does this make you happier, but it also takes you further—when you work on something you really care about, you have a much greater chance of success than someone who's not passionate but still trying really hard does. So try to avoid forcing it. If you're going to spend a lot of time on something, it'll be really painful if it's something you don't care about.
This is a hard problem and a large question in itself, and by nature everyone's different. The best thing I can do for now is give you a set of guidelines you can work through to start your brainstorming process:. If this seems like a challenge for a lot of readers, then let me know in the comments section below. I might write a more detailed guide about this if there's enough interest. I largely agree. There are too many students and parents especially parents who treat Ivy League admissions as the fundamental goal without questioning why they're doing it or how.
Even worse, if they're wrong about what it takes to get in, there's just a bunch of misery spread around for everyone. That's why I stand especially strongly behind my advice here. The fundamental goal is to identify and nurture your passion so that you make deep achievements in it.
You'll learn a lot more about yourself and your capabilities than if you simply followed the usual recommended mold. You'll enjoy your life a lot more and find meaning in your work. And along the way, this happens to be exactly what colleges are looking for.
As I said above, the college you attend has relatively little influence on where you go in life. By far, most of your success is determined entirely by you and the actions you choose to take.
However, there are true benefits from going to a better school. The largest one in my mind is the community. The students who attend top schools, and the professors and staff who work there, are of a higher caliber than those at lower-ranked schools. This is a fact of life. You'll meet people who are more insightful, creative, driven, passionate, and competent, largely because of how schools such as Harvard run their admissions processes and choose their faculty.
By working with them, studying with them, and being friends with them, you'll become better yourself. This fact wasn't apparent to me until I compared my experiences with those of friends who went to public schools and lower-level schools.
The difference in the quality of the community is stark and noticeable, and will have lasting effects throughout your life. Top schools used to be very expensive, but nowadays most of these schools are no longer cost-prohibitive.
Schools such as Harvard and Princeton now have generous financial aid packages with high income limits. If all of this doesn't sound good to you, then don't go to a top school. It's really fine. Do what makes you happy. Last note: what you do not get at top schools is a better academic education.
In fact, top schools are notorious for having professors who are brilliant in their research and innovation, but are terrible pedagogical teachers. That said, the academic knowledge you gain is only a small part of how college will change you. This is true.
Admissions is relative, meaning that the school wants the best students it can find, even if the bar is rising everywhere. So if the world gets more competitive, you need to do greater things to stay at the top.
However, not everyone's reading this guide and not everyone cares about the same level of achievement as you do. Just by reading this guide, you have a big leg up on the competition through your determination and resourcefulness. More importantly, only a small percentage of people who read this article will ultimately be able to fully execute this advice.
Once again, this stuff isn't easy—it's far easier to go with the flow and do what everyone else is doing. As entrepreneur Derek Sivers said: "If information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs. By definition, you're breaking from the mold by following the advice here. This is hard to do, let alone actually putting in the hours and motivation needed to achieve something great. Some people truly have extenuating circumstances that make their achievements disproportionate to their potential.
Luckily, colleges truly do look at applications holistically. If you articulate this well and are able to achieve a lot relative to what you've been through, colleges will look well upon you, even if on an absolute scale your application is weaker than that of an heir of a Fortune company.
If finances is a concern, I encourage you to find low-cost ways of adding value to the world through your passion. If you're into piano, you might not make it to Carnegie Hall, but you might be able to create YouTube tutorials on how to learn piano on a budget.
Or you might set up a mentorship program through which you recruit high school musicians to volunteer as music teachers for low-income students. There's a bunch of stuff you can do without having to spend money, if you're creative enough,. If time is a limitation, you might truly not have the time to dive deep into your passion. The tradeoffs will be much harder for you, but you might still be able to carve out time and make sacrifices to pursue your interest.
Again, at the end of the day, hardship shows tremendous character, and if on your application you tell a compelling story about where you've been and where you want to go, colleges will consider this favorably. Unfortunately, if you're very close to college applications i. Namely, work on your personal statements and make sure you have strong letters of recommendation. Everything else is more or less set.
But if you have a few months left before applications go out, you can probably do a lot more than you imagined if you prioritize your time and efforts correctly. Be strict about cutting out items that aren't helping your application and about working hard on your passion project.
If you can show a growth trajectory that's interesting to schools, that helps—especially if by interview time you've made a lot more progress since submitting your application. As I mentioned at the very beginning, these techniques are critical for the top 10 schools in the US.
For lower ranked schools such as Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Brown, these concepts apply less—more well-rounded students get in—but you'll still have an outstanding application if you apply the advice in this guide. For admissions to less selective schools i.
Because the competition is less fierce, you don't need to have a deep spike as much as you do for other schools. If you're a solid student all around, you should do fine. That said, I would still recommend following the advice in this guide because it will almost always strengthen your application and help you do more meaningful things earlier in your life. All top colleges say that their admissions criteria are holistic, and that they don't use cutoffs or rubrics.
This is generally true—they do care about where you are in your life, what opportunities you've had access to, and whether you're taking advantage of them. That said, they also have soft requirements. If you get 20 on the ACT, it will be very difficult for you to get into Harvard, no matter your other accomplishments.
This is just too low of a score for top schools to have confidence in your academic ability. Furthermore, it's very likely there's another applicant who's done what you've done but also has the academic ability to match.
Harvard will take that candidate every time. More specifically, your test scores and academic performance need to be consistent with your story. If you're applying with a science focus, for example, here's what you'll need:. I know this from personal experience. Even starting from freshman or sophomore year, I consistently scored on every SAT Math section I took without much prep.
If you're applying with science or math as your spike, you're competing against people like me. If you don't measure up on these standardized metrics, MIT will simply think you're not that good. You should still try to aim for at least , though. The reason, once again, is that science nerds typically find these sections fairly easy as well.
You can be even more lopsided: say you score on Evidence-Based Reading and Writing. This is OK, but you need to compensate by being even more amazing in your spike.
You must really set yourself apart from the students who are scoring s and creating big spikes. You can work through this logic for your own situation, whether that means you're applying as a humanities focus or with a special talent. You can read more of this analysis in our guide to admission requirements for Harvard. He's committed to providing the highest quality resources to help you succeed.
Allen graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude and earned two perfect scores on the SAT in , and in and a perfect score on the ACT. You can also find Allen on his personal website, Shortform , or the Shortform blog.
Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub. See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process. Ask questions; get answers. How to Get a Perfect , by a Perfect Scorer. Score on SAT Math. Score on SAT Reading. Score on SAT Writing. What ACT target score should you be aiming for?
How to Get a Perfect 4. How to Write an Amazing College Essay. A Comprehensive Guide. Choose Your Test. How to Get Into the Ivy League: Brief Overview If there's one central takeaway from this article, it's that most students are spending their time on entirely the wrong things because they have an incorrect view of what top colleges are really looking for. Bonus: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions This article is long and detailed, but I strongly believe it's well worth your time.
Important Disclaimers Before we dive in, I need to get a few things out of the way. Part 1: Why Schools Exist and What They Want to Accomplish To fully understand my points below on how to get into Yale and similar schools, we need to first start at the highest level: what do top schools hope to accomplish by existing? Schools are looking for two main qualities in applicants: Students who are going to accomplish world-changing things. Students who are going to contribute positively to their communities while in college and help other students accomplish great things as well.
That's essentially it. Fitzsimmons, long-time Dean of Admissions at Harvard College : "Each year we admit about 2, applicants.
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