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We see thousands of applications a year, and I’ll be honest with you: applying to college can bring out the worst in otherwise thoughtful, curious students. The pressure, the comparison, the noise online – it all adds up. It doesn’t surprise me that a significant share of applicants end up in therapy after the process.
But it doesn’t have to work that way. In fact, the same mindset that protects your mental health is also the one that tends to produce the strongest applications.
Every year we meet students who have spent years designing their lives around what they think admissions want to see:
Sometimes those efforts are enormous. Students pour hundreds of hours into work that, on the surface, looks impressive. And then they are devastated when the results don’t match the effort.
From our side of the desk, here’s the hard truth:
If you built something only to impress colleges, it usually shows.
If you built something because you genuinely cared, that usually shows too.
They are not dismissing your effort. They are asking a different question:
“Does this activity grow naturally out of who this student is, and where they seem to be heading?”
When the answer is no, the application feels hollow, no matter how polished the résumé looks.
There are real structural frustrations: high tuition, unequal access to opportunities, advantages tied to wealth or legacy status. On top of that, students drown in comparison:
From where I sit, the most damaging part isn’t that these things exist. It’s that students fixate on factors they cannot control and neglect the part they can control: how they spend their time, what they learn, and how honestly they tell their story.
You will never know exactly why a certain decision went the way it did. But you have complete control over whether the life behind your application is real.
You will hear this phrased a lot of different ways, but here is the core idea:
The strongest applications come from students who go deep into their genuine interests and become the best version of themselves, not an imitation of what they think we want.
That does not mean you must be the best in the world at anything. It means that the particular combination of things you care about, and the way you pursue them, is coherent and alive.
Maybe it is guitar, cats, coding, and entrepreneurship. Maybe it is aviation, music, and psychology.
You might not be “number one” in any single lane. But the way those interests intersect is uniquely yours. When you lean into that combination, you become memorable in exactly the way that matters: you become someone’s favorite reader experience in the pile, not just another “strong applicant.”
As readers, they remember the student whose file feels like a person, not a checklist.
You are allowed to change. In fact, they expect it.
A student who starts out convinced they want neuroscience and later discovers economics, or who shifts from one activity to another after discovering a real interest, is not “inconsistent.” If it’s done thoughtfully, that evolution is compelling.
What I look for is:
Your application should feel like a story of growth, not a random pile of pivots.
Many students quietly think this. From the admissions perspective, that usually means:
Passion often grows out of repetition and progress. You try something, you’re not very good at it, you keep going, you get a little better, and somewhere along the way it stops being miserable and starts being meaningful.
You are allowed to experiment:
From an admissions perspective, depth beats volume almost every time.
You may have heard the advice to develop a “spike” – one area where you show unusual depth or initiative. There is truth to that.
Imagine all your energy focused on building one serious project, skill, or pursuit:
Now imagine trying to build five of those at once. Almost no one can.
When they read applications, what stands out is not the student who tried to do everything, but the student who clearly committed deeply to one or two things and grew from them.
We will never tell you not to aim high. Apply to the reach school. Take the big swing. Regret over not trying is often worse than a rejection.
But direct your ambition wisely.
If you are willing to “do anything” for college, then do this:
From my side of the table, that is exactly the kind of student they want to admit. Because here is the quiet reality of admissions:
You can do nearly everything right and still be denied. That is not a verdict on your worth. It is a function of limited space, institutional priorities, and timing.
You cannot control that. You can control whether the years leading up to those decisions were spent living someone else’s idea of “impressive” or becoming someone you’re proud of, regardless of the outcome.
If we could give you one guiding principle as a college admission professional, it would be this:
Do the unglamorous work: study when you don’t feel like it, show up to practice, keep your commitments, finish what you start. But build that work on a foundation that is genuinely yours.
If the decisions break your way, you will arrive at college as a fuller, more grounded version of yourself. If they don’t, you will still have skills, experiences, and a direction you care about.
Either way, your time will not have been wasted. And that, from where we sit, is far more important than any single admit letter.