In the last several years, it has become increasingly harder to get into one of the prestigious Ivy League colleges. With so many global students applying for limited spots, admissions officers struggle to find the best talent to represent their university. To make things even worse, a lot of applicants have near-perfect test scores, further complicating the selection.
“In an attempt to stand out from the crowd, many students turn to passion projects and independent initiatives,” according to H&C Education, an Ivy League admissions consulting. “Some of them start YouTube channels, others create nonprofits, while a handful of them organize events.” These passion projects showcase a person’s creativity, but also willingness to take initiative.
The Importance of Passion Projects for College Admissions
In the grand scheme of things, passion projects for college admissions might seem irrelevant, especially if they’re not related to a major that a person applied to. Nevertheless, they provide some valuable insights for admissions officers:
- Showcase Resilience: Complex projects usually require a lot of planning and sometimes, communication between different parties. Organizing them can be rather stressful, so a person has to be resilient to pull them off.
- Demonstrate Authenticity: These initiatives tell a story about a person, their interests, and perspective on the world. Admissions officers can learn a lot about an individual just by analyzing them.
- Proof of Leadership: Some projects require experts with different backgrounds. A student has to organize all these professionals to ensure that everything goes smoothly. As such, these projects will put your leadership skills to the test.
- Community Impact: Doing good things for your community usually carries over and indicates that you’ll be a positive factor for the society in the future. By supporting these individuals and giving them proper education, colleges can empower local communities.
It’s worth noting that not all projects are made the same. Some of them are done on a smaller scale with students purposefully organizing them to gain an advantage when applying for a college. So, if you’re adamant on doing one of these events, you’ll have to make a noticeable impact to wow admissions officers.
Focus on Personalized Learning
Education is experiencing tectonic shifts in recent years. With greater emphasis on visual content and the emergence of artificial intelligence, institutions are forced to completely overhaul their methods to cater to a new generation of students. Furthermore, there’s much more focus on personalization.
The change was necessary because students couldn’t take standardized tests during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, admissions officers had to rely on personalized learning evidence, which included portfolios, passion projects, and individual research. Once the pandemic was over, the methodology remained in place, as it provided officers with valuable data that couldn’t be gathered otherwise.
How Admissions Officers Assess Personal Projects?
When evaluating passion projects for college admissions, officers are not only interested in results. They would like to know why you’ve started a project and how you got that particular idea. Among other things, admissions officers would like to know what you’ve learned from the experience. Here are a few main points of emphasis when assessing each project:
1. Passion Project Trend
As great passion projects for college admissions are for gathering additional insights about a student, they also introduce particular challenges. Particularly, with so many students using passion projects to improve their portfolios, admissions officers have to be careful when evaluating each one.
Specifically, officers measure your effort to determine whether or not this was a “real” passion project, and not just something you did to improve your application. They evaluate whether you did this to enhance your learning journey and what you’ve gained from the entire experience. Officers put emphasis on leadership skills you’ve gained, resilience under pressure, and curiosity.
2. Focus on Authenticity
As mentioned, admissions officers have become better at recognizing projects that were done only for the sake of a resume. They can differentiate between “soulless” projects that have little direction and those with a specific focus. As such, admissions officers place a specific emphasis on evaluating candidates’ authenticity.
The best way to demonstrate this is through alignment of interest. For example, if a project is closely related to what the student is applying to, admissions officers can easily determine that this is their true passion. They also take into account the project’s length, with longer projects providing more authentic insights into a student.
3. Growth and Skills
At the end of the day, these projects are invaluable for students, as they can teach them a great deal about a particular subject. Besides attaining knowledge, students will improve their creativity, leadership, problem-solving, and collaboration. Most of these skills can be used in both academic and business environments.
Admissions officers evaluate students’ ability to reflect. In other words, a person should be objective regarding the results they’ve achieved. Even if the project missed its mark, they should take lessons from their mistakes as an invaluable part of their growth. This is usually considered a testament to a person’s resilience and maturity, which bodes well for their application.
4. Impact and Scope
Schools assess the impact and scope of each project to better understand lessons learned. Projects that lasted a long time and required quite some effort are weighed more heavily than quick projects that could’ve been finished in a week or two. College admissions officers consider whether a project had a broader impact on the community or was only done at the high school level.
For example, teaching a classmate a few things might demonstrate your command of a subject, but it doesn’t say much about your organizational skills or leadership. In comparison, if you organized classes for your local community, handling dozens of students simultaneously, it shows that you’re a natural-born teacher.
Leveraging Personal Projects and Initiatives
Whatever you do, make sure that your initiatives and projects are valuable to your community. Furthermore, it is much better to spend some time planning and executing the passion projects for college admissions than rushing through different phases. In the end, only through real commitment can you leave a positive impression on admissions officers.
