Applying to College? Here’s What Admissions Officers Are Really Looking For
Most people think they know what colleges are looking for: stellar grades, perfect test scores, and an extracurricular list longer than your grandmother’s wedding dress.
To an extent, of course, this is true. Admissions committees at selective colleges love seeing these things, and it’s hard to get into a top school without one or more of them.
But they’re not everything. As a Harvard admissions officer once explained to me, “Each year we could admit a class made up entirely of valedictorians with perfect SAT scores. But we don’t, because it would be a disaster.”
Colleges are communities, and admissions committees are looking to put together a diverse group of students who will thrive together. They also admit people, not numbers, and are highly trained to look for human characteristics behind those well-polished resumes.
So what are they looking for? Over my 15 years of teaching, sitting on committees, speaking with admissions officers, and advising hundreds of students on their applications, I’ve been shocked to learn that most students and parents can’t answer that question. This is an enormous problem, because it leads families to waste time and money on pursuits that kids don’t really care about, drives already-anxious teenagers to stress out over the wrong things, and inspires students to write admissions essays that fail to help them — or even hurt them.
Knowledge, however, is power. If you know what colleges are looking for, you can make choices and craft admissions essays that are true to yourself and help you get into the school of your dreams. So without further ado, here are the top eight qualities that selective colleges look for in their applicants.
1. Achievement. It’s important to be honest about this: colleges are looking for achievement, both academic and extracurricular. Specifically, admissions officers look for “demonstrated achievement,” i.e. achievements that can be measured in concrete evidence such as grades, test scores, awards, etc.
That’s why your transcript is typically the most important piece in any admissions decision, and it’s why your activities list plays such a big role. Your essays can also be a great place to highlight achievements that could be overlooked elsewhere in your application, or to tell the story behind an achievement that was personally significant to you.
2. Engagement. No big surprise here: colleges are looking for engagement in the form of active involvement in your school and community.
It should come as a relief, however, that colleges are generally not looking for people who spread themselves thin by joining every club, team, and protest movement in sight. Instead, admissions officers want to know: How have you spent your time, and how have you made use of the opportunities available to you? Essays give you a chance to answer those questions, and to highlight the quality of your engagement as opposed to the quantity.
3. Passion. Given the focus on numbers in admissions, it may come as a shock that admissions officers care about passion. But they do — in fact, the essays that effectively show a student’s genuine passion are usually the most compelling.
Why is this? It’s because colleges are looking for people who know what they’re passionate about and pursue those passions. Pursuing one’s passions is at the core of the liberal educational experience: finding your interests, learning more about them, growing in understanding and knowledge. Your essays play a crucial role in highlighting your passions, which are rarely clear simply from looking at your résumé.
4. Leadership. Selective colleges are looking for leaders. In fact, many of them see it as their mission to educate the future leaders of society. If you don’t believe me, read Harvard’s mission statement: “The mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.”
Good admissions officers, however, know that there is more than one kind of leadership. Your essays can and should highlight how you lead in your activities, but you can also talk about leadership in the classroom, among your friends, even at home. In addition, as any observer of presidential politics knows, leadership can take many forms. Talking about the kind of leader you strive to be while getting specific about what leadership means to you will make a strong impression on an admissions reader.
5. Intellectual Curiosity. While qualities like achievement and leadership are pretty straightforward, intellectual curiosity can be a slightly fuzzier concept. Put simply, it’s a genuine interest in ideas and learning, a trait often seen when a person is driven to understand something or solve a problem.
Like passion, intellectual curiosity is hard to quantify. Your essays are the best place to show it. It’s also a quality that becomes increasingly more important as you move up the ladder in terms of college prestige and selectivity. Which makes sense, when you think about it: the best universities are global centers of scholarship, and they want students who care deeply about the life of the mind.
6. Creativity. I put creativity towards the end of this list because it’s usually the first thing people think about when they start their college essays. If that’s all you’re thinking about, though, it can lead to a flashy, “creative” essay that grabs the reader’s attention but doesn’t help you in the committee room.
Creativity simply means imagination: the ability to come up with new ideas. Happily, all of us are creative. If you are a painter, you’ll demonstrate creativity through your art. Athletes also use creativity to win games and navigate team dynamics, scholars show creativity in their research, and leaders of every stripe need creativity to motivate others towards common goals. Showing your creativity in your essays will help show the readers who you are.
7. Maturity and Personal Growth. I saved this one for last because it’s rarely talked about, yet is highly important. Colleges are looking for students who, even though they’re teenagers, have begun to develop some sense of their own values.
Colleges are not looking for adults — which is why deeply introspective essays written by parents often bomb. Instead, they are looking for young people who have the ability to self-reflect, kids who have slowed down enough to think about and articulate who they are, what they value, and the impact they want to have on the world.
Personal growth and maturity are internal qualities. You can’t show them on a transcript or résumé, but you can show them in your essays. Clearly articulating how you’ve learned, changed, grown and developed in your high school years will almost always make a positive impression.
8. Personality! Put together, these seven factors add up to show your personality. Which is great, because the reality is that college admissions officers do want to see your personality.
What is personality? I’d say that it’s your unique way of being a human in this crazy world. Every applicant will have some degree of achievement, passion, engagement, etc. — but you have your own particular way of doing and embodying all of these qualities.
Colleges, after all, admit people, not numbers. That’s why the best essays help the admissions officer make sense of all the numbers, grades, references, and other information in your application folder. They want and need your help to answer the question that’s burning in their minds: Who is the person behind all this data?
The deeper you can dive into all of these qualities in your essays, and the more vulnerable you can be, the more you will show something of your true personality in the midst of what can often be a very dehumanizing process.
If you can do that, while I can’t promise that you’ll get into every school where you apply, I can guarantee that you will craft a powerful application that will get you admitted to a college where you will flourish.
Good luck on the journey, and reach out if you have questions!
