Approaching Prestigious Universities with 'Distinctiveness' Rather Than Academic Achievement

Maintaining excellent academic performance in high school, achieving top test scores, and building a flawless profile through extracurricular activities demonstrating talent and passion often isn't enough. It's common for students to receive rejection or waitlist notifications from the universities they apply to. The admission process of prestigious universities is a mystery to most students and parents. Although there's no definitive answer to what more needs to be done for admission, there certainly are ways to increase the chances of acceptance. Let's explore what students need.

Just because a student excels acadically doesn't guarantee their admission to a prestigious university. It's important to remember that universities prefer differentiated students and strategize accordingly. picture=Image Today

■ The Unseen Factors

Ivy League colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, which most outstanding students aspire to attend, do not decide an applicant's admission based solely on academic performance, test scores, extracurricular activities, and award history available in the application. These universities strive to find through the application whether the applicant possesses any special talent and can contribute to societal development after completing their studies.

1. Capability to Handle College-Level Coursework

Simply having a high GPA in high school does not guarantee admission to prestigious universities. In the United States, there are over 100,000 public high schools, each with its own way of calculating the GPA. Relying solely on the numbers reflected in a child's report card and letting one's guard down can lead to a big setback in college admissions. What matters is the level of the courses the student has chosen. Universities closely examine the level of the classes where the grades were assigned, and predict whether the applicant can handle the courses offered by the university. It's a good sign if the level and grades of the courses improve as the student progresses, but if the class level and grades decrease over time, it can backfire. It's important to ensure grades do not drop as the college admissions date approaches.

2. Ability to Be Independent

It's not unusual for seemingly ordinary students to receive acceptance letters from prestigious universities, leaving their peers and parents puzzled. From the perspective of parents who have children who were rejected by prestigious universities despite possessing better credentials, it can be quite confusing. A few years ago, a girl from a financially challenged family managed to get accepted into a well-known private university. Unable to participate in conventional extracurricular activities due to her circumstances, she worked part-time at a fast-food restaurant in her neighborhood throughout high school to support her family. She started working due to financial difficulties, but during her employment, she did her best and won the 'Best Employee' award several times. Upon hearing this, a senior executive from the restaurant's head office wrote a strong recommendation for her during the college admission process, which helped her achieve her dream of attending her dream school.

While some students from wealthy, socially prominent families use their parents' influence to get internships in well-known politicians' offices or participate in research with well-known university professors over the summer, the girl working part-time managed to overcome her difficulties by doing her best in challenging circumstances. Although working with politicians and participating in university research are meaningful activities, from the perspective of a college admissions officer, the girl who worked part-time to help her family and contribute to her company also deserves high scores. This is because the college authorities give high marks for such a student's independence.

3. Interdisciplinary Learning Skills

This is the most challenging concept for Korean parents to understand. In Korea, once a student enters a specific college or department, it becomes their identity. Furthermore, it's often assumed that their life and future align with the major they are studying in college. However, it's different in the United States. The combination and accumulation of various fields a student has studied and experienced forms their unique identity.

Admission officers are interested in seeing how students apply and integrate what they've learned in school into their hobbies or areas of interest. For example, if a student wants to become an engineer, it's not enough to simply demonstrate their competence in science and math. Admission officers want to see how they can connect the concepts and ideas learned in literature, history, or art classes to engineering. They want to see the student exploring commonalities between different disciplines or trying to introduce music, law, or psychology into engineering. The ability to think outside the box and create new ideas is a powerful weapon to increase the chances of admission to prestigious universities.

4. Effort to Understand Other Cultures

During the summer vacation, many high school students participate in overseas missionary activities in Mexico, Asia, Africa, etc., through churches or community service organizations. These voluntary activities should be performed as much as possible for the welfare of the community, regardless of college admissions. However, the issue from the college's perspective is that a large number of students in the United States participate in such overseas missionary activities and write their college essays on this topic.

Admissions officers receive a lot of similar essays based on missionary activities, and it's understandable that they may find these repetitive. It is not mandatory to go abroad to understand different cultures and languages and help those less fortunate. These activities can easily be done within the local community where students belong, which is full of various cultures, languages, and people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. With a change in perspective, it's entirely possible to understand various cultures within your own community.

5. Activities That Bring Positive Change

With college admissions season approaching, many students hastily participate in activities they don't particularly care about due to lack of time. It's easy to tell from their application or essay whether they're just filling up time. For example, participating in a street cleaning activity one weekend and serving lunch to homeless people the next. While these activities are valuable and important, if the student isn't interested in environmental protection or social welfare policies, they're merely fulfilling their service hours.

No matter what activity they engage in, if it ends at a level where the student is just satisfied or is unrelated to their interests, it's hard to find significant value. There's no need to focus on grandiose activities. Any activity can be good if it naturally appeals to them and brings positive change to people around them.