If you founded a STEM nonprofit empowering undeserving children in a different country, if you ensure equitable solutions, if you bring awareness to disparities, if you are a passionate, innovative entrepreneur looking to bridge a gap, please empower yourself away from this article. Conversely, if you are fascinated by the mathematics of beauty, the physics of social change, Cold War-era fighter jets, the economics of bubbles and depressions, Soviet engineering, Shostakovich, genuinely helping others in your community, or literally anything else that’s interesting, please stick around. 

Many other students have made videos on social media about this topic. My advice is probably different. 

I attended a few months ago a lecture at Stanford provokingly titled, “Why you don’t deserve your Stanford acceptance.” Giving the lecture was a familiar soft-but-not-too-soft-spoken man who looks more like he’d be the leader of a ragtag motorcycle gang than a renowned academic, and whose lectures I had excitedly watched on YouTube, from which many fascinating ideas sprang. His name is Robert Sapolsky, and he talked about—or rather disparaged—the notion of free will. 

We are all, he told the theater packed with students and parents, nothing more than a result of our biology and our environment, both of which are outside our control. Citing studies on epigenetics, he asserted that the food your parents ate, where they grew up, and the food their parents ate and where they grew up, and so on and so forth, determines your anatomy and therefore your personality, your health, your IQ, your cravings, your preferences (i.e. if you are naturally predisposed to sweets or not, that was not your choice and yet you will pay for the consequences if you contract some sort of cancer), and your reactions to events in life. And, not to mention all the things that happen to you because of other peoples’ actions — where can you shoehorn in free will? Thus, you shouldn’t really be blamed for your mistakes, but, moral responsibility being what it is, you also don’t deserve credit for any of your accomplishments! 

As I sat there and listened to this tremendously smart man tell me that it wasn't my own hard work and determination that got me into Stanford but pure luck, I recalled my reading of a lecture by Sartre called Existentialism is a Humanism, which offered a radically different argument. In it the cross-eyed, five-foot-tall marxist declares that, because God doesn’t exist, and therefore because the world is a terribly cold place with no implicit moral framework, we have radical freedom and are in complete control of our decisions and how we react to things happening to us. We must bear what he calls the “burden of freedom,” the responsibility of choosing a path when there are a million others. For the hopeful college applicant’s purposes, even if Sapolsky is right—which I’m not sure he is—it would do him well to operate under Sartre’s framework. 

Note: I’m not an admission officer and I don’t know exactly what they want. Everything I’m about to tell you is what I did. There is a lot of luck involved, but also a lot you can do to improve your chances of getting lucky. 

In my view college admissions is nothing more than an ode to Emerson’s tritest cliches: “Ne te quaesiveris extra.” “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” “Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Or for our purposes: To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you a nonprofit founder, scientific researcher, cancer curer, and “empowerer” is the greatest accomplishment. 

But then what are you supposed to do? If you aren’t the number one math student in the country or an ISEF winner or a crazy violinist — in other words, if you think you’re average compared to the stereotypically “cracked” applicant, how do you compete? Emerson has the answer: “To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius. Speak your latent conviction…” Put differently, if you are radically yourself and like no one else, that is genius. This is precisely what you must do in every single part of your application: show off your genius. 

Given that admission officers will spend from 10 to 40 minutes on each application, admissions is basically just a speed date, an exercise in how well you can present yourself to a complete stranger. This can be either splendid or disastrous. If you’re interesting, funny, and humble, you’ll be memorable. If on the other hand you’re similar to other people—extremely passionate about empowerment and the like—you may not be as sticky in their mind. 

Let us begin from first principles. Who is an admission officer? They work for a school, which is an institute of LEARNING, and the school’s future interest (hint: ka-ching and bring glory to the school). They want you to succeed. Now consider their situation and what they’re looking for. They have to read 50 files a day, 15 of which are competitive, and then they need to read through the lines and determine which 2 applicants to squeeze out from the pile and push for admission. To do so they look for students who they think have the wherewithal, the moxie, to change the world. Primarily, though, they’re looking for…STUDENTS! Yes! Students! They don’t care if you cook good tacos or if you like karaoke. I’ve seen those Tik Toks where students get in after writing about how they like making chocolate for their families; I wouldn’t recommend that approach. 

What is a student? “Student” comes from the latin verb studere, meaning “to be eager, to be zealous, to strive after, to study, to apply oneself.” So, using the good ol’ transitive theory, a=b and b=c therefore a=c, we can say that admissions officers are looking for eager, zealous, striving, studious, and determined kids who are students in the full sense of the word both inside and outside the classroom. Now those stereotypically successful students’ profiles make sense: conducting research and starting a real nonprofit are extremely difficult to do. They take eagerness, zeal, and great determination. To gain PhD-level knowledge in high school or become an impactful social entrepreneur is rare and takes hard work, both qualities that are necessary for future success and, in the school’s eyes, future donations. 

Now that we understand what admission officers are looking for, how do we portray ourselves in a way that best highlights these qualities? How do we convey our best selves, our humblest, smartest, most interesting selves? I’ll go through each part of the application and do my best to show you. 

Activities 

There are three things you absolutely must do to produce a compelling application: demonstrate intellectual vitality, be as clear as a San Diego sky about what you want to do in the future, and be interesting. Here’s what Stanford’s website says about intellectual vitality: 

“Stanford students are brimming with curiosity, openness, and imagination. The cornerstone of one Stanford building is dedicated to ‘the things that haven’t happened yet, and to the people who are about to dream them up.’

Through your application, we hope to learn about your intellectual horizons. We want to hear about the ways you have expanded your perspective and sought new opportunities. We hope to envision how your energy, curiosity, and optimism would make a mark on Stanford and the world.” 

1: Your activities should show that you are capable of “dreaming up something new.” There are some established ways to do this. Research is a good example because it is literally discovering something new and then writing a report about it. Another good way to show off your intelligence is to write about interesting ideas and then submit your papers to competitions. I probably wrote 50 essays (or more) for many different essay competitions. I only received awards in three, and all three ended up on my application. 

I did not start an international nonprofit or publish research. But I did start two clubs and work in a lab. Those were my absolute favorite things to spend time on during high school. If you can manage to form clubs that fill a gap in your immediate community, I find that to be much more compelling than solving some international problem in a foreign country. Won’t your admission officer be skeptical of you if you—a high schooler who is busy with schoolwork—claim to have solved some vague problem like “STEM disparities” in Africa or India, places you don’t live in? I know I would. Again, my advice would be to look at problems in your immediate vicinity and think deeply about ways to approach them in a nonconforming manner. Or join an existing nonprofit. (Shoutout to Keep Texas Beautiful’s Ambassador Program, where I made some great friends.) Or, even better: do both. 

2: This is much easier if you have an uncommon niche. For me it was popular science and history writing. I loved reading about ecology and chemistry in my encyclopedia as a child, and, as a high schooler, I spent large amounts of time each week editing Wikipedia articles about those topics and about subjects that composed my second interest: politics, history, and philosophy. Every activity on my list besides music was related to either environmentalism or philosophy. My best activities synthesized both. 

I know that a lot of the kids who have asked me for help are doing pre-med or CS. “Everyone does it so it’s more comp,” they complain. There are so many interesting things about each of those fields I could go on and on. When I first read “Attention Is All You Need,” a paper by Google engineers about transformer models, I recall immediately going to a Karpathy video—the one where he builds an early GPT model from scratch—to learn how it all worked. One could explore so many tangent ideas off of that one paper it’s incredible. Or take human biology. I took anatomy and hated it, but I must admit it was fascinating at times. I recall learning about a special enzyme called ATP synthase, which is a biological ATP-producing motor that spins based on a difference in proton concentrations across a membrane. How cool are these things? If you explore these ideas and somehow attach activities to them, that would make a killer essay. 

In short, for your activities: focus on the idea behind each being unique. Impact matters, but in my opinion local/regional can be better than national if the idea behind the organization and local impact is compelling. Remember: Admission officers see students all day claiming they address disparities and inequities in different states and countries. This also can come across as privileged in my opinion. On the other hand, by tying your activities to where you come from in a creative way, you stand out and feel more authentic. It’s also just more fun. 

Writing

To speak truly I think my essays and recommendations were what got me in. I think this because my Stanford admission officer referenced my essays in her letter to me, and my Columbia admission officer also congratulated me on creativity throughout my application. 

These are the two parts of your application that show the committee who you are. Recall our definition of a student: you must be eager, zealous, striving, studious, and determined. Now that you’ve pursued interesting activities with zeal, you must write about them with even more zeal. Every essay you write—besides maybe one or two—should be about your academic interest tied to an activity related to that interest. 

For example: In my personal essay—which I drafted 23 times, the last one being a week before deadlines—I wrote about my love for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature and tied it to my frustration of being a bad writer. I then transitioned into talking about how even though I initially had trouble with chemistry research, I found joy in that, too. I finished my essay by talking about how I learned to conduct research and tie philosophy into my science writing in a new way. In other words, I had found my style instead of trying to imitate other great writers. 

Then, in my supplementals, I wrote about academic ideas I found interesting: how effective is the activism we hear about on the news? How can we improve environmentalism using philosophy? How can we democratize philosophy and the love of ideas? My favorite essay was my roommate essay. I wrote about my Spider-man obsession by analyzing the philosophical origins of Miles Morales’s leap of faith (check out Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling). 

Also: Anything that may bring your admission reader skepticism, such as a club you’re part of or research you participated in, you MUST write about. Not only that, you have to write about it with authority. You have to prove to your reader that you actually worked hard in that activity and you know what you’re talking about. This is why I wrote every essay, in some capacity, about philosophy, or applying philosophy to science or to history or to my own personal interests like Spider-man and Wikipedia. 

Another tip: Almost every essay you write—at least the longer ones—should teach the reader something new about the world. If you think your reader will finish the essay and think, “Hmm I never knew that!” or, “Wow that’s an interesting take,” then you’ve written a good essay. If you write your essay about liking anime or chocolate—congratulations, you’ve become one of the other hundred million people in the world who like those things. But if you connect your respect for anime’s beautiful storytelling with your interest in effective public health crises management policies, now you’ve got your reader’s attention. 

Another way to do this is to teach your reader about the history behind an idea you’re interested in, and then tie that to an activity you’ve pursued. Example: Say you play tennis. Have you ever wondered where “tennis” as a word comes from? It’s fascinating: Italians, when watching Frenchmen serve the ball in the 13th century or something, heard them yell “tenez!” meaning “take it” to indicate that the ball was now in play. The Italians then took that and the game eventually became known as tennis. Now tie that to something else you’re interested in and boom, you have a fun essay that isn’t necessarily academic. If you read some of my other articles carefully you’ll notice I sprinkle things like this throughout my writing. 

Writing is thinking. Thus, creative writing is creative thinking. By showing off your genius through fun writing rather than AI-esque disgusting writing, you will set yourself apart. 

Recommendations 

Ask the teachers that think better of you than they do other students. If you think even for a second that your letter will be mediocre, ask someone else. Of course, these teachers should write a letter that aligns with everything else in your application: activities, essays, and future plans. My recommendation for your recommendations: Write a cover letter to each teacher explaining what you want to study and why, and anything you’d like them to write about. Most of all, tell them that colleges are looking for students who are curious and ask them to highlight instances of you going out of your way to explore more about their academic subject. 

Interviews

I only had two interviews. My first one was with Stanford. I distinctly recall it being on one of those freezing cold January days, and my bladder felt like it was going to explode because I was nervous. Nowadays interviews are often online and kept strictly to 40 minutes (depending on your interviewer, but both of mine adhered to the time limit), which sucks. 

Your interviewer will know nothing about you except your name and high school. The way your interview is conducted really depends on your interviewer. Both of my interviewers asked me questions and I did my best to answer them. I’ve heard from others that their interviews were very casual and conversational, but that was not the case for me. 

Other Tips

Another piece of game: You will exist in these admission officers’ minds not as a “Daniel” but as, “Oh, that mountain-biker-philosopher kid from Texas.” Not as a “Jack” but as, “My Nazi-history-Bruckner kid from D.C.” My point is that you will become a brand, not a name. And it is essential that this brand be sticky and obvious after reading your application. 

Like I said earlier, I drafted my personal essay 23 times before writing one I finally liked, one that felt authentic and representative of my identity. I also wrote all of my Columbia essays the day the application was due. This is NOT recommended. It was extremely stressful and I think I developed an eating disorder over winter break. 

I wrote this article because there was demand: Instagram DMs, messages, emails. And because I understand where many of you are coming from. This process is weird and stressful and frustrating, especially when it feels like everyone else has made college their life since middle school. But I assure you that even if you played Fortnite in middle school instead of grinding science fair, if you follow what I’ve told you to do in this article as best you can, as creatively as you can, then you will be better off than most applicants. Overplanning will not bear fruit—at least it definitely didn’t for me. My original plan was to train hard and go D1; two spine injuries later I have internalized Steve Jobs’s famous lesson told at Stanford’s class of 2005 commencement: “You can only connect the dots looking backward.”  

If you still want more personalized help, I realize that though I’ve tried my best to help, this article isn’t my greatest work—I’m burned out. That said, I do have a lot more tips on how to write well, especially for this strange type of writing that is college essay writing. There are also things you can do on common app to stand out. So, I am considering taking a couple of students who I think are interesting. If you believe you are one of those students and you have read to this point, email me a blurb on your future plans.