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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Meh.  Any college admissions officer would say that the kid who stands out at elite colleges is the one who took AP Chem while at the same time taking doing the independent music thing.  [/quote]

This actually isn't true. In most cases, the kid who stands out is the one with a unique story. Right now, a lot of kids have the same (overachieving, overtaxed) story.[/quote]

but hasn't this been true for 10 years now? this is what they call the spike. this is why kids start fake NFPs or write AI-generated self published books on amazon. makes them sound deep into a passion! and colleges were falling for the NFPs for a while - and the books now. [/quote]

Yes, but the point (I think) is, don't actually do all the other STEM AP stuff if you are deep into colonial women's history. Do the minimal amount of necessary and then do buckets and buckets of extra on the colonial history front? So yes its a spike, but showing initiative to double up on history electives could help and you don't need AP physics...Honors might be enough?

There's a guy on FB (private counselor) who has a whole thing that goes through why this is a better strategy and shows "passion" and drive. And helps not make you look like a bot.[/quote]

Don't know if this is actually true? Or at least not across the board. A former T10 AO (from another thread here) on Reddit said the below this week:

"She seems to think that prioritizing rigor is aligned mostly with major interests, at least in the videos I've seen.

That's not right. [b]We value rigor across the board, no matter major preferences. Our pools are so competitive that I've gotten accustomed, as have other AOs, to seeing the most rigorous curriculum in all subjects. A humanities kid still challenging themselves with calculus or above. A STEM kid taking AP Lit.[/b]

[i]There is no AO that gives a shit about passion projects.[/i] We don't even use that term in the admissions office. This passion project idea is just born out of the college consulting industry, with consultants who are trying to sell that this is a golden ticket. And it's smart, I suppose, because they take advantage of an incredibly opaque process with students that don't know any better. But when I was reading files, when I was in committees, I can assure you, most students did not have a passion project, and if a student did, barely any mention of it came up in the discussion of the student's admissibility.

Wrt a central theme in the entire, this is a bit more nuanced. You can have one, but it's not necessary[i]. A lot of people push this because they think it's easier for an AO to identify what's special about a student, so they then can pitch the student much more easily in committee. This works for some students, doesn't work for others. The way we select students is simply looking for the strongest in the pool relative to others.[/i] So you can have a great "theme" to your app, but the kid that has no theme, that is more dynamic, has the pieces we're looking for as far as priorities and has strong essays that demonstrate who they are without trying to string everything together coherently can STILL get in. And in fact, they do at higher quantities than someone who is trying to weave a "theme" throughout the app."

https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/1lxo48y/comment/n39q77w/[/quote]

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