⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Personal Narrative: My Work Environment

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Having two test scores is completely unnecessary —you get pretty much zero additional credit. Again, with one test score, you have already passed their filter. Finally, class finals or state-required exams are a breeze if you get a 5 on the corresponding AP tests. This section asks for your parent information and family situation. There's not much you can do here besides report the facts. The reader made a number of marks here for occupation and education. There's likely a standard code for different types of occupations and schools. If I were to guess, I'd say that the numbers add to form some metric of "family prestige. So it seems higher numbers are given for less prestigious educations by your parents. I'd expect that if both my parents went to schools like Caltech and Dartmouth, there would be even lower numbers here.

This makes me think that the less prepared your family is, the more points you get, and this might give your application an extra boost. If you were the first one in your family to go to college, for example, you'd be excused for having lower test scores and fewer AP classes. Schools really do care about your background and how you performed relative to expectations. In the end, schools like Harvard say pretty adamantly they don't use formulas to determine admissions decisions, so I wouldn't read too much into this. But this can be shorthand to help orient an applicant's family background. For most applicants, your Extracurriculars and your Academic Honors will be where you develop your Spike and where your Personal Narrative shines through.

This was how my application worked. Just below I'll describe the activities in more detail, but first I want to reflect on this list. As instructed, my extracurriculars were listed in the order of their interest to me. The current Common App doesn't seem to ask for this, but I would still recommend it to focus your reader's attention. The most important point I have to make about my extracurriculars: as you go down the list, there is a HUGE drop in the importance of each additional activity to the overall application.

If I were to guess, I assign the following weights to how much each activity contributed to the strength of my activities section:. In other words, participating in the Research Science Institute RSI was far more important than all of my other extracurriculars, combined. You can see that this was the only activity my admissions reader circled. The reason for this is the prestige of RSI. Because the program was so prestigious and selective, getting in served as a big confirmation signal of my academic quality. In other words, the Harvard admissions reader would likely think, "OK, if this very selective program has already validated Allen as a top student, I'm inclined to believe that Allen is a top student and should pay special attention to him.

Now, it took a lot of prior work to even get into RSI because it's so selective. I had already ranked nationally in the Chemistry Olympiad more below , and I had done a lot of prior research work in computer science at Jisan Research Institute—more about this later. But getting into RSI really propelled my application to another level. Because RSI was so important and was such a big Spike, all my other extracurriculars paled in importance. The admissions officer at Princeton or MIT probably didn't care at all that I volunteered at a hospital or founded a high school club. This is a good sign of developing a strong Spike. You want to do something so important that everything else you do pales in comparison to it.

A strong Spike becomes impossible to ignore. In contrast, if you're well-rounded, all your activities hold equal weight—which likely means none of them are really that impressive unless you're a combination of Olympic athlete, internationally-ranked science researcher, and New York Times bestselling author, but then I'd call you unicorn because you don't exist. Apply this concept to your own interests—what can be so impressive and such a big Spike that it completely overshadows all your other achievements? This might be worth spending a disproportionate amount of time on. As I recommend in my Harvard guide and 4. In retrospect, one "mistake" I made was spending a lot of time on the violin. Each week I spent eight hours on practice and a lesson and four hours of orchestra rehearsals.

This amounted to over 1, hours from freshman to junior year. The result? I was pretty good, but definitely nowhere near world-class. Remember, there are thousands of orchestras and bands in the country, each with their own concertmasters, drum majors, and section 1 st chairs. If I were to optimize purely for college applications, I should have spent that time on pushing my spike even further —working on more Olympiad competitions, or doing even more hardcore research. Looking back I don't mind this much because I generally enjoyed my musical training and had a mostly fun time in orchestra and I had a strong Spike anyway.

But this problem can be a lot worse for well-rounded students who are stretched too thin. First, developing a Spike requires continuous, increasingly ambitious foundational work. It's like climbing a staircase. From the beginning of high school, each step was more and more ambitious—my first academic team, my first research experience, leading up to state and national competitions and more serious research work. So when I suggest devoting a lot of time to developing your Spike, it's not necessarily the Spike in itself—it's also spending time on foundational work leading up to what will be your major achievement. That's why I don't see my time with academic teams or volunteering as wasted, even though in the end they didn't contribute as much to my application.

Second, it is important to do things you enjoy. I still enjoyed playing the violin and being part of an orchestra, and I really enjoyed my school's academic teams, even though we never went beyond state level. Even if some activities don't contribute as much to your application, it's still fine to spend some time on them—just don't delude yourself into thinking they're stronger than they really are and overspend time on them. Finally, note that most of my activities were pursued over multiple years.

This is a good sign of commitment—rather than hopping from activity year to year, it's better to show sustained commitment, as this is a better signal of genuine passion. In a future article, I'll break down these activities in more detail. But this guide is already super long, so I want to focus our attention on the main points. Please describe which of your activities extracurricular and personal activities or work experience has been most meaningful and why.

I chose RSI as my most significant activity for two reasons—one based on the meaning of the work, and another on the social aspect. Reading the second paragraph now, it's a bit cringe-y in its enthusiasm, but I really did have an amazing experience and am still good friends with some of my classmates from RSI, over a decade later. In my application and in the Common Application, there's an Additional Information section, where you can write about anything else.

I chose to spend this clarifying my extracurriculars even further. My main motive in this section was to add more detail around my most significant activities : what I did, why they should be noteworthy to the reader, and what I personally gained from them. The only parts the reader underlined were the name of my research supervisor, and the fact that my research was then a Siemens-Westinghouse Semi-Finalist.

Both of these legitimate my research. I highly recommend you take the time to write an Additional Information section. You have so little space in your Yale application or Duke application to express yourself—this is purposely designed so everyone doesn't submit pages of drivel. Here you have an extra words to add more color around your life and accomplishments—DO IT. Along with Activities, Academic Honors is the other major area where you can really shine and develop a big Spike. The higher the level of competition and the more prestigious the award, the more the honor is worth. This has an exponential relationship, because of how quickly the field is narrowed at each stage of competition. A state ranking is probably worth 10x that of a regional ranking; a national ranking 10x that of a state ranking; and an international ranking even more.

This can also mean an international ranking is worth x that of a regional ranking—again, why a big Spike is so impressive. It's obvious that schools like Yale and UChicago want the best students in the world that they can get their hands on. Academic honors and awards are a great, quantifiable way to show that. Here's the complete list of Academic Honors I submitted.

By far, the biggest academic honor I had was competing in the US National Chemistry Olympiad , where I ranked 6 in the country in junior year, out of roughly 11, students who took the first round test. If you don't know about these academic Olympiads, they're like the Olympics for math and science geeks. At the highest international level of competition, countries send their top students to wage battle against each other, just like the sports Olympics. The best known subjects are Math , Physics , Chemistry , and Biology in order of descending prestige, among nerds. I ranked at the national level, before the US selected their final team—a study camp of 20 students. In junior year, I didn't make it onto the international team to compete I did in senior year, too late for college apps.

But this was still a national level honor, in a well-known competition. If you are nationally or internationally ranked for something meaningful, you really stand out in the reader's mind , because most applicants only have regional and state honors, if even that. This is why I say a big Spike makes you stand out clearly among a bin of well-rounded applicants. Note that even though I had a strong application, I clearly didn't have the strongest application possible.

At Harvard in my class, I knew International Math and Physics Olympiad gold medalists, people who were on their national teams for the hardest subjects AND ranked in the top percentiles worldwide. And there were students with similar level accomplishments in other arenas, from music performance to writing. Earning this kind of honor was nearly a golden ticket to getting into schools like Harvard , because you literally are the best in the world at what you care about. So you don't need anywhere near a "perfect" application to get in. I know this is intimidating if you don't already have a prestigious honor. But remember there are thousands of nationally-ranked people in a multitude of honor types, from science competitions to essay contests to athletics to weird talents.

And I strongly believe the 1 differentiator of high school students who achieve things is work ethic, NOT intelligence or talent. Yes, you need a baseline level of competence to get places, but people far undervalue the progress they can make if they work hard and persevere. Far too many people give up too quickly or fatigue without putting in serious effort.

If you're stuck thinking, "well I'm just an average person, and there's no way I'm going to become world-class in anything," then you've already lost before you've begun. The truth is everyone who achieves something of note puts in an incredible amount of hard work. Because this is invisible to you, it looks like talent is what distinguishes the two of you, when really it's much more often diligence. Just like extracurriculars, there's a quick dropoff in value of each item after that.

My research work took up the next two honors, one a presentation at an academic conference, and the other Siemens a research competition for high school researchers. At the risk of beating a dead horse, think about how many state medalists there are in the country, in the hundreds of competitions that exist. The number of state to national rankers is probably at least less than because of variation in state size , so if there are 2, nationally ranked students, there are 40, state-ranked students in something! So state honors really don't help you stand out on your Princeton application.

There are just too many of them around. On the other hand, if you can get to be nationally ranked in something, you will have an amazing Spike that distinguishes you. I didn't grow up as a refugee, wrenched from my war-torn home! I didn't have a sibling with a debilitating illness! How could anything I write compare to these tales of personal strength? The trite truth is that colleges want to know who you really are. Clearly they don't expect everyone to have had immense personal struggle. But they do want students who are:. In retrospect, in the context of MY application, the personal statement really wasn't what got me into Harvard. I do think my Spike was nearly sufficient to get me admitted to every school in the country.

I say "nearly" because, even if you're world-class, schools do want to know you're not a jerk and that you're an interesting person which is conveyed through your personal essay and letters of recommendation. Back then, we had a set of different prompts :. I chose to write on a topic of my choice. After thorough brainstorming, I didn't really identify with any of the other topics. I couldn't think of a topic that wasn't trite and that I cared about enough. I also felt a need to be distinctive and thought that a free essay topic might give me more freedom.

The way I saw it, the personal statement was a vehicle to convey my personality and my interests. To build my Personal Narrative, I wanted to showcase my personality and reveal a bit about my life experiences. Even though the life experiences I'd had weren't distinctive in themselves, I thought I could package them from an interesting perspective. The idea I used was to talk about my battle against the snooze alarm. I really did love sleep and still do and I thought it'd be interesting to frame my personality, interests, and life experiences from this perspective. Frankly this personal statement is really embarrassing.

Each time I read it, I cringe a bit. I think I sound too smug and self-satisfied. But again in the interest of transparency, here goes:. I'm still cringing a bit. I want to as well. We'll get to areas of improvement later, but first, let's talk about what this personal essay did well. I showed this through mentioning different interests Rubik's cube, chemistry, Nietzsche and iterating through a few designs for an alarm clock electric shocks, explosions, Shakespearean sonnet recitation.

I don't take life too seriously. The theme of the essay—battling an alarm clock—shows this well, in comparison to the gravitas of the typical student essay. I also found individual lines funny, like "All right, so I had violated the divine honor of the family and the tenets of Confucius. The frank admission of a realistic lazy habit—pushing the Snooze button—served as a nice foil to my academic honors and shows that I can be down-to-earth. So you see how the snooze button acts as a vehicle to carry these major points and a lot of details, tied together to the same theme. Packaging my points together under the snooze button theme makes it a lot more interesting than just outright saying "I'm such an interesting guy. So overall, I believe the essay accomplishes my goals and the main points of what I wanted to convey about myself.

Note that this is just one of many ways to write an essay. It worked for me, but it may be totally inappropriate for you. Looking at it with a more seasoned perspective, some parts of it are WAY too try-hard. I try too hard to show off my breadth of knowledge in a way that seems artificial and embellishing. The entire introduction with the Rubik's cube seems bolted on, just to describe my long-standing desire to be a Renaissance man. Only three paragraphs down do I get to the Snooze button, and I don't refer again to the introduction until the end. With just words, I could have made the essay more cohesive by keeping the same theme from beginning to end.

Some phrases really make me roll my eyes. A key principle of effective writing is to show, not say. You don't say "I'm passionate about X," you describe what extraordinary lengths you took to achieve X. The mention of Nietzsche is over-the-top. I mean, come on. The reader probably thought, "OK, this kid just read it in English class and now he thinks he's a philosopher. The ending: "with the extra nine minutes, maybe I'll teach myself to cook fried rice" is silly. Where in the world did fried rice come from? I meant it as a nod to my Chinese heritage, but it's too sudden to work. I could have deleted the sentence and wrapped up the essay more cleanly. So I have mixed feelings of my essay. I think it accomplished my major goals and showed the humorous, irreverent side of my personality well.

However, it also gave the impression of a kid who thought he knew more than he did, a pseudo-sophisticate bordering on obnoxious. I still think it was a net positive. At the end of the day, I believe the safest, surefire strategy is to develop a Spike so big that the importance of the Personal Essay pales in comparison to your achievements. You want your Personal Essay to be a supplement to your application, not the only reason you get in. There are probably some cases where a well-rounded student writes an amazing Personal Essay and gets in through the strength of that. As a Hail Mary if you're a senior and can't improve your application further, this might work. But the results are very variable—some readers may love your essay, others may just think it's OK.

Without a strong application to back it up, your mileage may vary. We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools. This is a really fun section. I've also reached out to my letter writers to make sure they're ok with my showing this. Teacher recommendations are incredibly important to your application. The average teacher sees thousands of students through a career, and so he or she is very well equipped to position you relative to all other students.

Furthermore, your teachers are experienced adults—their impressions of you are much more reliable than your impressions of yourself see my Personal Essay above. They can corroborate your entire Personal Narrative as an outside observer. The most effective recommendation letters speak both to your academic strengths and to your personality. For the second factor, the teacher needs to have interacted with you meaningfully, ideally both in and out of class.

Check out our guide on what makes for effective letters of recommendation. Starting from sophomore year, I started thinking about whom I connected better with and chose to engage with those teachers more deeply. Because it's standard for colleges to require two teachers in different subjects, I made sure to engage with English and history teachers as well as math and science. The minimum requirement for a good letter is someone who taught a class in which you did well. I got straight A's in my coursework, so this wasn't an issue. Beyond this, I had to look for teachers who would be strong advocates for me on both an academic and personal level. These tended to be teachers I vibed more strongly with, and typically these were teachers who demonstrably cared about teaching.

This was made clear by their enthusiasm, how they treated students, and how much they went above expectations to help. A final note before reading my actual teacher evaluations— you should avoid getting in the mindset where you get to know teachers JUST because you want a good recommendation letter. Your teachers have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of students pass through, and it's much easier to detect insincerity than you think. If you honestly like learning and are an enthusiastic, responsible, engaging student, a great recommendation letter will follow naturally.

The horse should lead the cart. Read my How to Get a 4. She was young, having taught for fewer than 5 years when I had her. She was my favorite teacher throughout high school for these reasons:. By the time of the letter writing, I had known her for two full years and engaged with her continuously, even when I wasn't taking a class with her in junior year. We'd build up a strong relationship over the course of many small interactions. All of this flowed down to the recommendation you see here.

Remember, the horse leads the cart. First, we'll look at the teacher evaluation page. The Common Application now has 16 qualities to rate, rather than the 10 here. But they're largely the same. You can see a very strong evaluation here, giving me the highest ratings possible for all qualities. You can tell that the updated Common App places a great emphasis on personality. The most important point here: it is important to be ranked "One of the top few encountered in my career" for as many ratings as possible. The more experienced and trustworthy the teacher, the more meaningful this is.

Again, it's a numbers game. You really want to make sure you're one of the best in your school class, if not one of the best the teacher has ever encountered. You'll see below how you can accomplish this. As you read this, think— what are the interactions that would prompt the teacher to write a recommendation like this? This was a relationship built up in a period of over 2 years, with every small interaction adding to an overall larger impression. You can see how seriously they take the letter because of all the underlining. This admissions reader underlined things that weren't even underlined in my application, like my US National Chemistry Olympiad awards. It's one thing for a student to claim things about himself—it's another to have a teacher put her reputation on the line to advocate for her student.

The letter here is very strong for a multitude of reasons. First, the length is notable —most letters are just a page long, but this is nearly two full pages , single spaced. This indicates not just her overall commitment to her students but also of her enthusiastic support for me as an applicant. The structure is effective: first Miss Vorak talks about my academic accomplishments, then about my personal qualities and interactions, then a summary to the future. This is a perfect blend of what effective letters contain. On the micro-level, her diction and phrasing are precise and effective. She makes my standing clear with specific statements : "youngest student…top excelling student among the two sections" and "one of twenty students in the nation. When describing my personality, she's exuberant and fleshes out a range of dimensions: "conscientious, motivated and responsible," "exhibits the qualities of a leader," "actively seeks new experiences," "charismatic," "balanced individual with a warm personality and sense of humor.

Overall, Miss Vorak's letter perfectly supports my Personal Narrative —my love for science, my overall academic performance, and my personality. I'm flattered and grateful to have received this support. This letter was important to complement the overall academic performance and achievements shown on the rest of my application. My second teacher Mrs. Swift was another favorite. A middle-aged, veteran English teacher, the best way I would describe her is "fiery.

Emotionally she was a reliable source of support for students. You can see right away that her remarks are terser. She didn't even fill out the section about "first words that come to mind to describe this student. You might chalk this up to my not being as standout of a student in her mind, or her getting inundated with recommendation letter requests after over a decade of teaching. In ratings, you can see that I only earned 3 of the "one of the top in my career. As a teacher's career lengthens, it gets increasingly hard to earn this mark. I probably also didn't stand out as much as I did to my Chemistry teacher—most of my achievement was in science which she wasn't closely connected to , and I had talented classmates. Regardless, I did appreciate the 3 marks she gave me.

Now, the letter. Once again, as you read this letter, think: what are the hundreds of micro-interactions that would have made a teacher write a letter like this? Overall, this letter is very strong. It's only one page long, but her points about my personality are the critical piece of this recommendation. She also writes with the flair of an English teacher:. These comments most support the personality aspect of my Personal Narrative—having an irreverent, bold personality and not being afraid of speaking my mind. She stops just short of making me sound obnoxious and argumentative. An experienced teacher vouching for this adds so much more weight than just my writing it about myself. Teacher recommendations are some of the most important components of your application.

Getting very strong letters take a lot of sustained, genuine interaction over time to build mutual trust and respect. If you want detailed advice on how to interact with teachers earnestly, check out my How to Get a 4. The first piece of this is reporting your academic status and how the school works overall. There's not much to say here, other than the fact that my Principal wrote my recommendation for me, which we'll get into next. This was definitely advantageous—remember how, way up top in Educational Data, the reader circled the "Principal. So it was pretty distinctive that I got a letter from our Principal, compared to other leading applicants from my school. This was also a blessing because our counseling department was terrible.

Our school had nearly 1, students per grade, and only 1 counselor per grade. They were overworked and ornery, and because they were the gatekeepers of academic enrollment like class selection and prerequisites , this led to constant frictions in getting the classes you wanted. But the counseling department was still the worst part of our high school administration, and I could have guessed that the letters they wrote were mediocre because they just had too many students. So how did my Principal come to write my recommendation and not those for hundreds of other students?

I don't remember exactly how this came to be, to be honest. I didn't strategize to have him write a letter for me years in advance. I didn't even interact with him much at all until junior year, when I got on his radar because of my national rankings. Come senior year I might have talked to him about my difficulty in reaching counselors and asked that he write my recommendation. Since I was a top student he was probably happy to do this.

He was very supportive, but as you can tell from the letter to come, it was clear he didn't know me that well. Interestingly, the prompt for the recommendation has changed. It used to start with: "Please write whatever you think is important about this student. Now, it starts with: " Please provide comments that will help us differentiate this student from others. The purpose of the recommendation has shifted to the specific: colleges probably found that one counselor was serving hundreds of students, so the letters started getting mushy and indistinguishable from each other.

This letter is probably the weakest overall of all my letters. It reads more like a verbal resume than a personal account of how he understands me. Unlike my two teacher recommendations, he doesn't comment on the nature of our interactions or about my personality because he truly didn't understand them well. He also misreported by SAT score as instead of I did score a in an early test, but my was ready by January , so I don't know what source he was using. I still appreciate that he wrote my letter, and it was probably more effective than a generic counselor letter.

But this didn't add much to my application. At this point, we've covered my entire Common Application. This is the same application I sent to every school I applied to, including Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Thanks for reading this far—I hope you've gotten a lot out of this already. If you keep reading to the end, I'll have advice for both younger students and current applicants to build the strongest application possible. For most top colleges like Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and so on, you will need to complete a supplemental application to provide more info than what's listed on the Common Application.

Harvard was and is the same.

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