Ready for the Ivy League Challenge?

Transcript

Welcome back to season two of the Ivy League Prep Academy Podcast. Equipping you to successfully pursue the college of your dreams. We believe that everyone deserves to reach their full potential, and the admissions process shouldn't hold you back.

If you're a fan of this podcast, you have heard just over the past couple of months a couple dozen interviews with high school students who are absolutely amazing, who have probably inspired you in incredible ways. And maybe you're like some of the other parents who've reached out to me, parents who have said, Hold on. My child is not ready to write an economics textbook or produce research in a laboratory.

My child is normal, and my normal, quote unquote child can't do that. And I completely understand. I get where you're coming from.

But I did want to share a couple of thoughts with you as you think about how to encourage or how to communicate with your child about what the best use of their high school years might be. The alternative, of course, is to join school activities, do things that the school has organized, and do your best to become a leader in those activities, because then you can show that you outperformed your classmates, and maybe that's a way that you can show that you're memorable, that you're interesting, that you're different from everyone else. And the problem with that is, I would argue that that takes more effort, more stress, more everything else than doing what we do in the Ivy League challenge, doing something truly remarkable that aligns with your core values.

So for those of you who just are hesitant, who feel like, man, my child isn't, that child right? My child's not ready to be joining a laboratory and producing really, truly groundbreaking new work and research. It's understandable. But I want you to think about a couple of different metaphors that can maybe help you to bridge that gap in your own mind.

For some students, an impact project is kind of like hiking up a mountain. They see the top of the mountain from below. They know that they want to get there.

And how do you get to the top of the mountain? It looks really daunting. It's a couple of miles of trails, and maybe it's several thousand feet up. And regardless of how high up it is and how many miles it requires to get there, you're still going to have to get there one step at a time.

And of course, what can be frustrating is if you try to take a big leap all the way to the top or if you believe that some other child took a big leap because they had some superhuman ability to leap to the top of a mountain. Of course, that's not true. Other children had to go one step at a time as well.

But for most students, I would say they're not clear at 13 years old, they're not clear which mountain they want to climb. It's not obvious which peak is the peak for them that they want to get to. And so starting out on that path and taking one step in front of the other isn't going to necessarily get them anywhere because they're not sure which path they want to climb.

And for those students, which is the vast majority, I will say most students are in that second category. And for them, this process is more like an exhibition to the North Pole. The direction is the important thing.

And along the way you have to be incredibly resourceful because it's a very dynamic path. There is water and there are temperature changes and there is ice, and there's a lot of dynamic changes that occur. And so you have to be really resourceful.

When you run into one challenge, you're going to solve that differently compared to a different challenge. But the important thing is that you have figured out the direction that you need to go. And along the way, you learn how to be resourceful because you're going to face all kinds of different challenges.

When I work with students in the Ivy League challenge, we figure out that direction by figuring out the student's core values. And that has to be the first step. If you don't figure out your core values, then you just don't know which direction is north.

Now, as you're figuring out your core values, is it okay to be curious and to test and to probe and to tinker and to play around and explore? Of course, part of discovering who you are is not just what matters most to you, your core values, but also what you're curious about and what you're interested in, what your strengths are, which of course, is going to be dependent on what you've been curious about in the past. The stuff you've spent more time doing and exploring is the stuff that you're better at today than the other stuff that you haven't spent time exploring or practicing. So of course, strengths are born out of interests, and interests can be explored and discovered, and so can core values to a certain extent.

And that process is, yeah, it can be a little bit confusing, but ultimately your direction, the direction you want to go, is your core values. And then the kind of path that you take to get there is something that you can explore and test out and probe and figure out along the way. And the second thing that I'll say is, along with this metaphor, you don't just jump all the way to the North Pole.

You don't just jump to the top of the mountain. You have to go one step at a time. And as you're going one step at a time, there's going to be dynamic changes and you need to be resourceful.

You need to figure out solutions to these really tricky problems. But at the risk of really having too many metaphors in this one podcast, I want to add one more metaphor to this, something that I've talked about before and I talk about in every single cohort of the Ivy League challenge, and that is the difference between swimming and riding an ocean current. All of my students know that I love scuba diving.

It's my favorite thing to do. And when you gear up, you've got a heavy tank on your back, you've got all of the scuba equipment. You actually wear weights around your waist to pull you down so that you can get underwater and stay underwater.

All of that is going to weigh you down. And if you have to swim with all of that equipment, you swim slowly. It's very difficult to swim.

But those of you who have been in my class or have heard the other podcast when I shared this idea, you know that there are actual currents inside the ocean that act like rivers. It's a fascinating thing. It's amazing.

Inside of the water, there is rivers of water. And those rivers of water, those ocean currents, carry you very, very quickly. I had a friend who, while she was scuba diving, decided to just stay in a current for a little while just because it was fun.

You get pulled, and I've done that also. I've been pulled, but I didn't stay as long as she did. And anyway, she got pulled so far so fast that when she came up to the surface, she could barely see the boat.

It took her quite some time to even see the boat, let alone get back to the boat. And by the time she swam back, she was completely exhausted. Well, why do I tell you that story? Because a lot of high school students try to swim to their destination, despite the fact that they're wearing all of these disadvantages, these weights, this extra heavy tank, all the stuff that high school.

You know what? You don't choose your classes oftentimes. You don't choose your teachers. There's all kinds of restrictions.

Life is tough. And with all those restrictions, if you try to get where you want to go by swimming, it's going to take you a long time to get almost nowhere. And the good news is, almost all of your peers, almost all of your classmates are going to follow that strategy.

They're just going to try to swim as fast as they can. And they think that swimming an extra ten minutes every day is going to be meaningful. It's going to get them further ahead than everyone else, and it will get them further ahead than the people who follow that same strategy.

But my students are a little bit more resourceful, and those of you who are listening in can take advantage of this, because I teach my students to find a community. If you can find a group of experts that is already working to solve the problem that you want to solve, they're already actively engaged. They're professionals.

Maybe they've spent decades working on this, and you can communicate with them in a professional and insightful way that gets them excited to have you join the community. That community can act like an ocean current and carry you further and faster than you ever dreamed possible. And that is why this combination of deciding that you want to move in the right direction, figuring out your North Pole and just moving in that direction, knowing that you will need to be resourceful along the way and overcome challenges, but also recognizing that a community can take you further than you could possibly go by yourself.

That is how we have students just in the last couple of months who have been interviewed on this podcast, who have created finance textbooks, economics textbooks, geography textbooks that have actually been adopted in their schools. We've had students create gen AI guides, or astrophysics guides and other guides. We have students who are doing identity research, biology, chemistry, neurology research, and they're doing this research at places like MIT at Harvard Medical School, university of Michigan, Cornell, Case Western Reserve, UPenn, NYU, and more.

We've had some really, really impressive results, and that's not even getting to these kind of non academic things, right, where we have someone who's literally working with the CEO of the hospital, and his program has been adopted throughout the entire hospital. All of the doctors are being trained through his system. We've got incredible impact projects that you can listen to for yourself.

But all of these are real, average, normal students who decided to commit themselves to figure out their North Star, figure out their North Pole. Right. The direction that they need to go.

Decided that it's okay when they face challenges. They can still be resourceful and overcome those challenges, and that they're going to go far further and faster with support than trying to figure it out on their own. And so, yeah, you need to have professional communication skills.

You need to know how to network. You need to know how to find these people and communicate with these people and get them on your side. But I want you to know that I also have students who are in 7th grade or 8th grade who are just now they've figured out some of their core values.

They have some really clear ideas, but they don't know how to turn that into something amazing. And so, for example, I have a student who just knows that she loves coffee and books and is trying to build community around coffee and books, and she's moving towards the North Pole. She doesn't know what that end result is going to look like, and that's okay.

I hope this description is helpful for some of you who feel overwhelmed, for some of you who feel like it's just not possible. It's not possible for my high school student to outperform what I could do as an adult and somehow all these other students figured out a way to do it. Maybe they're children of billionaires and they just had a road paved for them.

None of that is actually happening. These students that I'm telling you about are normal students. Many of them are even immigrants and are on free or reduced lunch programs in their school districts.

These are not children who are given all of the advantages, and somehow they ride the coattails of some expert and then write it off as their own work. These are normal, amazing children, teens who are doing incredible work because they have the mindset and they have a few tools to take them in that direction. And you can do it, too.

I hope this has been helpful for you, and I hope you continue to reach out if you do want support through the Ivy League Challenge. All three of our cohorts are currently full, but we'll be opening up again in the fall, and that will be an excellent time to join the Ivy League Challenge and get this kind of support for you or your teen. In the meantime, feel free to reach out with questions or concerns, as these other parents have done, and perhaps I'll turn some of your questions into the next podcast as well.

Music for this episode came from we are here by declare P. I'm Steve Gardner. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and share with a friend.

Thanks for listening.