It is hard to imagine anything more frustrating than committing yourself— sacrificing your sleep, your friends, and fun, everything important to you— in order to get into your dream college, only to find out that the things you spend your time, your sweat & tears doing were not helpful. And some of the things you sacrificed actually would have helped you more. 

This guide will help you avoid that fate. 

US admissions can be so confusing, especially the first time a family member applies. And they are even more confusing when university admissions in your heritage country are so much more straightforward (look at your grades and test scores. If they are higher than everyone else, then you can get in. If they are lower, then you need to go somewhere else to study. 

But colleges in the US– especially the most selective ones– care about community impact. They care about finding the next Nobel Prize winner, or NYT best-selling author. They want to admit future CEOs of companies that will change the world for the better. 

And admissions officers have discovered that getting great grades in school doesn’t correlate well with changing the world for the better. 

So even though universities are academic institutions, they are looking for more than academic evidence of your future success. 

And the stuff that helps you get in is not what you think.

US college admissions, especially among the most selective colleges, have evolved! 

Even if you have friends or family who applied to US universities years ago, the old advice is no longer enough to get you into a great school. 

Fortunately, there is a much more effective way to prepare for college, and you don’t have to give up your childhood for it.  

The myth: What many people THINK colleges are looking for

We conducted an unscientific survey of what people thought colleges were looking for in their freshman classes. While there were a variety of answers, the three most popular, by far, were:

1. Colleges are looking for the smartest students possible.

2. Colleges are looking for the hardest-working students possible.

3. Colleges are looking for the most impressive students 

The idea is that admissions officers must be reading through piles of applications, separating them into stacks, and ranking them from “smartest” to “dumbest” or from “hardest working” to “laziest…”

Once those piles are completed, the admissions officers simply take the 2,000 applications at the top of the pile (the 2,000 smartest or most impressive applicants) and reject the rest. 

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you come from a country where this is exactly how decisions are made. But, fortunately, this is NOT how things are done at the most selective colleges.

Preparing for the admissions process often becomes a race to see who can take the most AP or IB (advanced) classes. 

Who can join the most clubs (and become president!) 

or create the most clubs. 

Who can earn the most awards from MUN or Math & Science Olympiad competitions…

and who can get the highest GPA and test scores.

But if ALL the ambitious students (there are tens of thousands of truly ambitious students every school year who will be applying to college) are trying to show that they are the most impressive by doing these same things …

 how can you compete? 

Parents of these teens fuel the anxiety when they log into Facebook groups and hype each other up about how impossible the odds are.

This is a quote from part of a post in one such Facebook group of college-bound teens:

I feel great empathy for these anxious parents. 

And I feel even more compassion for the stressed-out teens. 

It is true that colleges want to admit academically curious and competent students. But to be competitive for selective colleges, it is important to understand the full picture. 

The good news is that when you understand the full picture, you’ll discover that being healthy and happy throughout high school actually increases your odds of being competitive for college—if you do it right.

That’s why I’ve written this guide—so you can LOVE high school while becoming the kind of applicant that selective colleges fight over.