How to build an academic spike for college applications

SStanford's admissions committee, in the office we learned from, asked the same question before nearly every admit: what is this student's point of excellence. The phrase means a skill or interest developed to an unusual and differentiating degree, and strong grades alone never answered it, because thousands of applicants have strong grades. A file that could not answer the question tended to stall at the table, however good the transcript underneath it.

Not every kind of excellence is equally within reach, and families often spend years chasing the wrong one, when another kind can still be built by a student who starts this year.

What an academic strength consists of

Readers recognise three kinds. The first is a blue-chip strength: a recruited athlete, a working professional artist, a student already performing at an adult level. If you have one, you know it, and very few admits do. The second is leadership across several serious groups, the captain of one team who also leads a second organisation of real consequence. That is rarer than families think, and it is hard to manufacture late in high school.

The third is academic, and it is the one most students can actually build. An academic point of excellence says: I want to study this specific thing so that I can do this specific work, and here is the evidence that I already care about it more than most people my age.

Strong grades alone never answered it, because thousands of applicants have strong grades.

The three steps

Step one is to choose. Decide, for now, the job you want after college and the field you would need to study to do it. Be specific. Archaeology to become a field archaeologist says more than history, and the specificity is what a reader can repeat in committee.

Step two is to act. Build activities that support the field: a paper submitted to an undergraduate journal, an online college course in the subject, a talk you organise at school, an assistant role on someone's research. A handful of these, done properly, can carry a file further than years of activities chosen for their own sake, and they often take less time than a varsity sport.

Step three is to write. The essays and short answers verify that the interest is authentic and the activities are legitimate. A reader who has just seen three activities in philosophy wants to watch you think like a philosopher on the page. When the personal essay takes up an idea from the field and argues with it, the case closes.

Why the order matters