How to do an independent study in high school

RReaders in the Stanford admissions office we learned from described one activity with unusual certainty: in their view, nothing else showed both initiative and intellectual vitality so clearly. It needs only a willing teacher, requires no outside institution to say yes, and produces two things a selective file needs, a strong line on the activities page and a teacher who can describe your mind in detail.

Most students never attempt it, because nobody tells them it is possible. The few who do tend to finish with the kind of recommendation every applicant hopes for and most never receive, and the work of setting one up is less daunting than it sounds.

Setting up a teacher-supervised independent study

Choose an advanced subject your school does not offer, or a question within a subject that the regular course never reaches. Approach a teacher you respect and ask them to supervise. Draft the syllabus yourself: what you will read, how often you will meet, what you will produce. Propose a capstone, such as a long research paper, and decide in advance where it will go, whether a competition, a journal that publishes high school work, or a presentation to a panel of teachers.

One example the office used: a student interested in persuasion designed a course on rhetoric, reading figures from Aristotle and Cicero through Lincoln and King, met his teacher weekly to discuss the reading, and wrote a long research paper as the capstone. On the activities page that becomes a single crisp line. In a letter, it becomes much more.

That one sentence carries more weight with a reader than a paragraph of adjectives.

The letter it produces

Most teachers write letters for dozens of students, and they struggle to recall specific moments from any one of them. That is why so many recommendations are warm and vague. A teacher who supervised your independent study has an entire semester of specific material: what you chose to read, how you argued in your weekly meetings, what your paper said. The office's sample letter for the rhetoric student made exactly this point, noting that he was a rare student who took the initiative to design a course and ask a teacher to supervise it. That one sentence carries more weight with a reader than a paragraph of adjectives.

When the time comes to ask for the letter, remind the teacher of the moments you think mattered most. You are making their work easier, and the details will be fresh because you lived them together.

Keep it real

Pick a subject you would study anyway. A course designed for show, with a reading list you skim, will produce a thin letter and a thinner paper. A course built around a question you cannot stop thinking about is the kind of evidence a committee trusts.