22
Lectures
~10
Hours
7
Application
Profiles & Essays
What I'll teach you
My goal is not to teach you secrets on getting into Ivy Leagues. I certainly did not have any when I applied. Instead, this course will focus on one simple principle: colleges look for extraordinary students.
By extraordinary, I don’t necessarily mean students with perfect GPAs and high test scores. Colleges ultimately look for students with incredible stories. They want students who are ambitious enough to pursue their passions outside of class. My goal is to teach you how to become this student.
If you make an honest effort to apply these lessons to your own life, I can earnestly say that your application will improve. This is, in good faith, a course designed to help any hard-working student stand out when applying to college. More ambitiously, it is a course designed to help you succeed in life.
I will show you how to build a story for yourself.
What you'll learn
This course will teach you to do the following:
1. Find activities outside of classes and clubs
2. Build a portfolio
3. Find internships & research positions
4. Write a personal statement
If you put in the effort, these aspects will build you into a stronger applicant. How you complete these components depends on you and your interests. This course will teach you to explore those interests deeply. Along the way, you'll hopefully encounter many challenges. In overcoming these obstacles, you'll develop a story for yourself. I'll help you tell this story by teaching you my technique for writing personal statements.
The best application strategy is to find something to obsess over.
Course structure
I’ll first show you what I did to get into Ivy Leagues. From my story, we’ll extract a more general application blueprint. This strategy is centered around pursuing your passion deeply and building a portfolio.
I’ll give six examples that teach you how to use this blueprint to build an application profile. In these examples, we'll build an application strategy for hypothetical students with the following intended majors:
1. Mechanical Engineering
2. Finance/Statistics/Computer Science
3. Biology/Neuroscience (pre-med track)
4. Psychology
5. Computer Science/Computer Engineering
6. Business/Marketing
Each student is assumed to have a particular passion, which will form the basis of their application strategy. In each case, we’ll build a portfolio for these students and write a personal statement from scratch.
Although we focus on the most common majors, the strategy presented can be used for any course of study.
