A key to a standout college application essay is including what your biggest personal challenge has been, not chasing someone else’s “Kilimanjaro.”
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A high school student recently spotted a TikTok post by a student admitted to Yale after he had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and written about it in his college application. The high schooler, an 11th-grade girl looking for an edge in the college admissions race, called her advisor to ask if she should do the same. Book a flight? Buy hiking boots? “The answer is no,” declares Lindsay Tanne Howe, founder and CEO of Connecticut-based admissions consulting and test-prep firm LogicPrep, which employs the advisor who fielded the student’s call. “The first pitfall high-achieving students fall into is that they compare themselves to what others are doing.”
Tanne Howe, who started her company as a Harvard freshman in 2007, says, “There’s no such thing as the perfect college applicant.” Or, put another way, “The perfect college applicant is the most deeply engaged version of you.”
It’s advice that sounds simple but runs counter to everything students absorb from their social media feeds. Acceptance rates at elite schools are extremely low. Yale accepted only 4% of more than 50,000 applicants for the class of 2030, and while Harvard has declined to release the newest admissions statistics until October, just 4% of nearly 48,000 hopefuls were admitted for the class of 2029. The Common App has made it easier than ever to apply to numerous schools, but the pressure to stand out has never been more intense. Here’s what admissions experts say families should focus on when going through the college application process.
Start Earlier Than You Think
Families frequently assume the college application process begins during a student’s junior year of high school, when kids usually take the SAT or ACT. Tanne Howe says that could be too late. Instead, she recommends families start thinking intentionally at the tail end of middle school or the beginning of high school. “We’re not suggesting that students study for the SAT in eighth grade,” she says. “But it’s a great time to start exploring interests broadly and going into high school with intentions that they can narrow and refine over time.”
Course selection is a key reason why. The classes a student chooses in eighth and ninth grade directly affect the level of academic rigor available to them later—and rigor matters to admissions officers. “Families who’ve been through this process with us once before will start their second or third child earlier because they see the impact,” Tanne Howe says. Starting early, she argues, is the antidote to college-prep anxiety, not the cause of it.
Depth Beats Breadth
The Common App allows students to list a maximum of 10 extracurricular activities. That cap is a useful reality check. Admissions officers aren’t looking for the longest résumé—they’re looking for evidence of commitment, growth and genuine engagement.
“Students whose extracurricular profile feels like a coherent and cohesive narrative are generally most successful,” Tanne Howe says. A student who has pursued a handful of interests with real depth and impact will outperform one who has collected activities like merit badges. The goal is to tell a unified story.
Treat Testing Like a Marathon
With Columbia University’s announcement this month that the school was returning to standardized test requirements for admissions, testing is back at the center of the application conversation. Experts say the right response isn’t panic—it’s pacing.
Jack Shull, a university counselor who has guided students through admissions processes in the U.S. and across Europe, recommends students here at home take a PSAT during their sophomore or early junior year to understand where they stand. “Then the prep may come in,” he says. He recommends students take the SAT three times across junior and senior year.
Let the Essay Do Real Work
When Tanne Howe thinks back over nearly 20 years of placing students at the most selective schools in the country, she doesn’t recall grades and scores. She remembers the kid who wrote about assembling IKEA furniture with his dad and the girl who got into Yale after writing about the playlist of her life.
“Think of the essay as a window, not a time capsule,” she says. The strongest essays don’t recount achievements—they reveal how a student thinks, what they value and how they see the world. LogicPrep advisors with experience in more than 25 admissions offices, including Duke, MIT, Stanford and Wellesley, say the people reading applications often remember specific anecdotes from essays. Sometimes students even receive handwritten notes accompanying their acceptance letters referencing their essays.
Instead of chasing someone else’s accomplishment, Tanne Howe says, the application process is about asking, “What is your Kilimanjaro?”
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