OP’s dad will start a business for him. You don’t think people see that, just like everyone has a start up -these are 16 year olds. They play football, they’re in the band, etc - not curing cancer or raising thousands and millions like some like to state.
I have to think adcoms see through it all.
A few of my kids were Finance majors - I know things change over time but I’ll just re cap my youngest’s path. She never had a major in mind- being the youngest she has been around a lot of career, life discussions. We looked at several schools - she knew what she liked, then thought about what she might like to study, possible career paths.
After ruling many things out I told her to apply to direct entry business programs as easier to exit that than try to get in later. She wasn’t applying to Wharton so this may not be of interest to OP or anyone looking at elite schools but she was admitted to: Mendoza, Gies, Kelley and UWisc business. She had no intentional finance/business related EC’s obviously because she never had any idea what she wanted to study.
She had course rigor in all the major subjects, took Latin which was not a popular choice at her HS ( she loved it and Latin Club ), was a 3 time All American in her sport, had a job every summer, volunteered ( because that’s what our family does ) and had high grades/test scores. And yes, she’s a kind, confident young woman with great people skills.
Her summer jobs were regular old jobs, no internships. She went on to find internships starting sophomore year and a job offer after one of these and is incredibly happy in her career. She hasn’t been out of school very long but yes I know things change and if you’re applying to tippy top schools her path might not work. However, I think the schools she was accepted at are plenty good. Best of luck.
Agree that adcomms see through the myriad of businesses started by 16 year olds and prefer to see strong evidence of community involvement over fake start-ups & investment clubs.
Your daughter has a great profile; easy to see why she was admitted to such prestigious business schools.
Sorry for the Babson sell job, but you would be shocked to see the types of businesses some of these kids started in high school. Very impressive. So much so that I often advise kids with the less than impressive ones to go easy on making that their focus.
I think I agree with you both.
This is what some of us are reacting to. There is no doubt that there are kids with magnificent entrepreneurial instincts and experience. But for everyone else, there are other paths to follow. And some of us are suggesting the time worn path of getting a job (pizza, frozen yogurt, acai bowl joint in town), volunteering, etc.
That was not my favorite part of the proflle either, but much of it was good.
To underline this point: When we visited NYU with D19, the admissions talk mentioned there are very few cases where an essay totally makes or breaks an application, but one example she gave was exactly like this: a kid who basically said “I want to go to Stern so i can make lots of money”. She said there was debate in the adcom about this, with one point of view being that at least this kid was being honest, but they ultimately decided his essay didn’t reflect the type of person they wanted in their program (apparently the rest of his application was stellar).
Thanks for all your replies. Actually, the business idea is my son’s brainchild. He is doing everything on his own to set up the business. My husband helps him with logistics and what would be feasible (keeping him grounded) as my son has very lofty ideas. But time will tell on how far he is able to take off.
i can’t imagine a reasonable school, never mind a top one, accepting a kid with such immature thinking.
I agree but many schools know this is the truth - the reality of why many are applying to them. But the thinking is without originality.
I imagine because they all say they review every app, they’d review this too.
Yet there are whole forums devoted to talking about target schools for IB/hedge funds/the big consulting firms precisely because they want to make the big bucks. And parents who push their kids towards these too. There was one particularly notable example of the latter on these boards a while back.
College applications, and job applications/interviews for that matter, are so performative. Write/say what you think the other party wants to hear.
Students can’t write about their financial ambitions, nor can people who are interviewing for a job say they want the job because they need the money.
But you can’t say/write those obvious things, you have to create a story that is ‘authentic.’ The irony of it all.
So here we are, helping students and their parents put together their ‘authentic’ story in their applications!
Great analogy. That kid who telegraphs that money is their driver (if it is) won’t get those jobs either.
I want to be in IB because I want to work with smart, arrogant, and ruthless types who drive me to the point of near insanity as I learn to think the exact way that others did before me.
1/2 kidding.
You know what’s authentic? A kid writing about his refugee family which fled a controlled/oligarchic/planned economic system and how that spurred an interest in a market, somewhat capitalistic banking system where “ordinary” people can get a mortgage, car loan, etc. And yes, for some kids, the interest is truly authentic and not manufactured. There are kids who have volunteered in hospitals and want to study operations management (or similar) and want to learn how to drive efficiencies in a complex system. There are kids who advocated for- and won- an extra traffic light on a dangerous corner in their town by developing a cost/benefit analysis which showed that the financial “cost” was far outweighed by the civic benefit- and that sparked an interest in financial modeling on a larger, more sophisticated scale. Everything about ‘business’ isn’t about making money and buying a house in the Hamptons.
I interview college seniors who have finished a business degree and cannot articulate in any meaningful or compelling way why they are interested in working in a business. They went into it to make money, they come out of it intent on making money, and it’s hard to plunge the depths of something that’s two inches deep. I’ve interviewed kids focused on “international business” who speak no languages besides English, read nothing that isn’t delivered on their phone via Instagram or Tik-tok. So if Adcom’s at top business programs are trying to at least balance the class composition by finding kids with a more robust understanding of “business”, that’s ok in my book.
People need a job to live in our society as currently structured, it’s that simple. That was the main point of my post.
To stay on topic for OP, their S should do activities he likes, knowing he needs at least some strong business ECs to create a competitive app for the level of schools he is targeting. Write a good personal statement that does not talk about their activities, and flesh out experience from activities in the business supplements. Lots of schools provide good guidance on their websites and/or in their admission sessions as to how to create a strong app.
I note if, say, you are an already-advantaged upper-middle-class kid with good numbers who is looking to move up even further into the pure upper class, call it the top 0.1%, there are in fact options for being “authentic”, namely all the schools that will largely admit you just based on your numbers. Some don’t even have supplemental essays, and don’t really care about your Common App essay either. So you can write that on something bland but truthful and it won’t matter to them.
Recent studies do suggest that the most selective holistic review private colleges might MAXIMIZE your chances of making it into the top 0.1% (or whatever), probably mostly because you are going to have more students from such families around you with whom to try to network (or, you know, marry–still works!). Although you better include in your budget the costs of all those expensive vacations and such . . . .
But still, a less heralded fact about those studies is they also show that path to the top 0.1% (or whatever) is still POSSIBLE from many other schools. The controlled success rates might be around half, give or take, which is not a trivial distinction, but they aren’t zero.
The world being what it is, I am aware many individuals in this situation with such ambitions are not going to choose to limit their options to the authentic ones, they are going to try to BS their way into the ones where their odds of fulfilling their ambitions would be maximized. And I am sure it sometimes works. But I do suspect it works less often than some people think, that in fact fairly regularly admissions officers recognize the BS for what it is.
And actually, if they think you are being actively dishonest, it might backfire. Since they don’t have to tell you why they rejected you, they can quickly reject applicants on suspicions of dishonesty without further consideration, and not have to worry about appeals, lawsuits, and so on. You then get the same rejection letter as everyone else and never know this happened. And can never report it on social media, or so on.
But anyway, if you are just within the realm of sort of normal BS, basically concealing your real values and such but not actually lying about awards or activities, well, even if they suss you out and don’t admit you as a result, they probably didn’t really see a reason to punish you either. In fact, I suspect sometimes they see the BS and yet you fufill some other institutional priority anyway, so you get an offer.
In that sense, as long as don’t cross the line into active fraud, you can probably treat this as a free roll. Hence why the application volumes just seem to keep on going up.
But to bring this all back home for the OP–I continue to think the actual best chance you have to get admitted to these sorts of colleges is to actually make a point of authentically being who they are looking for. I strongly suspect if you have to BS about it, your chances are not zero, but they are already a lot lower.
There are multiple paths for admission. You can look at the CDS for a school and see what they value for admission. Not perfect but a start. Work experience is on the list.
S20 wasn’t looking at schools like Wharton. That said, I feel his work experience at Top Golf during high school helped him in interviews and his essays. Dealing with the public provides many growth opportunities. Good luck.