Few things are cool (as you and I mean it) on the level of lobstering. As in real life, our interest would be piqued. So many kids are still into how great it is that they did a lil fundraiser or founded a club.
You can often convey the AND just through your maturity and the way you matched yourself. As in, “AND, he gets it.” Maybe I said that already. But you don’t really need this CC idea of “standing out” in such unusual ways to impress. Really.
I don’t disagree–but my claim here is really pretty modest, which is that if you do have something interesting or unusual that you do, mention it in your application. I think some kids (and perhaps even more so, their parents) might be hesitant to mention things that might seem silly or weird or trivial, when those things actually give an insight into who the kid is, and which might be interesting (or even cool) to a reviewer. So I’m focusing not so much on “should I go work on a lobster boat this summer” as I am on “should I mention that I worked on a lobster boat last summer?”
One of my son’s somewhat cool stories (but really, what can be as cool as working on a lobster boat? but I digress):
He was hired as the only musician, a cellist, for a local theater company’s production of Romeo and Juliet. About a week before the show, the director, who’d been looking for a drummer (this wasn’t a high paying gig; stipend type thing) couldn’t find one, so he asked my son if he could drum, too. Never mind that my son had never drummed. 
It turned out great, though. My son got to play drums, cello, and improvise. Musicians can be pretty flexible when the need arises.
My three kids all got into elite schools being terrific students and good (not great) athletes. None of them had hooks. I believe the idea of needing a hook for elite school admission is a myth.
If you’ve grown up in a family of lobster fishermen and had to help out after school and all summer, it would absolutely be a fascinating “and” to the AdCom – especially if you’re low income or first gen college.
Personally, I always describe the “and” to my kids as “star quality” or what’s “starry” about the kid.
When I was at Stanford’s accepted students weekend, just in the process of casually chatting to accepted students whom I had just met, I found that I could often fairly easily tease out the “starry” quality that I suspect got them accepted.
As I worked my way through this thread I was reminded of this thread:
In it, the OP, a highly qualified Asian male from CA with insanely high stats was rejected by every Ivy to which he applied. It seemed to be a counter-example of the principle mentioned earlier: “You can be passionate about things that run counter to what a college is looking for overall, maybe reflect isolation, self-limits, judgment, etc.”
In this case, the OP wrote about his love of marksmanship and a novel manuscript in which gun culture seemed to figure somewhat prominently. Perhaps it was a detective thriller of some sort; I don’t remember the details. He speculated that perhaps he had run against political correctness on the part of the admissions officers who read his essay. Who can say? It may have been that his recs were not as glowing as those written for other highly qualified STEM-bound, Asian male students from CA. In any event, it seems likely to me that his attempt to differentiate himself from his demographic with a unique “AND” backfired.
I have always been of the opinion that my kids should pursue what interests them to the degree they find sustainable and enjoyable. Either they’ll get play with the admissions folks or they won’t. If they are true to themselves, they’ll be admitted to places where their qualities are appreciated and they won’t have to reinvent themselves to fit in. Threads like this make me think that the chase for the Ivies is simply too stressful given that the chance of success is so small.
This was what I wrote:
There’s misunderstanding about “passion,” same as with national awards. You can be passionate about things that run counter to the overall a college is looking for,maybe reflect isolation, self-limits, judgment, etc. Even Harvard ends with, “Would other students want to room with you, share a meal, be in a seminar together, be teammates, or collaborate in a closely knit extracurricular group?”
It was an example of why it’s not always wise to simply tell kids to follow their own passions, no matter what they are, or to march to their own drummer without regard for other important aspects of their growth. I am against most of the advice about “passion” when it seems to suggest the simplest aspects of the term are all that matters. You’re applying to college, not choosing your favorite downtime activity. Make it make sense. The top colleges are building communities, not looking for kids who isolate themselves or reflect weirdness, whose own words suggest little judgment. That’s entirely different than some worthwhile pursuits and clear thinking.
@looking forward says: Even Harvard ends with, “Would other students want to room with you, share a meal, be in a seminar together, be teammates, or collaborate in a closely knit extracurricular group?”
This is really helpful to me for D16 and (I hope) to the OP, in retrospect. I think it can be easy for 17/18 year olds to focus on their (truly impressive) passions and not consider how they fit into the community they are aiming for. I think I will introduce the concept of applying to live in co-housing to my D. That might help her temper the (totally understandable) tendency to focus on her passion(s) and put it/them in the context of the type of community she wants to join.
What are the simplest aspects of the term?
I can’t speak for lookingforward, but perhaps what she means is that simply caring deeply about something is not sufficient to make it an asset in college admissions. If your passion is playing World of Warcraft or watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey it may be best to find something else to do with your time instead of following your passion.
One somewhat harsh message that needs to be conveyed sometimes is that a student’s passion for something will not help much in terms of admission to highly selective schools unless the student is also very good at whatever activity he or she is passionate about. It doesn’t really matter how many hours you practice your musical instrument if you aren’t an excellent player as a result.
Does this mean that you shouldn’t follow your passion if you aren’t very good at it? Not at all. It just means that you shouldn’t have too many illusions about what it will do for you in terms of college admissions.
Hm. I’m sorta gobstopped that something this obvious needs mention. Obviously, my bad.
There are teens whose passion leads them to run away from home and join ISIS, but that doesn’t make them good candidates at select colleges. It’s not a constructive passion. That’s obviously an extreme case, but there are plenty of more subtle examples. But a passion that is manifested in a constructive and positive activity and pursued with commitment at a reasonably high level will pretty much always be a positive.
@mamaedefamilia, the applicant who you site came from an incredibly challenging demographic group. He could have been on the wrong end of a brutal numbers game, and nothing more would be needed to explain his admission results. But often the devil is in the details, and we aren’t privy to those. I could certainly see sports shooting being viewed as a positive EC if presented in the right way; but given the endemic of on-campus violence, I could see adcoms being a little skittish of someone who comes across as over-obsessed with guns. I have no idea how the applicant in question presented himself, how he came across in interviews, or how he was described in his recommendations; but it wouldn’t shock me if there was something there that gave adcoms reason to hesitate, and given his demographic challenge, it wouldn’t take much to have put him on the wrong side of the fence.
This is such an interesting thread. Bumppp
@Hunt Hi, this is a very personal question and after reading this whole post (every single bit of it) while sitting in econ made me realize how important it is to mention this in my application. I had a stammering problem growing up and when I get extremely nervous (in extreme conditions but very very rare) I sometimes still stammer. I don’t know if this makes me different or unique but this has been a big part of my life because I fixed my stuttering problem by volunteering under my speech therapist for a whole summer and teaching and helping out kids going through the same problem. Thank you for your post!
I think the trick is in figuring out what a “reasonably high level” is. As an example, I would suspect that involvement in Scouting is not a big help if the student isn’t an Eagle Scout or Gold Award recipient. It won’t hurt, but if I were the reviewer, I have to confess that I’d be thinking, “If this kid is so passionate about Scouting, why isn’t he an Eagle?” Of course, that’s an activity in which you can pretty much achieve that goal by putting in the work. It’s a lot harder to figure out what a “reasonably high level” would be for something like, say, playing the violin. How good do you have to be before it has a real positive role in whether a selective college takes you?
Agree with @renaissancedad, writing about guns can be a slippery slope to tread. Also, that kid apparently emphasized an unpublished novel but provided no evidence that the novel even existed. There was nothing for them to evaluate or even a credible third party critique, I believe. Violated the “show” don’t “tell” maxim.
Crazy as this may sound, I don’t think students should create an AND. That should come from them just being who they are, not what they think will make them strong applicants. If a student struggles to maintain top grades and extracurriculars they should not want to get into a school with the super-stars who easily do it all. Be challenged appropriately in college. If you choose schools based on what your strengths are, you will be much happier.
While I don’t think students should go searching for weird activities that could constitute an AND, I do think there is a risk that students could be discouraged from pursuing interesting activities that could play this role, especially if parents have rigid ideas about what the “right” activities are. So, for example, what will you, as a parent, say when your piano-playing kid comes home one day and says, “I was over at my friend’s house, and they have an accordion that nobody plays. It is awesome! They say they will lend it to me if I’d like to learn to play it. What do you think?”
I think it is also difficult to determine how unusual the activity is nationally. D has a few interesting experiences on her resume which are unique to her high school cohort, but who knows how many others there are in the subset of top students in the whole country who may share those activities and who will apply to the same schools? Furthermore, it’s also tough to judge how valuable a certain EC experience would be to schools, or how many niches actually exist for students with a particular different hobby. For example, let’s use the origami earring case from earlier. Suppose mathmom’s son and D are the only students in the whole USA who make and market origami earrings and are high school seniors applying to elite colleges. How many origami-making students would Harvard or Yale or Stanford want to accept, all other things being equal? Probably only one. D is out of luck, lol.