The One Thing All University Admission Committees Are Secretly Looking For

Imagine this… You're a university admissions officer during the month of October. You’re buried under hundreds of applications for a fixed number of spots in a program, and you only have moments to review each application. Personal Statements start to run together, extracurricular activities all sound the same, and pretty much everyone applying to your program has a great GPA. This might all sound like a bad dream, but unfortunately this is the reality that most admissions officers face at a modern university. The fact of the matter is that most applications are very similar, and hardly any actually stand out. But those that do tend to have one thing in common: authentic intellectual curiosity.

So what is authentic intellectual curiosity? In the context of a university application, this would come through your essays to the admissions officer as a genuine passion for learning or academia. And when I say learning, I don’t just mean textbooks. Even discussing your passion for intellectually stimulating hobbies like electronics, art, or debate can make your application really stand out in a sea of others. This matters so much to universities because they prefer to accept students who they are confident will actively engage in their courses, research, and even campus life. Curious students are the ones that excel academically and contribute not only to university culture but also society later on after graduation.

I’ll give you a real life example. I once worked with a student who was applying to the University of Alabama, and straight away I could tell that her essay needed work. She mostly focused on facts about her background: where she had worked, extracurricular activities she had been involved in, and volunteer work that she had contributed to in her hometown. But what was missing was the why. After a bit of back and forth, she was able to state in her essay that she worked the internship at the law office because she had always been fascinated by the legal system and wanted to better understand its inner workings. She also explained that she participated in the environmental club in high school because she felt compelled to do something about climate change, which she emphatically asserted was a solvable crisis if only the right people stepped up to do right thing. And lastly, she explained that she volunteered at the animal shelter because she sought to refine her understanding of how underfunded public services in her hometown were having a real impact on the wellbeing of the animals housed there. All of these examples seemed obvious in her own mind–they were all decisions she simply inherently made because of the person that she is–but at least initially she was not able to see the bigger picture and put herself in the shoes of the admissions officer that really wanted to understand her motivations for the background and activities she gave as examples.

As you tell these stories in your application, keep in mind that depth beats breadth! It is much better to give two really meaningful examples of projects or extracurricular activities that you have been involved along with a great amount of information for why you were involved and why they mattered in your life than it is to give brief descriptions of ten different clubs or sports you were involved with. You cannot cut corners here. This is not a resume where you are listing the things you are passionate about as bullet points, you have to actually, genuinely convey why you were involved and why they mattered. Instead of just mentioning an internship, talk about why you wanted that specific internship. Instead of just saying you joined debate club, talk about something unexpected that you learned throughout the semester as a participant in it.

Personal projects or research outside of the classroom stand out far more than standard extracurriculars. I’ll say it again: research or a project you have undertaken purely on your own, on your own time at home, matters far more than XYZ club that just anyone could’ve signed up for. Self-led projects show that you are capable of taking initiative, and prove far more than a membership to an organization your passion for a specific subject. They show that you have authentic intellectual curiosity, and that you would be bringing that same spirit to campus. And when I say projects or research, I don’t mean to lead you to believe that it even has to be anything extraordinarily sophisticated: do you run an online blog or YouTube channel about a particular subject? Have you conducted an online survey or research in a favorite subreddit? Have you built an app on your own to solve a really strange and niche problem? Whatever it is, outline the project’s inception, your original goals, the challenges you faced, and most importantly, the lessons you learned along the way. Convey your deep and persistent commitment to a project, ideally along with personal anecdotes speaking to your continuously incremental involvement in the subject. Admissions officers don’t want to see dozens of superficial activities, they want to see the one or two big things that really make you tick.

So, this is what admissions officers are secretly looking for. They prioritize applicants that can demonstrate authentic curiosity and commitment to a research area or project; bonus points if it is an entirely self-led project that the applicant started themselves. One of the greatest misconceptions among students that we work with at Gradly is that they don’t have anything to talk about in their application. People often feel like there is nothing that makes them special, but this is simply not true. Every student has the potential to showcase these aforementioned qualities, because everyone has things that they truly care about. The hard part is taking a step back and really doing the work of identifying what those things are in your own life. But once you discover what it is, you’ll find that the essay for your application seems to write itself.