 Guest blog post provided by Emili Lok for The Ivy Brothers The Engineered ProfileIn the past few years there’s been a shift in high schools during that pivotal senior fall. There’s no one way a student can be successful, but you would never expect much more from a kid with a solid GPA, good SAT scores, and a few fun extracurriculars, like playing varsity soccer or volunteering at the local soup kitchen. This used to be enough to lock down a coveted acceptance letter at a top college. Today, the elite admissions landscape has completely changed the expectations for students. Admissions officers across the country are drowning in thousands of applications that look formulaic. And in response to this immense competition, we're noticing a new, troubling trend: the "engineered" student profile. An engineered profile is a resume that’s been methodologically crafted. Sometimes it starts as early as middle school. In New York City, for example, you’ll see competitive admissions starting from pre-school. Families curate their children’s lives according to what they think Ivy League admissions committees want to see. But it’s not only the parents. By high school, driven students feel the pressure to get into their dream schools, and not knowing better, they make the mistake of trying to be perfect. Once these profiles make the admission’s officer table, they are chockfull of super impressive-sounding achievements. However, when the goal becomes doing everything, naturally the depth gets lost. When you take an inquisitive eye to these profiles, the foundation is disingenuous. A student might start a non-profit that mostly just exists on a website, pay to publish a research paper in a sketchy journal, or launch an app that solves a problem they have no personal connection to. It looks great on paper, but when admissions officers read your file, they aren’t just looking at a paper, they are trying their best to look at the student behind them. This lens can expose when the extracurriculars lack depth. It may seem difficult, but when they’ve parsed through profiles for days on end, it becomes easy to differentiate between surface-level extracurriculars and the real commitment that comes from actual passion. For teachers and counselors, the job becomes more difficult. They want to support their students and help them get into their dream schools, but what we’re watching is kids sacrificing their actual interests and mental health just to check boxes on some imaginary admissions rubric. It’s even worse that these imaginary expectations they build themselves according to, aren’t even getting them in anymore. Massive burnout is the result. Kids are anxious, exhausted, and on their way to being totally disconnected from the actual joy of learning. So, how do we help students navigate this high-stakes mess without losing themselves in the process? The answer is steering them away from the engineered resume and helping them cultivate organic, passions instead.  What is a Good Extracurricular? First, we need to help students redefine what a "good" extracurricular even is. A persistent myth in college admissions is that colleges want well-rounded kids who are president of five clubs and play three sports on top of that. In reality, elite schools don’t care about the volume of activities as much as some may think. Instead of looking for one jack-of-all-trades student, they are looking to build a well-rounded class made up of "spiked" individuals. One student doesn’t need to do it all. The ideal incoming class is of kids who have shown they are specialized, even if it’s only in one or two areas. A student who spends their spare time coding an independent video game or writing a 400-page romance novel is often way more intriguing to an admissions officer than a kid who holds superficial leadership roles in random clubs. Both students are hardworkers, but the former is a lot more memorable. We can foster this kind of depth by encouraging kids to lean into their natural curiosities, even the ones that don't seem immediately "college-worthy." Ivy Brothers, an admissions agency started by former Ivy League admissions officers, has emphasized in their admissions strategies how not “college-worthy” can be developed into a story but “engineered” profiles cannot. If a student has a niche, whether it be historical arches, fashion, even cookies, we should be giving them the resources to target that niche. Connect them with a local expert, suggest a book, or help them set up an independent study. The idea of a "passion project" has been circulating more and more but what does that mean? And, how can it be done right? People often focus on the project part, but passion is what actually matters. Whether a kid is building a manifesto, starting a poetry journal, or doing independent research with a college professor, the key is that the drive has to come from within them, not from a desire to impress Harvard University.  What Teachers Can Do? Teachers are the perfect outlet for students to bounce their inspiration off of. When a student comes to you with an idea for a project, don’t be afraid to ask hard questions to make sure their motivation is real. It’s better someone the student trusts catches a flimsy extracurricular early, than get caught by an admissions officer. Why do you actually want to start this club? What problem is this app really solving? How does this research connect to what you want to do with your life? By making students articulate their "why," you help them refine their ideas and make sure they're doing it for the right reasons. It may sound preachy, but this is the truth to the admissions process. Through this we also actively fight the toxic culture of comparison that fuels these engineered profiles. In competitive high schools, kids are hyper-aware of what everyone else is doing, and it turns into a race that raises the bar and the unreachable expectations for everyone. It’s important to celebrate different kinds of success, and highlight the stories of alumni who took the unconventional, passion-driven paths and made it out successful and fulfilled. The more students realize authenticity gets rewarded, the better off everyone is. The Truth In college admissions, you can’t win by tricking an admissions officer with a perfectly engineered resume. That resume won’t pass a sniff test. Further, admissions is a matching process. Even if a fake profile gets a student in, the foundation of their fake self leaves them miserable at a school that doesn't fit who they really are. Your common app is not just your achievements, it’s supposed to be you. By encouraging students to pursue organic interests and real passions, we're giving them the self-awareness they need to actually be happy and successful. No matter where they end up going to school, knowing themself will always pay off.  Emili Lok is a student at Barnard College at Columbia University and an Operations Intern for Ivy Brothers.   Do you think most students feel pressure to “look impressive” instead of being true to what they actually enjoy? What does “success” look like to you beyond grades and achievements? Have you seen a student lose motivation because they were trying to do too much? Do you think students today feel more pressure than previous generations? Why or why not? Please leave your comments below. Your feedback is always appreciated. 
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