What Are Admissions Officers Looking For?

Admissions officers agree that when they're evaluating student activities, they care less about what the actual activity is and more about what it says about you. Specifically, they're looking for three things: passion, leadership, and impact.

Passion

Passion will manifest itself differently for different people, but college admissions officers usually notice it in the amount of time you've dedicated yourself to a certain activity over the years, and in how involved you've been in it.

Are you just doing an activity so you have something to write on your college application, or are you doing it because you couldn’t not do it? This is something that matters a lot to college admissions officers who want to know that you're pursuing something because it's a passion.

Try to find activities that you really care about, and that you feel makes you a more motivated, better person. Admissions officers like it when students are passionate about a certain activity because it means they are more likely to continue doing it in college, and also because these kinds of activities show who you are at your best. These activities will be the best indicators of how you act when motivated and dedicated to something.

Leadership

Leadership experience includes any time that you have been responsible for a project or for guiding, motivating, or instructing others. Many schools – especially the most highly selective ones – want to see students who exhibit leadership skills because they are hoping that their students will someday go on to be leaders who make differences on a larger scale in academia, business, or research. Therefore, showing that you have the desire and sense of responsibility that a leader needs can be very attractive to admissions officers.

Taking a leadership role in an activity is really going to help you stand out from the crowd. Being the president of a school club will sound better than being a member of the same club. But obviously not all students can be president. So how do you solve this kind of issue? Even in you don’t have an official title, see if it’s possible to be involved as a leader in some way. Talk to the people in charge and see if you can organize an event or lead a fundraiser. Showing you have taken this kind of initiative will look much better than a title with no special activity to back it up.

Impact

How have you changed the activity that you have been involved in? How has the activity changed you?

One of the reasons that passion is so important is because admission officers want to see that you have made a significant investment in an activity over an extended period of time. Though you’ll probably experiment with several different activities when you're younger, once you settle on the ones you're most passionate about, officers are going to be looking for how you've made a difference in the activity and how you've changed because of it.

You may have heard that you should prioritize depth over breadth, and this is why. It’s better to select a couple of activities that you can be deeply involved in than to spread yourself so thin that you can do little more than showing up to meetings.

Why does impact matter? Again, colleges are most interested in students who have the potential to be making positive differences on campus, and later, in the world. This kind of thing doesn’t come easily. It usually only happens when someone shows dedication, follow-through, and initiative.