Two Shy Kids, One Robotics Class, and a Cornell Envelope

Every activities list I see has the same problem. It's a list.

Member of this club. Participated in that walk. Played on the team. All true, all fine, all completely interchangeable with the 50,000 other kids applying.

Here's the distinction that actually matters, and I want you to hold it up against your own kid's list.

Being in a club versus founding one. Or running one.

Walking in the fundraiser versus starting the charity.

Being on the team versus being the captain, or making all conference.

Liking to write versus having self published a book. Liking to draw versus having your work hung in the local library.

Same underlying interest in every pair. Wildly different signal. The word for it is impact, and admissions officers are reading for it whether or not they ever say so.

Now let me tell you about two kids.

Twins. Painfully shy, both of them. Genuinely introverted, not the kind of shy that's really just modesty. Their mother was extremely stressed, because she could see what I could see: there was nothing on paper that would make anyone stop and look twice.

We spent a long time trying to find the spark. Eventually we landed on an opening. There was an opportunity to teach middle schoolers coding and robotics.

They did it. They were good at it. And at the end of the year, they figured they were done.

I said no. Hang on. What's next?

That question is the entire lesson. Most families stop at the activity. The activity is the starting line.

So they built something. They created a program from nothing, ran it, and grew it. It got written up in the local press. Then local television picked it up.

We sent all of it to their top choice school. Cornell.

They got in. Their mom texted afterward to say the Cornell application had stood out in what was a brutally competitive year.

Here's the part I like most, and it has nothing to do with the acceptance.

Those twins have graduated now. One majored in physics, one in computer science. They're each running startups, separately, both funded by the venture firm that backed DoorDash and Dropbox.

Which is the whole point. Not the four years. The 40.

Now, the practical version of this for your house.

If your kid is a junior right now, you're not founding a national charity by October. What you're doing is going deeper on something already there. One layer down. What's the next thing after the thing they already do?

If your kid is a sophomore or younger, you have real room. Go deep in two areas, ideally three. Not one, and not eight.

And please stop optimizing for well rounded. Well rounded is another way of describing the sea of sameness. Colleges assemble a well rounded class out of pointy, specific kids.

Don't invent a passion project from thin air because it "looks good." Admissions officers read thousands of those and they can smell it. Take what your kid genuinely already does, and ask the only question that matters.

What's next?

Onward.

-Andy "What's Next" Lockwood

P.S. The gap between an activity and an activity with impact is usually one conversation and one follow through. That conversation is the kind of thing we do constantly inside the Lockwood Inner Circle, with the same playbook we use with private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com