Hi!

It's been a minute since we've last talked. The end of the summer has been busy! Helping my seniors finalize the outlines and first drafts for all of their essays, onboarding juniors who are starting to dig into the recruiting process, gearing my sophomores and freshmen up for a new school year, and of course sailing my own regattas. I'm on the way to one right now (don't worry, I'm in the passenger seat), and not-so-typically for me, I'll be skippering this one! Although I primarily am a crew, I believe it's super important to get myself in the back of the boat at least a few times a year. It helps immensely with knowing what my skippers need out of me as a crew.

But don't just take my word for it, check out this new interview that just dropped on Steve Hunt's website with a Harvard sailor, all about how to be a better crew. If you haven't gotten your free month of access to Steve's resources yet, reply here for a coupon code!

Meanwhile, back in college application land, the Common App opened this month with a quiet update. The Activities section is now called "Activities and Experiences," and the field for a position or leadership title is optional.

Admissions officers have been saying this for years. A title never made an activity count. The form finally caught up to the people reading it.

Ten slots, still. One hundred fifty characters each, still. What changed is that your student no longer has to invent the words "Founder and President" to make something look legitimate on the page.

An application built entirely out of school-sanctioned clubs is a monoculture. Row after row of the same crop, impressive from the road, and famously fragile. Readers see hundreds of those a week. NHS, Key Club, varsity something, tutoring, repeat. A garden bed with six different varieties growing in it is messier, more interesting, and much harder to kill (assuming you've kept up with the watering!).

So be the math kid who gardens. The bookworm who also games, and can tell you exactly why the economy in one particular game is broken. The kid who sails four days a week and has room for nothing else, because six years of that is its own evidence. The one who has watched a younger sibling every afternoon since seventh grade because that is what the family needed.

The untitled stuff often reads better than the titled stuff, for a plain reason. Nobody assigned it. Nobody puts you in charge of your own tomatoes. Interest that survived without an audience is the most authentic interest there is.

Before your senior types a word into that section, have them list everything from the last four years on paper. The job, the sibling, the hours in Blender, the thing they quit. Then choose. Ten slots is a curation problem, not a volume problem.

And if you are a freshman or sophomore reading over a parent's shoulder: go out and do things. But not for the sake of college admissions. You cannot reverse-engineer a life from an application. But, you can build a great application out of a life.

Seniors staring at ten empty slots, or students who aren't even sure where to start, are my whole fall. If you're feeling stuck, hop into a free intro call.

Until next time,

Nikki