The US university admissions process is an unforgiving one and with the daunting realization that there is only one chance to do it right, many students are scared into conformity. What I mean by this is that students are scared to take risks in any aspect of their high school careers, whether it’s in the classes they take or the extra-curriculars they involve themselves in or the way they spend their summers. Yet, coming from Vancouver where there is a fairly homogenous applicant pool of students taking similar courses, volunteering in similar places and scoring similarly on the SAT, the importance of standing out is huge.

Though following the safe path of taking the ‘right’ APs and volunteering at the ‘right’ places and writing the ‘right’ essay doesn’t necessarily make you a bad applicant, it does make you a boring applicant. As I was once told at a Harvard information session, they have enough of the ‘right’ applicants to fill the places 3 times over so in order to narrow it down, applicants need to make themselves stand out. How can students do this though is the real question? What does standing out even mean? The answer doesn’t lie in trying to force oneself to be ‘different’ for the sake of being different, but it lies in taking risks and pursuing your passions, even though they may not necessarily be the ‘safe’, conventional choices.

Going into my grade 12 year at St. George’s, I was faced with the dilemma of choosing between taking English AP and Creative Writing 12.  While I was interested in both courses, this wasn’t merely about which one was more appealing than the other, it was about the safe choice versus the risky choice. I was just beginning to start my application to Princeton and I thought at first that I should take the AP because it was, well, an AP and that I had to take as many as possible to be a strong candidate. Yet at the same time, I had always loved creative writing and had been involved with the Saints literary publication for several years and did not want to miss what could be my only chance to take this kind of class. In the end, though I knew I was perhaps taking an ‘easier’ course that wasn’t an AP, I also knew that I was doing something I loved and this was explained more in detail by one of my references. By breaking convention and pursuing something I truly was interested in, I differentiated myself from other applicants who hadn’t taken similar risks and therefore hadn’t made themselves stand out.

This sort of calculated risk taking in following your passions is the kind of thing that jumps out at admissions officers as they sort through piles of similar applications from Vancouver. Universities want students who are not afraid of being themselves and doing what they love and those who are too afraid to break the mould of what they think universities want will never separate themselves from the pack. The blind dedication to the ‘right’ activities will inevitably lead to students producing an unoriginal application that gets lost among all the others, failing to reach a goal they had spent years working towards.