“Do you help with the passion project?”
Every so often, I’ll hop on a sales call with an inbound client at my college consulting company, Invictus Prep. Nervous parents, many of them immigrants and newcomers to the American college admissions process, will come prepared with a score of questions about how we propose to help their children land admissions offers from America’s most coveted universities. While most of these questions are well-intentioned, many of them are misguided, demonstrating a collective plague that has set over college applicants: the obsession with the so-called “passion project” on the activities list.
On the Common Application, the portal through which the vast majority of American high school seniors submit their college applications, students are asked to report the activities they have participated in throughout their high school years—ranging from medaling in science Olympiads to caring for a sick relative. Yet what was once a brief resume has now become an exercise in neuroticism and a contest in sleeplessness, whereby students report outrageous activities such as founding a global 501(c)(3) or coding an app that gets noticed by Mark Zuckerberg.
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These ventures, often referred to as “passion projects” in the college consulting industry, are seldom started by high school students of their own accord—instead, parents, college admissions officers, and private college counselors alike, buying into “the passion project industry,” have collectively created the illusion that a sixteen-year-old student must spearhead the development of a corporation or change the world through non-profit work to succeed in the college admissions process—and later in the professional world.
Heading into high school with this mentality, many students will sink hours into half-baked projects created by their mothers or their college counselors instead of focusing on the most crucial aspect of their teenage years: intellectual and interpersonal development.
As teenagers, we are all lost. We don’t yet know who we are or what drives us in this world. By our late teenage years, we should start to develop a vision, an identity, and a purpose, but many students today feel purposeless and lost, unsure of what they want in the present or the future. As someone who works with high school students for a living, I witness the importance of supporting students through their interpersonal and intellectual development daily. I believe that imposing draconian project structures on teenagers only stymies their interpersonal development, leaving them even more confused about who they want to be.
Many students don’t understand why they are working on these projects beyond the perceived advantage they think they will gain in the college application process. Large-scale projects, such as coding an app or founding a nonprofit organization, profoundly dilute a student’s free time, with many deprioritizing homework assignments or activities like reading to focus on projects they never cared about in the first place.
Consequently, these students see a dip in grades that precludes them from achieving the admissions results they had set their hopes on in the first place. By hyper-fixating on “the passion project,” high school students fail to grow intellectually at a time when intellectual growth is key to future success. Simply put, they lack the time to figure out who they really are.
Don’t get me wrong—there is nothing wrong with being a visionary high school student. In fact, we should be encouraging students to go above and beyond in the fields that they love—when I was in high school, for instance, I explored my love of literature by writing a novel and starting a blog that would eventually grow into the publication I still run today. Passion is fantastic, and all the power to those who truly harbor it. The danger comes, however, when students create such projects solely for the sake of the college application—and waste precious leisure time on an initiative born out of pressure from a parent or a college counselor.
It is our duty as adults to change the narrative. When I work with students, I never tell them that they must undertake a “passion project” or that such a project is required to earn a spot on a college campus. Instead, I focus on cultivating their intellectual curiosity, helping them channel it into something greater—something they can control—that will hopefully outlast their time in high school. And these ideas don’t have to be related to simulating the experience of a startup founder—not everyone is entrepreneurial, after all, and students should learn to lean into their relative strengths. A student interested in medicine might fare better learning anatomy or shadowing at a hospital than starting up a large project, many of which are usually abandoned once a student secures an offer of admission from a university—a testament to the ephemerality of such artificial ventures. And while the “passion project” might still be helpful for some students looking to explore their respective fields, many college admissions officers have begun to see right through the veneer of so-called “passion” and will quickly turn away applicants who do not appear to be genuine.
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But what’s most appalling to me about the “passion project” is the utter lack of reflection that often comes with it. While going through certain motions might sometimes lead to growth, what is typically more powerful is reflection and lifelong learning—and today, in a society at risk of losing all meaning and values, reflection is more important than ever.
By obsessing over manufactured projects, we have effectively renounced the tenets of intellectualism, opting instead to rear a generation of thinkers who don’t really know how to think or learn for the sake of learning. So, instead of asking our students to spend their hours with projects that will sink to the bottom of the ocean faster than the Titanic, we should encourage students to explore their intellectual curiosities—through books, conversations with adults and peers, and real-world experiences. Perhaps, then, we will see a future generation refocused on intellectual thought and meaningful engagement with our fascinating world.
Now, this is more important than ever.
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Image generated by ChatGPT based on the prompt: “A collage of exaggerated passion projects—such as coding apps, nonprofit logos, and science fairs—interspersed with a student in the foreground who appears overwhelmed or lost. This composition visually critiques the societal pressure to engage in numerous endeavors without understanding their true purpose.”
