How to Brand Yourself For Success

December 2023

Summary: The key to getting into a top university is to offer them something specific and valuable that they can’t get somewhere else.

The old days are gone.

A few decades ago, the way to get into a top college was to be well-rounded. If you had good grades, high SAT scores, strong teacher recommendations, and lots of extracurriculars, then you were perceived as someone who was going places. And most colleges would try to find a spot in their freshman class for you.

The new world.

Those days are gone. Top universities are no longer looking for generalists: students who do a little bit of everything. Instead, they’re looking for specialists: students who do one thing really well. Their goal is to create a well-rounded class. They don’t achieve this by admitting a bunch of well-rounded individuals. They achieve this by admitting a wide variety of highly-specialized students, who each excel in a distinct area. And together they compose a diverse, well-rounded class.

Think about a football team.

The best way to think about the college admission process is to think about a football team. If you were responsible for recruiting athletes to play for your championship team, you wouldn’t just recruit the best all-around athletes. That wouldn’t make any sense. Who cares if your players can swim laps or shoot hoops or run marathons? In football, each position is highly-specialized. The skills and body type required to be a good quarterback are completely different from that of a defensive lineman, or a cornerback, or a kicker. Instead, you would look for candidates to fill designated roles. In short, you need highly-accomplished specialists.

It’s the same with college admissions. Each year, admissions committees are looking for candidates who excel in specific areas, and who can make immediate contributions to their campus. So they create buckets of needs. For example, they might need an award-winning oboe player for their orchestra, and a few engineering prodigies to take advantage of their new robotics department, and a couple of proven social activists to advocate for change in their local community, plus an all-star goalkeeper for their women’s soccer team. Either you excel in these areas or you don’t. Colleges don’t like to guess; they require a proven track record of success.

How to use this to your advantage.

Now that you know what top universities are looking for, you need to look at your own candidacy, and ask yourself: What do I offer them that they can’t get somewhere else? What’s my specialty? This is where branding comes in. You’ve likely done all kinds of things in your high school career: a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. That’s normal, and even desirable from a personal growth perspective. But from an admissions perspective, it doesn’t help you at all. A football coach doesn’t care if his quarterback is pretty good at swimming laps or hitting the green with a 9-iron club; all he cares about is that his quarterback excels at playing quarterback. Colleges want specialists. They want to know exactly what they’re getting from each candidate.

Branding is about creating a singular, compelling narrative.

The trick to selling yourself to your top college is to portray yourself as someone who has achieved a tremendous amount of success in one designated area. That’s your brand. A nationally-ranked chess player. A published author. A business prodigy. A lauded community activist. A debate champion. An internationally-recognized painter. That, combined with an excellent academic track record, will make you a star candidate for most leading universities.

So what do you do with all of your unrelated interests and activities? Ideally, you find a way to incorporate them into your brand. For example, if you’re branding yourself as a star writer and aspiring author, then you try to bring all of your other activities under that same thematic tent. If you tutor elementary school students once a week, you should highlight your English tutoring (rather than the math or science work), and write your college essay about how you helped a 2nd grader win a state writing contest. In this way, you tie all (or at least most) of your activities back to your signature area of strength, your calling card.

Okay, so how exactly do you become a rock star specialist?

The answer is simple: focus and time. The more time and effort you devote to a singular pursuit, the better you’ll get, and the more you’ll get out of it too. But don’t just pick something because you think it will “look good” on your college resume, because it won’t. If you hate playing the clarinet, don’t play the clarinet, because you’ll never be great at it (and you’ll be miserable). If you don’t enjoy debate tournaments, same thing: don’t join the debate team. Instead, find something that genuinely interests you or solves a problem that bothers you, throw yourself into it 100%, and find a way to become great at it.

The good news is that when you discover something that you’re passionate about, and that you can excel at, it opens all kinds of doors for personal growth and development. And that’s really why you’re doing it in the first place: not because it was easy, or because you’re a natural, or because you wanted something for your college applications. But because you’re the type of person who grabs life by the horns, pushes the boundaries of what’s possible, and does whatever is required to get the job done. That shows initiative, leadership, commitment, follow-through, resiliency, and grit… everything leading universities are looking for.