One of the single best ways to differentiate yourself from the tens of thousands of other applicants you’re competing with is to come up with a signature capstone project. The idea is to tap into your natural strengths and interests, and to focus your time and energy on one big project that will provide the perfect showcase for your leadership abilities and your social values and the profound impact you’ve made on your community (whether that’s your school, your town, the scientific community, an online community, or some other group you’re involved with).
The good news is that there’s an infinite number of possibilities for what that project can be. And more than anything, you want it to be something that’s deeply meaningful to you. This is important not only because the project will take a lot of time and effort and you don’t want to lose steam, but also because college admissions officers want to know the real you, and what makes you different from everyone else. Copying someone else’s capstone project won’t help your true self shine, so it’s key to think about what’s something you’re uniquely positioned to achieve. What’s something that’s perfectly suited for your combination of strengths, interests and abilities? That’s the project for you.
If you’re a STEM student planning a career in computer science, a compelling capstone project might be to conduct independent research on bias detection using existing AI data sets, and then publish your paper in a top-tier IEEE journal, which demonstrates you’re already making contributions to the scientific community on-par with graduate and PhD students.
If you’re a budding entrepreneur, you might launch a profitable business that collects recycled waste products from schools and then sells them back to the state to be recycled into sustainable products. If you’re an aspiring immigration lawyer or social activist, you might spearhead a local campaign to provide food, shelter, and educational opportunities for disenfranchised groups or displaced communities, and perhaps you speak before your state legislature on behalf of a new hate-crime bill. If you’re a music enthusiast, you might launch a popular web channel where leading musicians provide free instructional tutorials to anyone interested in that instrument, regardless of where they live around the world.
Our job as mentors is to guide you every step of the way with your capstone project so that you’re never at a loss for ideas, support, connections, or encouragement. We help you with every phase of development: from skills assessment, to project ideation, to time management, to expert outreach, to impact evaluation, to project completion. We want you to tackle a project that excites you, but maybe even scares you a little bit, because it will challenge you to grow and develop in new and unexpected ways. And make no mistake: the ups and downs of your personal journey will provide excellent fodder for a gripping, original, persuasive college essay.
One student we worked with was an aspiring film-maker with a passion for environmentalism. He created a documentary film about an issue in the Puget Sound, his own back yard, to draw increased attention to something he observed and he wanted others to be aware of as well.
To help spread this message, he entered this film in a number of youth film festivals; we helped him find these festivals and fill out the applications. These are not complicated necessarily, but require tracking a number of moving parts, and this is our goal for students when working on projects like this; to facilitate and support their creative vision, to help them accomplish their goals and showcase their efforts.
One student we worked with had an early interest in reading research papers in biology, but saw how inaccessible research was to high school students generally, both due to paywalls, and due to an unfamiliarity with the terms and language used. She began an Instagram page which sought to make research accessible to high school students, and began posting infographics breaking down complicated research into easily understood forms.
This quickly drew the attention of other high school students, who reached out to her to ask if they could contribute. This allowed her to begin to scale up her organization, with other students joining as researchers, graphic designers, technical leads, editors, and writers. We helped her make this a self-sustaining organization, the kind that would be able to persist even after she graduated. This is one worry for many projects; that students create an organization that withers away once they graduate; we work with students to build projects that create a lasting impression and impact.
One student we worked with had dual interests, in philosophy and computer science. He sought for a project that let him combine him, so his mentor guided him through the ideation of a philosophy app, one which would supply users with relevant quotes or daily sayings from classical philosophers.
He did the work of coding himself; that is the point of these projects, to highlight what students are capable of when they push themselves. His mentor offered guidance and support, and helped him stay on track and organized, avoiding mission creep and keeping his milestones in focus. His app was launched on the app store, to moderate interest.
Ivy Scholars is the leading educational consultant in Sugar Land, Texas, providing admissions coaching, test prep, and more to help students enroll at top tier schools.
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