Independent projects are an increasingly popular way for students to differentiate themselves in the college application process, especially when competing for spots at top institutions. Whether this means starting a club at your school, a tutoring center in your hometown, or a startup with your friends, entrepreneurship is more prevalent in college admissions than ever before.
There are a few reasons behind this. First, entrepreneurial ventures show initiative, interest, and curiosity. They require the traits of successful business acumen, social skills, a passion directed at a goal, and continued effort – even if it means something as small as opening a lemonade stand. Secondly, college admissions are more competitive than ever before, and entrepreneurial ventures provide a way for students to stand out. While you can find similar results joining an existing project, creating your own can fill otherwise uncontested niches, and allow you to branch out in new directions.
In this article, we aren’t going to discuss how or when to start a new venture, but instead how to scale one up. Once you’ve begun an entrepreneurial exercise, the real challenge is taking it to the next level, and expanding your reach and impact.
Growing your Enterprise
Today, the barriers to create a project have been reduced dramatically. Anyone with an internet connection can come up with their own idea for an online venture and initiate it. Scaling it, then, is the real test. In fact, it’s what most colleges look at when they receive a deluge of student-founded organizations to comb through every application season. While it is good to have an idea and build it, the real-world test to see how dedicated, skilled, and unique a student is comes from growing your project as much as possible. Scaling is as much a challenge to real-world entrepreneurs as it is to students working on a passion project.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to scaling a project, because all projects are different and have their own audiences, each has a similar set of steps to take to scale up its reach and impact. The first of these, and the most applicable in most scenarios is networking. In every case, part of scaling a project is maximizing its impact, and doing so involves bringing your venture outside of the confines of your own room (both metaphorically and, in many cases, literally speaking).
For example, one of our students shared with us his strategy for getting as much media attention as possible. At the end of every interview he had with a reporter or media representative, he would ask the reporter for at least one contact of a colleague or friend in the industry. Thus, he never left an interview without having another one he could initiate. Each opportunity led to another, and his project was eventually featured in numerous newspapers and websites across the world. That’s impressive on a college application! This strategy doesn’t have to be used for media coverage, either. If you start a club at your school, have every new member bring in at least one referral, for example. Getting your followers to contribute to scaling creates a multiplier effect, which, if done right, can make scaling an exponentially faster process.
Scaling a project does not just mean increasing its reach. There are many ways you can grow a venture beyond increasing the number of people involved in it. For example, one student who had come up with an invention for a sensor product decided to go through the process of obtaining a patent for it, showing initiative and technical capability. A patented product stands out in college admissions for being both original and authentic but also complex and impactful. This approval from an outside source lends additional legitimacy to a project. Finding awards or competitions you can enter, grants you can apply for, or other organizations you can collaborate with will help you take your own project to the next level.
Another student of ours wrote a simple computer app to aid Zoom Rooms at the onset of the pandemic. Simply having an app is a fairly common and ordinary achievement, especially among computer science applicants. However, our student enrolled in numerous hackathons, promoting his project and growing it with teammates, both in terms of the complexity of the app but by collecting awards to add to its name. While he didn’t have thousands of users on his app, he gained a significant award for his honors list and a more impressive app to write about. Anything that shows outside recognition, whether the number of users, news articles, awards, or team members, is considered a part of scaling a project.
Finally, collaboration is key. There are thousands of like minded student entrepreneurs around the world, many of whom are likely working on projects similar to yours. If you can work together and collaborate on joint initiatives, such as combining user bases of your organization or forming a partnership, you can quickly and effectively increase your scale. Many students fear that colleges will look down upon projects that are not entirely your own doing. In fact, the opposite is the case. While leadership remains a central tenet of a successful application, demonstrating the skills of collaboration and cooperation stand out, too. The bigger the scale, the more impressive it is on a college application.
In order to find like minded peers, we recommend asking through your network of professional contacts (see step 1), if they have encountered any similar projects or ventures, or have been contacted by other students working on the same thing. You will not be able to collaborate in all cases, but a joint venture automatically increases the reach of both projects, as you combine networks, experience, and resources.
Why Scale Helps Applications
At the beginning of this article, we discussed why scaling is so important: it allows you to demonstrate your skills, passion, and motivation while providing a way for colleges to assess and compare the level of depth projects go to. However, there is a second reason why using the methods described above goes a long way. In addition to adding value to the project’s size, having a unique story on scaling your project provides engaging content for your essays.
When it comes time to write supplemental essays about your project, you’ll want to have more to talk about than merely your motivation and results. You also want to have a process to describe. Your essay can’t simply be a rehash of your resume and activity list. An engaging project-focused essay walks admissions officers through the challenges you encountered and, ideally, overcame in developing and scaling your project.
All this is to say that scaling your project helps not only in making it more impressive and impactful, but also in creating a cohesive narrative to write about, creating both the material and the backstory at the same time.
Final Thoughts
Starting a new venture is not the right choice for every student, and you can get many of the same benefits by joining an existing organization and dedicating your talents to increasing its reach and impact. Either way, however, the greater the scale of your accomplishments, the more they will stand out to admissions officers, and the more impressive your application will be.
Whether you’re starting a new venture or trying to take one of your projects to the next level, it can be difficult to know what step to take next. We hope this guide has given you a useful starting place for your own explorations. If you want more personalized advice, or want to learn how we can help you reach the next level, schedule a free consultation today. Our students have accomplished some truly amazing things, and we know you can too.
