The first tip is an essay writing tip that came from a student. His essays were terrible. Then, all of a sudden, his essays became great without using AI. I asked him what changed. Here’s what he said:

“I think the secret of good writing is writing about what you don’t want to write about.”

Great writing lives inside of discomfort. Powerful essays derive their power from vulnerability. Writing about the moments you’d rather avoid thinking about can make your essay powerful.

On the other hand, trying to list your achievements in your essay is a terrible idea. An essay that looks like a thinly disguised resume misses the point of the exercise. Your essay should not rehash your activities list or your awards list. It should capture your voice in its strongest moments of nuance and vulnerability.

Here’s a great way to enhance the extracurricular side of your application. Pick one of your current activities, and double your effort.

Most students are shocked at what happens. Doubling your effort in one club moves you to a higher level. It can turn members into officers, officers into presidents, and presidents into legends. It can energize a club, and make a minor club the biggest club in the school.

Most students put in the expected amount of effort into a club, which leads to expected results. It makes you look exactly like your competitors. But if you put an unexpected level of effort, you can create an unexpected outcome. It can turn a common activity into a major showpiece for an application. The icing on the cake: if you double your effort in one activity, you’ll also enjoy it a lot more.

Every great interview coach knows that the questions you ask the interviewer matter more than the answers you give. Interviewers often forget answers, but remember the great questions.

Something similar happens with recommendations. Getting the highest grade in a class is good…but common. In every class in the universe, someone has the highest grade. Standing out through sheer academic performance doesn’t work.

On the other hand, genuine curiosity is incredibly rare. Asking great questions during class matters more than test performance. It may be hard to believe, but the quality of the questions you ask matters more than how well you do on tests.

Asking great questions is also incredibly rare. Not every school has even one student asking high quality questions. For that matter, not every city has even one student asking high quality questions. Asking great questions can make you stand out among your ambitious competition.

What kind of summer program can directly help you get into an Ivy? The answer may shock you.

As it turns out, there’s just one rule. If you pay to attend a program, it can’t help you get in. For example, attending Harvard’s summer program for high schoolers won’t help you get into Harvard (or any other Ivy).

On the other hand, free programs dramatically increase your chances of getting in. Programs like RSI, TASS, and PRIMES significantly boost your chances.

There are two exceptions. PROMYS is free for most people, but not everyone. It can help your application. U Chicago’s summer programs allow you to apply to U Chicago in ED0, so if U Chicago is your absolute top choice, going to a U Chicago Summer Program can help you.

My recommendation: apply to every single free program that you’re eligible for. The topic matters much less than the fact that it’s a free program with a competitive application. These programs are incredibly tough to get into, so you’ll usually need to apply to several to get into one.

If you’ve looked at Ivy applications, you may have realized how important it is for students to read serious literature with real intellectual significance. Some colleges, like Columbia, explicitly ask students what books they’ve read outside of school that contributed to their intellectual development. Other colleges ask students to discuss an individual book that was important to them. College interviewers routinely ask students about the books they’ve read.

But parents struggle to get their kids to like reading serious literature. Some parents try to have their kids read nonfiction about topics the kid finds interesting (usually sports or science), with the hope that this will enkindle a love of reading, which will then grow into a love of reading literature outside of school. This obviously doesn’t work. Students grudgingly read a couple of sports biographies a year, and that’s it. Other parents hope that a love of reading fantasy and science fiction will turn into a love of reading serious literature. Again, that never actually happens.

The solution is to accept the truth: it’s impossible to love reading literature. Literature is unlovable. It is awful. It’s un-fun. It’s boring. There is no such thing as a “literary page turner.”

The solution is habit. You can’t develop a love of reading literature. No one can. But you can develop a habit of reading literature. It’s like developing a habit of daily exercise.

Your child won’t ever like reading literature, just as no one on earth actually enjoys exercising. But they’ll see the benefits, just as those who exercise daily see the benefits. By dropping the impossible goal of learning to love reading serious literature, and instead working on the attainable goal of developing a habit of reading literature, you can gain a serious Ivy advantage.

As your school’s college counseling staff probably already knows, there is one criterion which determines whether a summer program at a college increases your chances of getting into an Ivy: whether you pay tuition or not. If you pay tuition to attend, the program cannot directly increase your chance of getting into an Ivy. Free programs, on the other hand, generally improve your chances of getting in.

Pay-for-play summer programs at Ivies don’t help students get into Ivies. On the other hand, free programs can help a huge amount. RSI, TASS, and PRIMES dramatically increase a student’s chances of getting in.

This principle can help your institution increase its number of Ivy admits. Have your college counseling team compile and present lists of free summer programs. Have them stop posting the pay-to-play ones. Have them explain this principle to parents and students. Your goal should be to have all of your students apply to every single free summer program, and to have none of your students apply to a pay-to-play summer program.

If more of your students apply, more will probably get in. That translates into direct, measurable, and marketable success.

There are many students who can get into and thrive at an Ivy, but because they squander their resources on things that don’t work, they end up not getting in. By shifting your students’ focus from pay-to-play programs to free ones, you can help your students stand out and get in.

In my years of college admissions consulting, there is something I have never seen. I have never once seen a student who had a 1500+ SAT score and a legitimate passion for literature, history and philosophy, who didn’t get into at least one Ivy.

On the other hand, I have seen countless STEM focused students with 1500+ SAT scores who got rejected from every Ivy.

When it comes to getting in, reading literature and philosophy is king. Some schools, like Columbia, explicitly ask for the books you’ve read outside of school. Other schools ask about it in the interview. Every school can see from the quality of an application essay whether the student has read serious literature and engaged with ideas or not.

Right now, your students aren’t reading. They aren’t reading the assigned books, and they certainly aren’t reading anything else. You can change that right now.

For example, setting aside time during school for students to read serious literature outside of assigned reading (preferably under the watchful eye of your strictest teacher) will cause some students to engage with literature. It won’t be everyone, but it will be more than the 0% you currently have. Increasing the number of students who read literature will increase the number of students who get into Ivies.

Pro tip: don’t try to make this about cultivating a love of reading literature. That’s impossible, since serious literature is largely unpleasant. Instead, emphasize creating a habit of reading literature, similar to a habit of exercising.

Claude has an interesting guardrail: it won’t amplify negative self-talk. If you say, “Oh my god, I’m so dumb,” Claude won’t say, “True, you are very dumb.” ChatGPT has a similar guardrail.

Interestingly, this guardrail, combined with training data that encourages warm and upbeat writing, causes Claude to avoid writing essays in which the student feels guilt, shame, or embarrassment, which are the three most powerful emotions in an essay. Thus, having students write with real vulnerability about those emotions takes their essays to a place where Claude won’t follow.

These emotions have always made essays more powerful. But today, they also fundamentally separate an authentic essay from an AI-generated one.

Great writing lives inside discomfort. Or, to quote one of my own students: “...the secret to writing well is writing about what you don’t want to write about.” The struggle with difficult topics and difficult emotions is palpable when it’s real. Frontier AIs cannot mimic it.

AIs don’t feel discomfort with any topic. They write about jellybeans and psychological trauma with equal ease. Their lack of discomfort is their Achilles heel…and your advantage. Your students can struggle through discomfort. Bringing that struggle onto the page helps you defeat AI essays.

Essays don’t have to look like essays. One successful student wrote her essay like a fairy tale. Another wrote it as a series of magazine articles. Others have played with nonlinear structures. Encourage your students to experiment with form.

Note that frontier AI models don’t usually experiment with form. Even if they started to, most inexperienced students and parents would insist that the AI rewrite the essay in a traditional way. Thus, not only does experimenting with form make essays stand out, they also make them look different from AI-generated essays.