How to Find Your College Application Theme

Why "find your passion" doesn't work

Ask a sixteen-year-old what their passion is and you will usually get a shrug, or the name of whatever they did most recently. The question is too big. It asks for a conclusion before any of the thinking has happened.

So most students go looking for a theme in one of two wrong places. Some look forward and pick a career: "I want to be an engineer." Others look at their titles: "I'm captain of the robotics team." Both feel solid, and neither says much about the person.

The better place to look is backward, at verbs. What did you spend the hours doing?

Six steps, with one student as the example

Take a student who works weekends at his uncle's auto shop, manages the parts inventory for the robotics team, plays bass in a band, and spent last summer helping at a food pantry. On paper that is four unrelated lines.

1. Write down everything. Courses you chose, activities, jobs, family responsibilities, hobbies, things you do when nobody asks you to. Include what seems too small to count. For this student, the list turns up something he had never thought of as an activity: at the pantry, he was the one who rearranged the storage room.

2. Replace every title with what you did. "Robotics team" becomes "tracked every part so we stopped losing them before competitions." "Auto shop" becomes "labeled the bins and built a board showing which car was waiting on what." Titles hide the pattern. Verbs show it.

3. Look for what repeats. Read down the list and mark anything that shows up more than once. His pattern is hard to miss. In three different places, he walked into a mess and left a system behind.

4. Write three versions. One sentence each, saying what you do and who it is for. The first is usually too broad: "I like engineering." The second is often flat: "I organize things." By the third he has it: "I bring order to messy places so the people working there can get on with their jobs."

5. Test it against your record. Check the sentence against three things: the classes you chose, what you do outside school, and how the people around you would describe you. His holds up outside school and in what others would say. It is thin in class, where nothing on his transcript points the same way yet.

6. Ask someone who knows you. Read the sentence to a parent, a teacher or a friend. If they nod, you are close. If they look surprised, it is not true yet, however good it sounds.