There is a persistent belief among families preparing for US applications that more is better: more clubs, more positions, more certificates. The universities that receive the most applications say the opposite, in writing, on their own admissions pages. This guide collects what they say, explains why a single finished project fits their criteria better than a full activities list, and shows how to present it.
MIT’s admissions office lists what it looks for under seven headings. Under “Intensity, curiosity, and excitement” it says: “We don’t expect applicants to do a million things. Choose quality over quantity”. Under “Hands-on creativity”: “You shouldn’t just enjoy thinking about problems, you should be excited about doing something to help solve them”. Under “Risk-taking”: “We want to admit applicants who are not only planning to succeed but who are also not afraid to fail”.
Stanford, describing its holistic review, says: “An exceptional depth of experience in one or two activities may demonstrate your passion more than minimal participation in five or six clubs”.
Yale states that “academic strength is our first consideration in evaluating any candidate”, and then: “it is the qualitative elements of an application that make a prospective student stand out”.
Caltech asks applicants directly: “Tell us about something you created, tested, repaired, modeled, coded, built, or redesigned. What problem were you trying to solve and what did the process reveal to you?”
None of these universities is asking for a longer list. Each is asking for evidence of the same three things: depth, making, and initiative.
An activities list shows membership. It cannot show depth, because depth is a matter of what the student did over time, not which rooms they were in. It cannot show making, because a club is something you join, not something you build. And it rarely shows initiative, because most clubs exist before the student arrives.
A finished project shows all three by its nature. The student chose it (initiative), built and tested it (making) and stayed with it through the parts that did not work (depth). The MIT line about not being afraid to fail is not decoration: a project that went wrong and was fixed is exactly the kind of evidence it describes.
Every university on the Common Application gives the student the same three places to present a project.
The Activities section allows up to ten activities, each with a short description of 150 characters. A project takes one slot, and the 150 characters should carry the evidence: “Ran weekly homework club for 6 Year 7s, 8 wks; feedback slips each session; confidence ratings rose 2.1→3.8/5; trained a successor.”
The Additional Information section, now 300 words, is the place for what the activities line cannot hold: the problem, what was built, what the test showed, what changed. Written plainly, it reads like an abstract.
The essays. Many universities’ supplemental prompts invite the project outright. Besides Caltech, the University of California’s personal insight questions ask how the student expresses their creative side and how they have furthered an interest inside and outside the classroom; Tufts’ engineering prompt asks about a project the student helped build, design, create or iterate in the past two years; Penn’s Management and Technology prompt asks the student to describe something they created, designed, improved or built.
A smaller group accepts the work as an optional upload. MIT accepts a maker portfolio and a research supplement, both described as optional. Caltech accepts engineering, coding, maker and science-fair portfolios and research papers. Columbia accepts a maker portfolio of up to four items and a one-to-two-page research abstract. Harvard, Yale, Brown and Dartmouth accept research abstracts or academic work, all optional. Others, including Penn, Duke, Northwestern, NYU, Michigan and Georgia Tech, accept no uploads; there the project lives in the three standard places above. Princeton asks for a graded paper marked by a teacher, so independent project work does not qualify for that requirement.
Two cautions. Yale notes that most successful applicants submit only the required materials, so an upload should add something the application cannot otherwise show. And a portfolio is only as good as the evidence in it: photographs of a working prototype and a page of test results say more than a polished cover.
If your child is fifteen or sixteen and has several interests, the question is not which to drop but which to take deep. The right project usually sits at the meeting point of a subject they want to study and a problem they have noticed. A student heading for computer science who built a revision tool their classmates used for three weeks has a better story than one who attended three coding camps. A student heading for business who ran a small resale venture and kept the accounts has a better story than one who was treasurer of two societies.
The 300-word section works best as a plain abstract. An example, for the vocabulary-app project, at about 190 words:
“Problem. My Spanish class was set a new vocabulary list each week, but every revision app tested generic lists, so we revised words we already knew. What I made. A web app, built in a no-code tool over three weeks, where a student pastes the week’s list and is tested on it, with the words they miss coming back more often. Test. Five classmates used it for three weeks in place of their usual revision. I logged use and gave a short vocabulary test before and after. Result. Average scores rose from 61% to 79%; two of the five stopped using it in week three, and both said the interface was slow on their phones. Change. I removed a ‘streak’ feature nobody used and cut the page weight by half. What next. I would add the second language our school teaches and test with a larger group. I did the design, build and testing myself; my teacher agreed the test format.”
That is the whole story in the space provided, with the failure included and the authorship clear.
No. Sport, music and service still matter to universities and to the student. The point is that one thing should be taken deep enough to produce evidence, and that thing should lead the application.
No. Caltech and MIT ask about making because they are engineering schools; the same universities admit historians and economists whose depth shows in research, writing or ventures. Depth is the criterion, not the field.
Attending a programme shows interest. Making something during or after it shows initiative. The second is what the admissions pages describe.
Shorthand for one area of exceptional depth in an application, as opposed to being evenly good at many things. The universities themselves do not use the word; what they describe is depth, making and initiative, which a finished project shows.
The most selective ones say in writing that they would rather see depth in one or two activities than light participation in many. A student can still be rounded; the application should lead with the deep thing.
Not sure what to build? The CURIOO Project Finder asks a student ten questions and suggests three projects sized for twelve weeks: one practical, one ambitious, one for a cause they care about.
Parents: the Signature Project guide is a five-page PDF you can forward, at curioo.com/signature.
Sources. Quoted from UCAS and each university’s current admissions pages. CURIOO is not affiliated with or endorsed by any university named. Requirements change each year; check the university’s own pages before applying.
