For some majors, this is straightforward, even if it isn’t necessarily easy. There are many research programs for students interested in medicine, competitions for students passionate about engineering. For students interested in business, however, things are trickier. There are far fewer easy pathways to get involved at the high school level, and far fewer simple ways to demonstrate their passion.

In this article, we’re going to explore how high school students can build their profile to apply to business programs at top colleges. We’ll look at what extracurriculars they should pursue, how they should spend their summers, and what these universities are looking for specifically. Let’s jump right in!

What a Good Business Profile Looks Like

Admissions officers are looking for certain things from applicants. Some of these are general; all applicants should have strong grades and high standardized test scores. Others, however, are more specific. Top colleges want to see that you were passionate about something in particular. If you are applying to a competitive major (such as business) that passion should be tied to your intended major. 

We also want to note that many top colleges don’t have official business majors; out of the Ivy League, only Cornell and Penn do. This advice holds true for students interested in studying economics, applied math, or statistics with an eventual interest in a career in the business world as well. 

For any students in this position, here is what top colleges expect to see when they examine your application: 

• High grades. They are particularly looking at your math scores. You should take calculus in high school; you can take statistics as well, but if you have to choose one, take calculus. 
• Test scores. These are a standard requirement for these schools. Exceptional scores won’t get you in, but they are expected for all serious applicants. 
• Essays. You should be able to clearly articulate your passion for a certain field, and be able to show (with examples and evidence) how you have engaged with it in the past. Colleges do not care about your future dreams of being a business leader, they want to know why you want to learn these principles now.
• Extracurriculars. Admissions officers want to see how you have actively pursued your passions in high school, through whatever opportunities are available to you, and the values you have developed by doing so. 

The last of these is the most difficult, and this is what we are going to spend most of the rest of this article discussing. 

High School Extracurriculars for Business Students

There is no singular correct extracurricular you can take part in to wow admissions officers and secure your place as a business major. We will go through some of the options available, and detail what each of them requires, so you can see which most appeals to you. Note that unlike many other potential fields of study, there are far fewer preset options for business students, and pursuing these will often take far more work and creativity on your part. 

High School Clubs

Joining or starting a high school club related to business is a good low-level commitment, a way to dip your toes in the water and see if this is the kind of thing which interests you. This is a good way to build community in your high school, and can lead to interesting opportunities, such as hosting speakers or networking events, or leading seminars for your fellow students. As far as activities go, this is a good way to show community commitment, and is a good choice for freshmen to get involved with.

Stock Trading

Trading in stocks as an amateur has a much lower barrier of entry than it used to, but this isn’t necessarily a good idea for a budding entrepreneur. We advise simulations first, and learning all you can about the market, before jumping in without knowing what you are doing. 

There are a number of online courses you can take on stock trading; we advise focusing on those offered by universities on reputable platforms, such as or . There are many self-proclaimed gurus on Youtube and elsewhere who claim to have mastered the secrets of the market, but their advice is rarely worth much. 

Building and maintaining a small portfolio of stocks over time can be impressive if managed well. The goal here is to show your interest in understanding the market and the deeper principles at play. Making money is good as well, but that serves mostly as a demonstration of competence, an external validation of what you have learned. 

Competitions

There are a small and limited number of business competitions available, and these are much less impressive than their counterparts in the sciences or engineering. You can partake in these, and they add a nice note to a profile, but they are not where you should focus your main efforts, for they are not terribly impressive for universities. We discuss a number of business-related competitions here. 

Internships

Internships are one of the best ways to build a business profile for college admissions; the trick is finding a good one. You can read our general guide to finding an internship here, but we want to elaborate on what makes one particularly suitable to build the profile of a business student. 

You do not specifically need to be working in finance or accounting or other strictly market-focused fields in your internship. Working at a startup or in an industry you find interesting works just as well. What’s really important is what you learn from doing so, the soft and hard skills you acquire. You should also be able to show off your contributions to the company, how things there were meaningfully improved by your presence and efforts. 

Quality internships can be hard to find; these are generally set up through personal connections and networking. Standardized internship pathways generally only exist for college students, with little available for high schoolers. This is part of what makes a significant internship so impressive to colleges, for they know the work required to land one. You can pursue an internship during the school year or the summer, but longer term commitments do more to raise your profile. You should aim for an accomplishment of this caliber by the summer after your junior year.

Starting a Business

Starting a business is hard, but if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, it can be a great way to demonstrate your drive and passion to admissions officers. Starting a full business can be a complicated affair, and we don’t suggest going into this blindly; begin with a concept, plan carefully, and get advice and input from your parents. You don’t want to waste your time or money, or worse yet, end up on the wrong side of the IRS.

Starting a business is impressive because it is a practical thing, and often teaches you many lessons outside of what you can expect. Hard work and resilience are traits colleges look for in students, along with the drive to create something new. Most students will struggle with this, but if you have a solid idea and can make a good business plan, this can be something worth pursuing. 

Doing Research

This is more applicable to students who are interested in economics, but it is a good way to showcase your intellectual vitality to colleges, your desire to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Economics is a particularly tricky discipline for high school students to enter, even amongst the other social sciences, but publishing your work in a high school journal still shows a depth of understanding and commitment. 

Working

Having a job isn’t usually thought of as an ideal way to impress colleges (though many do appreciate students who have done an honest day’s work), but it is particularly useful for students interested in business. After all, what better way to understand how a business operates than by being inside one as it operates, what better way to understand the value of money than by working for it?

The benefits come regardless of the work you do; waiting tables and flipping burgers can give you valuable insights. This is particularly true because high school students generally can’t get hired to do accounting or manage sales; if you get an internship covering those topics, excellent, but otherwise, a simple job can grant many of the same benefits. 

A Note on Hospitality

As a final note, if you are looking at a program which focuses on hospitality management (notably, Cornell’s ), then your profile will need to include experience in hospitality specifically. This generally takes the form of working experience, though internships are also common. 

The summer after your junior year is often the best time to pursue these opportunities; child labor laws make doing so earlier in high school quite difficult. This is something you should think about when deciding on your future goals in business. Note that working in hospitality does prepare you for other business-related majors, but the reverse is not true. 

Final Thoughts

There is no single ”right” profile to have as a student interested in applying for a business major, but many different pieces you can put together into a unified whole. You can and should have extracurriculars outside of business as well, but we hope this article has given you insight into what admissions officers expect to see from competitive applicants, and how best you can give that to them. 

If you’re looking for help finding the right activities for you to pursue in high school, or aren’t sure how to get started on your path to a business degree, łÔąĎąŮÍř can make your life easier. Our mentors are experts at every aspect of the admissions process, from finding the best activities to crafting the best essays to tell your story. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more, we’re always happy to hear from you.

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But how does this impact your odds of admission? What do admissions officers think, reading dozens of applications from the same high school? Will you be compared to your classmates, weighed and judged relative to them? These are common and understandable concerns, and in this article, we’re going to address them. Our goal is to help you understand how colleges handle students from the same high school, and how it does (and doesn’t) matter for you.

Colleges Do Not Directly Compare Students

This is the first and most important point, since it informs all the ones which follow. When colleges read your application, they are evaluating it on its strengths and merits alone. You aren’t compared to your classmates, your neighbors, whoever’s application was in the stack next to yours; you are judged as yourself alone. 

This does not mean that your highschool doesn’t impact your chances of college admissions, nor does it mean that this impact will differ if there are many or few applicants from your school. What it does mean is that you won’t be admitted and another student from your school cut, or your application binned because they liked someone more from your school. 

Now, you will not be compared to individual students, but admissions officers are people, not machines, and so your application will be read in context. If your essays sound exactly like everyone else’s, they are more likely to be forgotten. If your activities have nothing that stands out, they won’t be remembered. This, however, is true regardless of whether other applicants are from your school or not. 

In some ways, this is very liberating. You are not directly in competition with anyone, you simply need to be the best student possible. This brings things back full circle, with a lot of pressure on you to present yourself to colleges well. If you want any specific advice on that, łÔąĎąŮÍř can help. 

How Multiple Students From a School Does Impact Admissions

Now that we’ve covered the most important disclaimer, we can dive into how admissions officers actually view and evaluate multiple students who come to them from the same high school. There are several ways this impacts applications; none of which inherently make you more or less likely to get admitted, but which can impact how you should approach your applications. 

School Reports and Familiarity

Top colleges try to evaluate students in context. This means your grades and test scores are evaluated in large part based on the school you attended. Students who attend schools with fewer resources and opportunities are judged based on that, not directly compared to students who attended a well-resourced school. 

The way admissions officers do this is by reviewing school profiles; these are compiled and sent by a school’s guidance counselor. These cover what courses your school offers, and the average performance of students at the school on everything from AP tests and SATs to graduation rates and college attendance. 

A single admissions officer generally reads for a region; the more students from your school who apply, the more that admissions officer will see that profile, and the more familiar with your school they’ll be. This can be both good and bad, but is generally a good thing. The admissions officer will fully understand the context of your school if many students apply, and be able to judge you accordingly. All you have to do is stand out as exceptional within that context. 

If your school is less well represented, then the admissions officer will still do their best to evaluate you in proper context, but this can be more difficult for them. You can always ask your guidance counselor what your school’s profile looks like, and add any information you think is pertinent to your additional information section. 

Letters of Recommendation

If multiple students are applying from your school, then admissions officers are probably going to be reading letters from a small group of teachers. This is not bad necessarily, admissions officers will still only care what your teachers say about you, but they will notice if they’re reading letters from the same teachers over and over again.

This is especially true because many teachers will evaluate students in comparative terms. Only one student each year can be the best, or their favorite. You don’t have to suck up to teachers, or be the star pupil in every class, but you should be sure to get letters from teachers who like you, where you served as a positive presence in their classroom. 

You also don’t want teachers to praise you falsely. Admissions officers have noticed that some teachers (especially at private schools) will go over the top with superlatives. When a teacher has named four students over the past four years as “the best student they’ve ever seen,” that phrase loses some of its impact. Familiarity with your teachers can be helpful, but only if they can write letters that genuinely speak to your abilities and presence in the classroom. 

Test Scores

Colleges evaluate your standardized test scores in the context of your high school. The choice of whether or not you should apply test optional depends much more on how your scores look compared to your high school’s averages than compared to what the college’s average rates are. (This does depend a bit on the college. This holds true for Harvard, while Texas A&M generally only looks at raw scores).

This is true regardless of how many students from your school who apply. This also means there can be a disconnect between a student’s test scores and their admissions outcome, especially if they used test optional policies at some colleges strategically. You should try to determine the average test scores at your school; if all else fails, your guidance counselors should know. 

What All of This Means for Your Applications

When you are deciding where to apply to college, where everyone else in your high school is applying shouldn’t be a major factor in your decision. It is possibly something to take into account, another piece of strategic information, but it should not make or break your choice of where to apply. 

Colleges do not have quotas from particular schools, but there is often a limit to how many students from a school get admitted. This is because colleges want a bit of geographic diversity in each class. Rice loves students from Texas, but they do want to admit students from Florida and Vermont too. Your high school isn’t the determining factor here, but your state or town can be. 

What colleges are looking for varies with each student, and here too you want to be careful when comparing yourself to other students from your high school. Doing the most activities, winning the most awards, won’t automatically get you in, and risks burnout. 

Colleges want unique specialists, so even looking at students from your school who got in in previous years won’t give you an automatic path to follow. After all, they already have a student like that, why would they want to admit one who’s exactly the same. This can be overwhelming, but the truth is if you focus on yourself, on developing your interests and passions, on following those to the highest possible level, you’ll become the kind of student and scholar colleges love to admit. 

Final Thoughts

We hope this article has helped answer your questions on this. The high school you attend very much matters when it comes to college admissions, but not always in the ways you think. From the classes you can take to the clubs you can join, high school is often fundamental to forming who you are as a person, and sets you up for your whole future. Just remember you aren’t competing directly with your peers in college admissions, that will make the whole thing a little bit less stressful.

If you’re looking for help choosing the right high school to support your needs, or want advice on how to make sure your application stands out and is memorable amidst the crowd of thousands, łÔąĎąŮÍř is here for you. Our mentors are experts on every aspect of the admissions process, and we love helping students tell their unique stories, showing off their strengths to colleges. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more, we’re always happy to hear from you.

The post Should You Worry łÔąĎąŮÍř Other Students from Your School Applying to the Same Colleges as You? appeared first on łÔąĎąŮÍř.

The post Should You Worry łÔąĎąŮÍř Other Students from Your School Applying to the Same Colleges as You? appeared first on łÔąĎąŮÍř.