There is a peculiar moment that now arrives sometime around ninth grade. A teenager who has spent years playing soccer, drawing, building things, arguing about politics at the dinner table and occasionally becoming obsessed with marine biology is asked a surprisingly adult question: What is your thing?
The question usually comes from sensible parents responding to sensible incentives. Selective colleges have made clear that they are not assembling classes solely from students with excellent grades. Stanford tells applicants that exceptional depth in one or two activities can reveal more than superficial participation in five or six. Yale says qualitative parts of an application help students demonstrate their distinctive strengths and interests.
Somewhere between those statements and the kitchen table, however, depth became a “spike.”
I have watched this vocabulary spread through college admissions for years. The idea is intuitive: if thousands of applicants have excellent transcripts and test scores, a student needs something memorable that distinguishes him from everyone else. The problem isn’t encouraging teenagers to develop depth. It is assuming they should know, at 14 or 15, exactly where that depth will eventually come from.
The irony is that the colleges themselves are considerably less rigid about this than the families trying to impress them. Yale admissions officers have explicitly described the belief that extracurriculars and intended majors should demonstrate a single spike as a persistent myth. Their concern is almost the opposite: a student who has engineered every choice around one narrow identity may appear poorly matched to an institution built around intellectual exploration.
There is a more useful distinction between finding a spike and developing one.
Several years ago, Stanford psychologists studied the familiar instruction to “find your passion.” They found that treating interests as things waiting to be discovered can make people less willing to explore unfamiliar subjects and more likely to abandon an interest when it becomes difficult. Their alternative was less romantic but more accurate: interests develop through investment, difficulty and time.
That describes many of the strongest applicants I have encountered over two decades. Their college applications may eventually display remarkable depth, but the path there is rarely tidy. The future engineer spent ninth grade playing trumpet. The historian tried robotics. A student tries something, returns to it, becomes better at it and eventually begins creating opportunities rather than merely joining them. What looks like a spike at 17 often looked like wandering at 14.
This is where admissions guidance can matter, although perhaps not in the way families expect. The goal shouldn’t be to manufacture a defining academic interest earlier. It should be to give students enough exposure to discover what deserves more of their time, and then enough structure and opportunity to pursue it seriously. Exploration and strategy aren’t opposites. Done properly, one precedes the other.
College admissions has a habit of pushing decisions backward. Choices once made at 17 migrate to 15, then 13, because families reasonably assume that an earlier start must confer an advantage. But adolescence isn’t necessarily improved by greater efficiency.
A teenager probably does not need to find a spike. He needs enough room to develop one. And for a few years, at least, nobody should be terribly alarmed if he still cannot answer the question: What is your thing?
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
