The most important thing

I read an application last year that was really impressive.

The student had a 3.95 GPA and a 1510 SAT. She was president of her school's National Honor Society, co-captain of the varsity soccer team, first violin in the school orchestra, and had completed a summer research internship at a San Diego State University. Her essay was well-written and polished, about learning resilience through an injury that sidelined her during soccer season.

But when I finished reading it, I realized that I had nothing to say about her. I had a good idea of what she had done, but I still didn’t really know who she was.

The trap that people fall into is thinking that “impressive” and “memorable” are the same thing. They aren’t.

The application journey inevitably leads us to a fork in the road. Do we strive to be impressive, or memorable?

What gets noticed

When parents think about what makes a strong college application, they almost always think in terms of impressive. Higher GPA. Higher test scores. More leadership positions. More activities. A summer internship at a brand-name institution. The logic is intuitive: the more impressive the credentials, the better the outcome.

It's intuitive, because to a certain extent, it’s correct. Higher scores and more impressive credentials will certainly help. But at selective schools, it’s not enough.

At schools admitting 5 to 15% of applicants, nearly everyone in the pool is impressive. That's the price of entry. A 3.9 GPA doesn't distinguish you when 80% of the admitted class has a 3.9 or higher. A 1510 SAT doesn't stand out when the middle 50% range starts at 1500. The credentials get you in the room. They don't get you remembered.

What gets a student remembered is something different: alignment and authenticity. When an admissions officer reads a file and every piece of it points in the same direction, something happens in their mind. They construct a person. Not a list of accomplishments. A human being with a specific way of seeing the world, a specific thing they care about, and specific evidence that the caring is real.

That construction is what makes a student memorable. And it's the thing the well-rounded, impressive-by-the-numbers approach systematically fails to produce.

Why families optimize to impress

The pull toward impressive is understandable. Credentials are measurable. You can see a GPA go up. You can count the number of activities on a list. You can point to a leadership title and know it's there. There's comfort in the concrete.

Memorability, by contrast, feels subjective. It feels like something that either happens or doesn't. Like luck, or charm, or some quality a student is born with or isn't. And because it feels uncontrollable, families default to what they can control: adding more things to the resume, raising the scores, collecting more titles.

But memorability isn’t random. It’ something that can be built deliberately. It's the byproduct of coherence. When a student has a clear direction, a distinctive angle on that direction, and genuine depth to back it up, the application produces a mental image that sticks. When those elements are missing, even the strongest credentials leave no impression.

I've watched this play out in hundreds of families. The parents who focus on building the most impressive credential stack end up with applications that are strong and forgettable. The parents who focus on helping their child understand what they actually care about, and then building evidence around that, end up with applications that are memorable. The second group doesn't always have higher numbers. They have a clearer story.

The two-sentence test

There's a practical test I give to the families we work with.

After reading your child's complete application, could an admissions officer describe them to a colleague in two sentences? Who they are, what they care about, and what makes their perspective on it distinctive.

If the answer is yes, the application is working. If the answer is a list of accomplishments, the application is impressive but not memorable.

I worked with a student a few years ago who wanted to get into psychology, specifically, counseling psychology. On paper, she had strong grades and test scores, but they weren’t show-stopping What she had though, was a clear story, woven through her entire application.

A victim of online stalking and harassment, she had taken the initiative to learn about the full extent of the problems faced online by young girls, and how to proactively take steps to stay safe online. She’d taken some free online courses on counseling psychology and had a packed reading list related to the topic. Most importantly, though, she ran workshops in her local community to teach elementary and middle school students how to stay safe online. She was a remarkably determined student who took an awful experience and reshaped it into something good for her community. And anyone reading her application would walk away with that impression.

That's memorability. And it came from direction and coherence, not from credentials.

She got into her top choice.

Navigating the fog of the application process

One pattern is emerging across the college application landscape: schools are publishing less and less about what specifically guides their decisions. The Common Data Set provides acceptance rates and score ranges, but it tells you almost nothing about why one student gets in and another with identical numbers doesn't.

In that opacity, the only reliable signal is this: the students who consistently get admitted to the most selective schools are the ones who are remembered after the file is closed. They're the ones an admissions officer can describe to a colleague without looking back at the folder. They're the ones who made a person appear on the page.

Tell a story

An application without a story faces a fundamental issue. Without a person behind the numbers and activities, there’s nothing for an admissions committee to advocate for. There’s no person to champion, no story for the admissions officer to grip onto.

Most admissions officers have seen this problem hundreds of times. Different names, different activities, the same structural problem.

The students I work with who do this well aren't necessarily the ones with the strongest numbers. They're the ones who've done the D1 and D2 work before the application season starts. Who've built genuine depth in something that matters to them. Who arrive at essay-writing time with something true and specific to say.

The application then becomes a report on something that already happened, rather than an invention under deadline pressure.

Being “impressive” is only the first step towards being memorable.