The Packaging Trap: How to not sound like everyone else

Imagine that you’re an admissions officer during peak season. You’re 12 days into the application reading crunch. Clif bar wrappers litter the narrow space on the side of your desk. You haven’t had time to clean your well-used Aeropress, which you’ve been using to brew coffees during your 6-hour reading sessions.

The office trail-mix tub is running dangerously low. It’s been 2 hours. Or maybe 5. You’re not sure because you’ve been too engrossed in the applications. You and your team of 8 other colleagues are reading through student profiles, comparing test scores, grades, and activity lists. You skim the essays, but unless one really grips you, you’re not reading especially closely. This isn’t your fault, but rather a reality of the hard choices you need to make about how and where you devote your attention. On average, you’re spending 8-10 minutes on each application before you place them in one of three piles: Accept, Waitlist, and Deny.

It sounds difficult, and it is. But you love it, because every once in a while you find an application that stands out. It tells a compelling, cohesive story, and it does so in a voice that’s so authentic it couldn’t have been written by anyone but the student telling it (and definitely not ChatGPT). Those are the applications you wait for. Sadly, most of the applications aren’t those ones. Some are chaotic and messy, clearly the product of last-minute effort. But on the whole, most of them are bland. Predictable. Packaged.

Stepping out of the admissions officer shoes now, it’s important to realize that our number one goal in the college application process is to not blend in with the crowd: to not look bland, predictable, and packaged.

What a packaged application looks like

As an educational consultant, I see this all the time: a student with strong grades, a handful of clubs, some volunteer work, and an essay about learning perseverance through a challenging experience. National Honor Society. Varsity soccer. A summer service trip. President of a club or two.

On paper, it looks fine, but that's the problem. 

They look “fine”, the same way that someone telling you they’re “fine” when you ask them how they’re doing means absolutely nothing.

When admissions officers at selective schools read 400 to 1,000 applications per season, "fine" blurs into the background. A student who checks all the boxes looks like every other student who checked all the boxes. There's no thread connecting the activities. No story that makes sense of the whole.

The packaged application fails that test. Not because the student is being dishonest, but because the application was built backward. Activities were collected first. The story was invented later.

How the packaging trap happens

Nobody sets out to create a generic application, but it happens to almost everyone as a natural process. It’s the way things normally go, unless you force them not to be that way.

Freshman year: a student joins a few clubs because that's what you're supposed to do.

Sophomore year: they add more activities because they've heard colleges want "well-rounded" applicants.

Junior year: panic sets in. They look at their resume and realize it's a scattered collection of unrelated things.

Senior year: they try to reverse-engineer a narrative that ties it all together.

This is the Packaging Trap. 

The result is an application that feels bland, predictable, and packaged. The activities don't connect. The essay feels like it could have been written by anyone, or, at the very least, it lacks a compelling and authentic voice. The whole thing has a manufactured quality that admissions officers can sense, even if they can't always articulate why.

Admissions officers want to see students who tell a compelling story, the ones who jump off the page and demand their attention and respect. They want interesting, engaged, quirky students who know who they are and aren’t afraid to show it. They’re looking for students who make a difference.

By contrast, packaged applications don’t demonstrate these qualities. They show compliance, the ability to follow conventional wisdom. But it doesn't demonstrate who the student actually is.

Why admissions officers can tell

People who spend years reading applications develop keen instincts. They notice when activities don't connect or feel forced. To an experienced reader, it’s glaringly obvious when an essay's "lesson learned" feels grafted on rather than genuinely discovered. It’s also easy to spot when a student's stated passion for a subject isn't supported by anything else in their file.

Most packaged applications focus on breadth over depth. They include a wide smattering of varied activities, with a couple of leadership roles sprinkled in. Maybe a student joined debate, or served as a chair at their local Model United Nations event, or organized an annual dog walk community event. 

That's not inherently bad, and it’s completely normal and natural to have a wide range of shallow activities early on in your high school career when you’re still discovering what you enjoy. But when every activity sits at the same level and none of them connect to each other, and you’re in your senior year, the application tells a story of going through the motions rather than pursuing genuine interests.

MIT is one of the most competitive schools in the world, and they only ask for four activities. They do this on purpose, because they want applicants to drive down only to the four core activities that mean the most to them. This is what they truly care about.

The alternative: A framework for authenticity

The students who avoid the Packaging Trap don't start with activities. They start with direction.

Direction means having a sense of what genuinely interests you and why. Not "I like science" (that's just a vague statement). Something more specific: "I'm fascinated by the relationship between exercise and neurodegenerative disease in octogenarians" or "I want to understand why some communities recover from disasters while others don't."

Your direction doesn't have to be a career plan. It doesn't even have to be a major. It just needs to be an area of knowledge or way of exploring the world that the student is committed to. For example, a student who has a relentless curiosity in breaking things down and analyzing how they work could find themselves engrossed in architecture, debate, and close-up card magic. The thread that ties all these activities together is that they appeal to the key direction: deconstruction and analysis.

Once you have direction, activities become purposeful. You're not joining clubs to fill a resume. You're pursuing opportunities that let you go deeper into something you actually care about. And, as a natural consequence, the resume builds itself as a byproduct of genuine engagement.

Our methodology for guiding students through this process is called the 4D Framework: Discover your direction first. Design what makes your perspective distinctive. Demonstrate that through meaningful experiences over time. Then deliver the story when it's time to apply.

The sequence matters. When you start with direction, everything else flows naturally. When you start with activities, you end up packaging.

Two students, same profile, different outcomes

Let's see what this looks like in practice.

Student A has a 3.9 GPA, a 1520 SAT, and a resume full of activities: Model UN, National Honor Society, varsity tennis, volunteer tutoring, student council. Their essay is about learning to overcome adversity through a difficult tennis match. Their "Why Major" essay says they want to study business because they're interested in entrepreneurship and leadership.

Student B has similar numbers: 3.8 GPA, 1470 SAT. But their activities look different. They started a small project freshman year teaching financial literacy to middle schoolers in their community. By junior year, it had grown into an actual program that other students helped run. Now, they’re building it into an online course that they give away for free to schools in low-income areas. They also took community college courses in economics and wrote for the school paper about local business issues. Their essay isn't about overcoming adversity. It's about a conversation with a small business owner who almost went bankrupt during the pandemic and how that changed the way they think about what "success" means.

As a package, Student A might look stronger. Higher GPA, higher test scores, more activities, more leadership positions. But that’s an illusion, because nobody is looking for packaged applications.

In reality, Student B is far more memorable. Their application tells a coherent story. You understand who they are, what they care about, and why they're pursuing it. Everything connects.

When admissions officers discuss Student A in committee, there's not much to say. Good student, solid application, could succeed here, looks like many others. Depending on the rest of the applicants it could land in the admit, waitlist, or deny pile, because nothing stands out.

When they discuss Student B, there's a person to talk about. A clear interest, evidence of initiative, and a perspective shaped by real experience. This student is memorable, and now admissions officers are talking about that particular applicant, not about the other applicants that could outshine them. 

That's the difference between a packaged application and one built on genuine direction.

What this means for you

If you're a freshman or sophomore reading this, you have time. The goal isn't to immediately manufacture a "direction" or start some impressive-sounding project. The goal is to pay attention to what actually interests you and follow those threads.

What topics make you lose track of time? What problems do you find yourself thinking about? What would you explore even if no one was watching and it didn't "count" for anything?

Those are the clues. Direction is always a process of discovery. It ebbs and flows through ups and downs.

If you're a junior or senior, you may feel like it's too late, but it's not. You can still find the thread that connects your experiences, even if you didn't plan it that way from the start. The packaging approach tries to manufacture a story out of scattered activities. The direction approach looks at what you've actually done and finds the genuine themes that were already there.

Either way, the principle is the same: authenticity beats packaging, because at core, admissions officers are admitting students for the compelling and authentic stories they convey. These are stories that make sense of who they are and where they come from, and make it easy to visualize how they might contribute to a university community. 

The goal isn't to assemble an impressive-looking resume. All applicants to selective schools can do that. Instead, focus on crafting an application makes people remember you a week later.

Direction before activities. Depth before breadth. Story before packaging.

That's how you avoid the trap.