The Biggest Gap in Your Application
(Skip the internships. Do this instead)
The biggest gap we notice in student profiles (especially for our Asian-American applicants) is that you’re not working a job.
Not a professional internship.
Not a research position.
A (menial) job. The kind where you clock in, a stranger is occasionally rude to you, and your manager doesn’t care that you’re aiming for the Ivies.
This matters way more than most families realize. Admissions officers read thousands of applications from students who have been carefully optimized — every activity selected, every summer accounted for.
A real job is one of the few things on an application that’s genuinely hard to curate. It signals you’ve operated in the adult world, handled something unglamorous, and inherently conveys humility.
For Asian-American and/or high-achieving applicants specifically, this gap is almost universal. The profile tends to be strong on academics, research, and structured achievement... but thin on the kind of grounded, independent experience that makes an AO feel like they’re reading about a person, not just a student.
But beyond what it signals, a job can do real work in your essays. In fact, Kevin wrote about this exact topic in his common app (a perfect example of a vulnerability-themed essay as he cooked mountains of fried rice)!
Your application benefits not just from the soft skills a job builds, or what it tells admissions officers about your independence — but from the material it gives you to write about!
For example, you could love behavioral science and also work concessions at a movie theater, watching how people make decisions differently on a Friday night versus a Sunday afternoon, solo versus a first date. Or you could be fascinated by environmental systems and spend the summer doing landscaping + gardening, learning more about soil composition and water runoff than from any academic experience.
The job doesn’t have to be impressive.
It just has to be real.
What if you could predict and improve your chances before you apply? (Spoiler: you can.)
After studying admissions rubrics from Harvard, Stanford, and other college admission agencies, we built our own.
See where you stand → elevated.school/getstarted
Until next time,
The ElevatEd School