The Passion Project, Revisited

A few years ago, I wrote a post called “Leave Your Passion Project at the Door” about why I believe “passion projects” are not worthwhile for most students. The reactions I received surprised me. Several parents called after reading it and asked, essentially, “Great, so what should my child do for their passion project?” Which told me the message hadn’t fully landed.

So I want to try again, because this topic keeps coming up in my conversations with families, and one particular pattern of thinking concerns me.

“Something Big Will Make Up for His Grades”

I hear some version of this regularly: A student has a weaker academic record, and a parent believes that a sufficiently impressive extracurricular project will compensate for it in the eyes of selective colleges. The passion project becomes, in their mind, a GPA eraser.

I understand the logic. When something looks weak on paper, the instinct is to find something impressive to balance it out. Parents want to advocate for their kids. And in a high-stakes process, that impulse makes complete sense.

But that’s not how admission offices think. Neither does a contrived passion project rescue an academic record, no matter how elaborate.

When Something Doesn’t Add Up

I’ll give you an example that stuck with me:

A student reported that he had spent two years establishing a small-scale solar energy cooperative in his rural county. He had navigated county zoning approvals, secured a conditional use permit, worked with a licensed electrical contractor to meet utility interconnection requirements, and coordinated financing through a combination of small grants and a community investment pool he had organized himself.

The cooperative, he said, was providing subsidized power to low-income households, and he had structured it so that every dollar of surplus revenue flowed back to those households rather than to investors or to himself.

On the surface, it sounds extraordinary. But several things felt off:

• The regulatory and financing layers he described take experienced adults months or years to work through, even with legal and technical support.

When I learned that both of his parents worked in the energy industry, the picture became a little clearer. And then, there was this:

• The student had no stated interest in renewable energy, infrastructure, or anything adjacent to this project. His intended major was music production. His career goals were entirely focused on the music industry. He wasn’t curious about solar technology or urban planning. He had simply built a project, or more likely had one built around him, that looked impressive on paper.

Admission officers read thousands of applications, and they develop a sharp instinct for what does and doesn’t hold together. A profile built around a project that was clearly engineered for the application raises flags, even when the individual elements appear remarkable. And when the project has nothing to do with anything else the student cares about, that disconnect is impossible to miss.

What Actually Works

The students who stand out aren’t the ones with the most spectacular-looking projects. They’re the ones whose extracurricular choices feel like a natural extension of who they are.

That might be…

1. a student who has been tinkering with electronics since middle school and eventually starts fixing devices for neighbors, and then for older community members who can’t afford repairs.
2. a student who works part-time at a family business and, in doing so, develops real skills and real responsibility.
3. a student who teaches themselves a language because of a genuine connection to a culture and then finds ways to use that skill to help others.

None of these requires a founder title or an LLC. What they share is an internal logic, a sense that the student arrived here because of genuine curiosity or circumstance, not because someone told them it would look good.

The Real Question to Ask

If a student or parent is asking, “What should I do for my passion project?” that question is worth sitting with for a moment. Because the answer probably isn’t a project at all. It’s a different question entirely: What does this student actually care about? What would they pursue even if no college was watching?

Starting there and then building outward is what leads to an extracurricular profile that is not only personally rewarding to the student but also genuinely compelling to an admission officer.

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If you’d like help thinking through how to present your student’s authentic interests in the strongest possible way, I’d welcome a conversation. You can reach me via my contact page.

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