The Common App Can't Show Colleges Everything. These 3 Tools Can Help.
Three ways to help colleges see who you are, how you think, and what you can do.
The Common App is remarkably good at telling colleges what you've done: your grades, courses, activities, awards, essays and recommendations. However, some of the qualities colleges care most about are difficult to capture in boxes and 650-word essays.
How do you think?
How do you communicate?
What happens when someone disagrees with you?
What are you like when you aren't polishing every sentence?
Can you teach?
Are you intellectually curious?
What does your personality actually feel like?
A growing number of platforms are giving students new ways to answer those questions and giving admissions officers a window into applicants that the traditional application can't provide. For the right student, they provide something potentially powerful: evidence.
Instead of simply telling a college that you're curious, creative, collaborative or passionate, you may be able to give admissions officers an opportunity to actually see those qualities for themselves.
Here are three tools worth knowing about.
1. Glimpse: Show Them Who You Are
Admissions officers can read an application by a student who looks terrific on paper. They know her grades. They know that she's captain of the debate team. They've read 650 carefully edited words about an experience that shaped her. But they still haven't really met her.
Glimpse by InitialView allows students to record a short, 60-90 second video about themselves. Unlike a carefully produced admissions video, Glimpse doesn't allow editing or post-production. The idea is to give admissions officers a brief, relatively unfiltered look at the person behind the application. And some highly selective colleges are explicitly inviting students to use it.
Northwestern says applicants can submit Glimpse if they want to “add a more candid voice to your application.” The university says students can use the video to communicate their “values,” “perspectives,” “background or experiences”—particularly things that may not otherwise come through in their application.
Duke describes Glimpse even more simply: it's a 60–90 second video that “helps us get to know you better.”
Washington University in St. Louis gives applicants the choice to make their own 90-second video or submit one through Glimpse. Its instructions are revealing: this isn't supposed to be a professional production or rehearsed audition. Instead, WashU asks students to tell the admissions committee about something important to them and encourages them to “be creative, be yourself, and have fun with it.”
That opens up interesting possibilities. A student who restores old cars might spend 90 seconds in the garage explaining why he loves figuring out how things work. A musician might talk about the obscure composer she can't stop listening to. A student who is hilarious in real life but whose humor doesn't come through in his essays finally has an opportunity to let that personality show. Learn more about Glimpse here.
2. Schoolhouse.world: Show Them How You Think and How You Engage With Others
Schoolhouse.world, the nonprofit platform founded by Khan Academy, offers an entirely different kind of window into an applicant.
Students can demonstrate mastery of academic subjects and then become peer tutors, helping other students learn the material. Their Schoolhouse portfolio can document certifications, tutoring activity, student impact, and other evidence of participation. That means a student doesn't simply have to write, “I love math and enjoy helping other people.” She can show that she mastered calculus and then spent dozens of hours teaching it to other students.
Carnegie Mellon says it considers the portfolio as part of its holistic admissions review because it allows students to demonstrate “not only subject mastery” but also commitment to peer learning and service.
Schoolhouse has recently added another dimension: Dialogues.
Students are paired with someone who holds a different perspective and participates in structured conversations about meaningful issues. Discussion guides encourage students to listen, question their assumptions, and even articulate the strongest version of a position with which they disagree.
Lots of students describe themselves as open-minded. Dialogues can provide evidence of what happens when they're actually confronted with someone who sees the world differently.
Do they listen?
Do they ask good questions?
Can they reconsider an assumption?
Can they disagree without becoming disagreeable?
Can they understand an argument without necessarily accepting it?
WashU says it will consider the Dialogues portfolio alongside a student's extracurricular activities and other involvements. More importantly, the university explains the portfolio gives its admissions committee information about “how you might engage in our community.”
Northwestern similarly says Dialogues aligns with its commitment to “free expression and productive discussions across differences.”
This is information that a SAT score or a polished essay has a hard time communicating. Learn more about Dialogues here.
3. SlideRoom: Show Them What You Can Do
The first two tools help colleges experience who you are and how you engage with other people. The third can help them see what you can actually create.
SlideRoom is the Common App's exclusive partner for receiving and reviewing applicant portfolios. Many families hear “portfolio” and think of painters applying to art school or violinists applying to conservatories. But, depending on the college, portfolios can include all types of original work.
MIT accepts optional SlideRoom portfolios from researchers, performing artists, visual artists, and makers. Its Maker Portfolio welcomes original engineering and crafting projects, while code submissions must include both the codebase and a working demonstration. MIT has explained that they “want to see how you learn, create, and problem-solve in a project-based environment.”
Consider a student who has spent two years designing a device to automate watering the vegetables in her backyard. On the Common App, that might become a 150-character activity description. While a portfolio could potentially show the sketches, prototype, electronics, code, failures, redesigns, and functioning final product, helping the admissions officer see her problem-solving.
Caltech takes a similar approach to portfolios. It explicitly invites students to submit engineering projects, coding projects, science-fair posters, STEM presentations, artwork, music, writing, maker projects, and other original work. They believe a portfolio can showcase an applicant's “interests, creativity, skills, or accomplishments.”
When a college gives you the opportunity to submit work that genuinely reveals an important dimension of who you are, it's worth doing so.
Who I Am. How I Think. What I Can Do.
Put these three tools together and something interesting happens. For a student whose application is built around a genuine interest in engineering:
Her Common App tells us she earned strong grades in physics and calculus and serves as president of her school's robotics club.
Glimpse lets us hear her enthusiasm as she explains why she loves taking things apart.
Schoolhouse.world shows us that she mastered calculus and then volunteered to teach it to younger students. Dialogues might show us how she listens, questions, and responds to perspectives different from her own.
A SlideRoom portfolio lets us see the robot she spent six months designing, including the prototypes that didn't work, the code she wrote, and the finished machine.
Don't Just Tell Colleges Who You Are. Look for Opportunities to Show Them.
Students should start by asking: What do I genuinely want a college to understand about me? Consider demonstrating:
Your intellectual curiosity
Your empathy
Your sense of humor
Your ability to teach
Your creativity
Your unusual way of solving problems
Your ability to bring people together
Your obsession with building things
Then you should determine where in their application an admissions officer can see evidence of those values or skills. Increasingly, it might be a video, a Schoolhouse portfolio, a Dialogue with another student, a maker project, a performance, or another piece of work that allows an admissions officer to experience something that can't easily be reduced to a grade, score, or 150-character activity description.
The Common App tells colleges a great deal about you, but it doesn't have to tell the whole story.
Want to make sure your college admissions application shows more than your grades and activities? Let’s talk about how to tell the full story of who you are. Schedule a complimentary consultation here.