Cal Newport has a similar stance on college admissions.
The main point of his book on high school is that pursuing the things that you’re actually interested in, and accomplishing something noteworthy with that interest, is a significantly better strategy for getting into college than loading your resume with extracurriculars/APs. That’s effectively dropping all effort to signal your ability to Do Things and focusing instead on actually Doing Things. Zvi’s post on The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing is relevant here as well.
The book also advocated some particular signaling strategies—a memorable one was “accomplishments that another person doesn’t immediately see how they themselves could do, like writing a book, are especially well-regarded”.
Cal Newport has a similar stance on college admissions. The main point of his book on high school is that pursuing the things that you’re actually interested in, and accomplishing something noteworthy with that interest, is a significantly better strategy for getting into college than loading your resume with extracurriculars/APs. That’s effectively dropping all effort to signal your ability to Do Things and focusing instead on actually Doing Things. Zvi’s post on The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing is relevant here as well.
The book also advocated some particular signaling strategies—a memorable one was “accomplishments that another person doesn’t immediately see how they themselves could do, like writing a book, are especially well-regarded”.