I studied at Stanford University for five years: four for my Bachelor’s degree and one for my Master’s. For all five of those years, I interacted with hopeful high school students from all over the world as a Campus Tour Guide. My smallest tours consisted of ten people; my largest tours hovered around two-hundred. And yet, no matter the size of the group, the questions from the crowd remained the same:
“What was your SAT score?”
“What did you write about in your college essays?”
“What do you think made you stand out in the application pool?”
Each of these questions, while well-articulated, all seemed to beat around the bush. Generally, what these high school students wanted to know was simply how I got into Stanford.
Well, dear reader, here’s my answer. But beware: It’s rather long. It comes with caveats, stipulations, and some (perhaps unexpected) analyses.
However, such length should be good news! By the end of this article, you’ll have a wealth of information to draw from when filling out your own personal application.
So without further ado, let me tell you about my journey through the Stanford application.
MUST READ: Important Caveats
I know you’re probably eager to hop into the advice right away. However, I urge you to read these three brief points first:
First, there is no formula to get into Stanford. If there were, I would 100% charge you money before telling you about it. Rather, everything I’m about to tell you in this article is mere advice. While tips and tricks should improve your application, I cannot guarantee that following this advice will get you accepted into a school that has consistently ranked as one of the most selective universities in the entire world.
Second, I am not a member of the admissions committee. I have no say in the admission process. I have never witnessed the admissions process even take place. I was merely a student who successfully got into Stanford. I base all my advice on nothing but my personal experience as an applicant (and eventually a student).
Finally, everything I’m about to mention applies specifically to the undergraduate program. If you’re applying to Stanford Medical School, Law School, or any other graduate program, I unfortunately don’t have any advice for you.
Okay, phew. With those notes out of the way, let’s talk about advice.
How I Got Into Stanford University
1. Letters & Numbers: SATs, ACTs, and GPAs.
First off, the numbers associated with your application—SAT scores, ACT scores, AP scores, and so on—will not make you stand out. As I would say to hopeful high school students back in the day: Your scores will put you on the table, but they won’t mark you on the map.
Why?
Well, think about it like this: You’re competing against students who all have similar SAT scores, ACT scores, GPAs, and so on. Imagine two different students with the following statistics attached to their names:
Student A:
- SAT Score: 1520 / 1600
- Unweighted GPA: 4.0
Student B:
- ACT Score: 35 / 36
- Unweighted GPA: 3.89
Which student is the “better” one? Which one most deserves an acceptance to an elite university? Do they both get accepted? Does neither get accepted?
See, it’s difficult to tell. Both students’ numbers live in the same neighborhood. And they’re both great scores! We can’t judge students based on stats alone.
Not to mention, according to CollegeBoard, “Approximately 1.97 million high school students in the class of 2024 took the SAT at least once.” So even if your score lands within that coveted 99th percentile, you’re in the same boat as 19,700 other gifted students.
And note that Stanford only accepts 2000–2400 new freshmen each year.
In other words, the world hosts a plethora of gifted students, but Stanford only has a finite amount of rooms to house its incoming class. The admissions officers, then, must find some other way beyond grades to whittle down the application pool.
So, while you might have great standardized testing scores and grades in your back pocket, just know that—out of sheer necessity—the criteria for selective colleges extends far beyond mere numbers.
And that’s where the rest of the application comes in: Your extracurriculars, your essays, and your recommendations. Let’s talk about them one by one.
2. Extracurriculars: Passion and Skill Incarnate
As the heading reads, the extracurriculars you pursue ought to combine your passions and your skills together. You absolutely need both components; otherwise, the structure crumbles. Think about it like this:
Scenario 1: Passion but no Skill
If you’re passionate about your extracurricular but not skilled at it, I regret to inform you that such an activity won’t help your application. You can’t expect to stand out by doing something you’re not good at.
Scenario 2: Skill but no Passion
Meanwhile, if you’re skilled at your extracurricular but not passionate about it, you’ll run into an issue that I ran into:
Growing up, I played piano competitively for fourteen years. I hated it for the last eight of those years. Needless to say, my passion for piano had greatly diminished (pun intended) by the time I filled out my application.
A prompt in my Common App asked if I had any artistic supplement to dress my application with. By default, I submitted a video of myself playing a Chopin Nocturne or a Rachmaninoff Prelude. However, due to my utter apathy towards competitive piano at that point in my life, I failed to realize that the video I turned in had audio issues. Lo and behold, I fully submitted a completely mute video to the admissions officers.
My incident is one of many. I’ve had friends who boast incredible skills that they feel no pride or passion for. And all these banal, ennui-inducing skills amount to nothing more than an ignorable line on your resume.
Scenario 3: Skill and Passion Together
So what’s the conclusion to this analysis? Your extracurriculars must combine your passions and skills together in order to be successful and stand-out.
But what does that look like?
Let me give you a few examples.
Example 1: My freshman year roommate absolutely loved coding. It was his passion. Furthermore, like any other teenage boy, he was rather skilled at playing video games. So what did he do? He coded a video game. And by 2016 (the year before we got into Stanford), his little mobile video game had sold 500,000 times in the Apple App Store. Also, he’s a 6’8” D1 rower.
Example 2: In my sophomore year, I lived next to an international student with a passion for animals, especially her pets. She also happened to be very skilled at building things. And this combination of passion and skill led her to build a device that could tell when your pet felt sick. This invention landed her a slot in Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30.
Now fret not. You don’t have to develop a successful app or land in a magazine to get into Stanford. The university accepts normal people too. For example, me.
Hi, my name is Jose Francisco, and I have never been featured in a magazine, nor did I even know how to code when I got into Stanford.
So what were my extracurriculars? What was my passion+skill combo?
Well, I participated in math club, like a million other students. I played water polo for about one week before quitting. Oh, and I also was student body president, but—fun fact—I got impeached.
Really, my passion and skill came out in my words: Math club may be a common extracurricular, but the way I simplified tough math concepts to the students I tutored left an impact on my community. Likewise, as nerdy as it sounds, I used my wit to perform a comedic magic act for the director of athletics at my school to get them to ease up on my sudden exit. And while my actions may have gotten me kicked out of the Core Campus Ministry Council (I went to Catholic School), my words cushioned the fall.
Also, I got a few awards for public speaking in the speech-and-debate circuit.
Long story short, my passion and skill have always revolved around language. And hopefully at this point in the article you can tell that I love words.
So while my application didn’t boast names like Forbes and Apple, my passion and skill for words drove my application forward.
And speaking of words, let’s talk about your essays.
3. Essays: Who You Are Versus What You’ve done
Your Stanford supplemental essays should represent who you are not merely what you’ve done.
The metric I’ve heard from advisors goes something like this:
Imagine a pile of a thousand essays written by a thousand different students. These essays don’t have any names, labels, or any other identifying markers on them. Only one of them is yours.
If your essay truly represents who you are, then someone who knows you should be able to sift through that mountain of nameless papers and pinpoint which one you authored because the story it tells uniquely describes your life.
But why does this metric work?
Well your essay should showcase what makes you unique. And if you merely write about what you’ve accomplished, then it becomes difficult to distinguish you from other students who have similar accomplishments.
For example, imagine you pick up an essay that says something to the effect of, “I’ve practiced the violin for many years. I played on my high school’s soccer team. And I volunteered as a tutor in my free time.”
It’s great that the writer of such an essay accomplished so much! But many, many, many other students have accomplished similar (or even identical) feats. In fact, if you simply swap out the instrument and the sport, this essay could accurately describe me, my freshman year roommate, or even a few of my teachers.
Indeed, an essay that merely discusses what you’ve achieved equates to nothing more than a verbose version of your resume.
To provide you with an example of what a “Who you are” essay looks like, let me tell you what I actually wrote about in some of my essays. (Note that I couldn’t find my actual essays; at some point in the past eight years, they have drifted off into the technological ether.)
Essay Question: Who/What inspires you and why?
My response: I wrote about Crayola Crayons. I thought it was inspiring that they started with only eight colors, but over time they grew. Now, they offer 148 unique colors. That kind of growth, development, and originality inspires me to evolve as the years go by.
Furthermore, I have a personal connection with crayons because I wrote my first words with Crayola Crayons—a magenta-hued “SeveN” sprawled diagonally downwards across printer paper.
Essay Question: Write a letter to your future roommate.
My Response: I legitimately just wrote about what it would be like to live with me. Having no siblings, I never truly learned to share, so my roommate would have to teach me. Also, because I sleep extremely deeply, he won’t have to worry about his alarms waking me up.
Essay Question: If you were to teach a class at Stanford, what would it be called and why?
My Response: My class would be called “The Statistics of Gambling.”
As I mentioned earlier, my math-tutoring skills helped me stand out in my community, so I would obviously lean towards something with numbers. Additionally, my skills with cards—from magic tricks to poker dealing—would allow me to demonstrate certain statistical properties in an extremely enticing, visual way.
Now, these three examples make up only a portion of the essays I had to write for Stanford, but I think they get the point across:
Of all the people you’ve met in your life, how many are only-children who sleep deeply, perform card tricks to teach math, and wrote their first words with Crayola Crayons?
I’m going to guess that I’m the only one.
Nobody in the application pool can replicate my essays because nobody has replicated my life. My essays stood out because they were unique to me. (And indeed, after I was accepted, my admissions officer told me so.)
Likewise, you are the only you. Write about yourself, and you will stand out as well.
4. Recommendations: Make Sure Your Teachers Like You
While the last two sections took some time to delve into, this one will remain rather short. I only want to say one thing:
Make sure the teachers you’re getting recommendations from are the ones who like you.
Don’t ask for a recommendation from the teacher just because they’re the most well-known one at your school. Don’t ask a teacher just because they’re the nicest one or the one with the hardest class. Don’t ask a teacher for a recommendation just because all your friends got recommendations from that teacher too.
You should only ask a teacher for a recommendation if you know for certain that they like you. A teacher who likes you can write glowing paragraphs of praise that could make even Shakespeare blush. Meanwhile, a “popular” teacher with a hard class who doesn’t know you as well will inevitably have limitations on what they can write in your favor.
If, by wondrous coincidence, the teacher with the best reputation or the toughest class at your school also happens to be the teacher who likes you the most, then great!
But the only criterion you should consider when asking a teacher for a recommendation is how much they actually enjoyed having you in their class.
Conclusion
Okay, phew.
That was a lot of information. I know it might be tough to remember everything, so I’ll summarize my key points of advice
Remember, there is no formula to get into Stanford; I can only give the following advice: Your stats (SATs, GPA, etc.) will put you on the table, but they won’t mark you on the map. What will mark you on the map, however, is the rest of the application—extracurriculars that blend passion and skill, essays that showcase who you are rather than what you do, and recommendations from teachers who like you.
Finally, good luck on those applications. Start early, do your absolute best, and let the chips fall where they may. And to answer that ever-so-common question students asked me on every tour I gave: My SAT score was 1520 and my ACT was 35. I got one question wrong on the latter—a multiple choice about the difference between lay, lie, laid, and lain.
Hope to see you on campus soon!
