“Our child had worked incredibly hard and accomplished everything we thought colleges were looking for. What we didn’t understand was that at the most selective colleges, doing everything right doesn’t necessarily make you stand out.” — Parent of a former Spark student
That uncertainty is familiar to many of the families striving to get into top-tier universities, but it lands with particular weight in the South Asian community. Since the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling ending race-conscious admissions, the rules governing how colleges may consider race have changed. Yet, for many South Asian families, the admissions process feels no more predictable.
That’s because despite doing everything “right,” applicants still find themselves struggling to stand out from the rest of the applicant pool. For South Asian students, this mismatch tends to show up in a few persistent, compounding ways:
- Many South Asian students are interested in STEM and pre-professional fields, where high numbers of strong candidates compete directly with other strong candidates who look nearly identical on paper.
- Those families who didn’t go through the U.S. school system themselves often don’t know which parts of the process are flexible, from demonstrated interest to how a resume gets read by admissions officers.
- And in essays, some South Asian applicants lean on a family story to do the differentiating work on its own, when a familiar topic told with specificity will always beat an unfamiliar one told in general terms.
None of these problems belong to one community alone. But they tend to converge for the South Asian families we work with closely.
The STEM Crowding Problem
Spark counselors offer guidance on the best extracurriculars for STEM applicants as a way to distinguish themselves. We contend that depth beats breadth: original research, a self-directed project with a real output, or a specialized internship does more work than another club membership. A self-directed data project mapping local air quality trends is more beneficial for a STEM applicant than a fourth year on the robotics team. The same is true of original research with a named mentor, or a specialized internship that produces something concrete: a working prototype, a dataset, a paper with the student’s name on it.
And when it comes to distinguishing yourself as an applicant to Ivy League Schools and other top-tier universities, we caution students that undifferentiated well-roundedness often reads as a checklist to admissions committees. Students may try to check as many boxes as possible without developing a “spike”: a narrow area of unusual strength, reinforced over several years, with some form of external validation attached. For a STEM applicant competing in one of the most saturated applicant pools in the country, a genuine area of unusual depth can be what makes an admissions committee remember the application.
Navigating A System You Didn’t Grow Up In
“In the education system we knew, achievement was relatively straightforward: you performed well academically, and that performance spoke for itself. In U.S. admissions, we learned that accomplishments matter, but so does the story connecting them.” — Parent of a former Spark student
For families who weren’t educated in the U.S. themselves, admissions can feel like a system with endless unwritten rules. For example, families may not know that demonstrated interest (campus visits, emails to admissions reps, an interview request) is tracked and weighed at many schools, even though nothing in the application explicitly says so. Or that a resume anchored too heavily on exam results (the standard currency in many countries’ education systems) can read as thin to an American admissions committee looking for initiative and narrative.
Spark’s recent analysis of shifting visa and international policy points to a related dynamic: policy volatility changes how every family has to think about timing, testing, and risk. For example, a family planning a student’s junior year around one set of assumptions can find the ground has shifted by senior fall.
For those students who didn’t attend a U.S. high school, even further complications arise. For instance, they often lack access to tools other applicants take for granted, like alumni interviews. Video introduction platforms like Glimpse cover one practical workaround: several selective schools now accept short video submissions specifically because they recognize this gap, and a well-prepared video can do some of the relationship-building work an interview normally would.
In all the examples above, unfamiliarity with the system is a solvable problem, but only if a family knows where to look.
Writing Past the Cliché
And then there are the admissions essays. The instinct many students have to write about identity, family expectations, or the pressure to succeed is a reasonable one, and it’s not off the table. But it may not be the most impactful choice.
In Spark’s guide to improving your college application, we note that discussing identity remains valuable even after the 2023 ruling. But the bar for doing it well is higher, not lower. Such an essay must reveal specific values, decisions, and growth, not a general narrative about one’s heritage that any number of other applicants could also claim.
For example, “my parents sacrificed everything so I could succeed” is a real experience for many applicants, but it’s also a sentence admissions officers have read hundreds of times. What works isn’t the sacrifice itself, but the specific decision that came out of it: the summer a student turned down a resume-building internship to help run the family business or the argument over an unconventional major that the student ultimately won.
There are other essay clichés to avoid as well. For example, a chronological highlight reel, even a well-written one, repeats information the activities list already covers, using up limited essay space without giving admissions officers anything new to evaluate.
For South Asian applicants in particular, following this advice means resisting the pull toward a familiar narrative arc about their community or about the immigrant experience. Such a family story alone won’t distinguish you. Students should instead focus on a specific moment or experience or period of growth and delve into their reaction to said moment, revealing to readers how they think and how they engage with the wider world around them.
A Sharper Story, Not A Different One
“Our son didn’t need to become a different applicant. We needed to understand what was already distinctive about him and make sure that came through clearly.” — Parent of a former Spark student
Of course, none of the above advice changes the fundamentals of what it takes to produce a strong baseline application. It simply adjusts where one’s effort needs to go to take that strong application to the next level, for South Asian families and for any student.
For the family quoted a few times in this article, the most effective approach meant no longer asking what else their son should be doing. Instead, they began asking what he genuinely cared about, where he had something distinctive to contribute, and how his application could communicate that clearly. The result wasn’t a different set of accomplishments. It was a sharper story about the ones he already had.
If you aren’t sure how to sharpen your story, Spark is here to help. Request a free consultation today.
