Listen "Episode 4 — What Top Colleges Look For & How To Build It"
Episode Synopsis
College admissions has never been more competitive: high GPAs, strong test scores, and a well-rounded resume—once sufficient for an acceptance—are now common features of most applications to highly selective colleges. In this episode, we reveal what top colleges nowadays seek: students with compelling admissions stories centered around a focused academic passion, or “hook.” Using the process we’ve employed with our own students to help them gain admission to top colleges, we break down how students need to go about identifying their own unique narrative, how to build and continually reshape it over time, and how their approach should differ depending on how close—or far away—they are from actually applying to colleges.——“The Game” is hosted by Sam Hassell and brought to you by Great Minds Advising. Great Minds Advising’s unique, hands-on mentorship program and its deep strategic insight into the application review process have earned the company a nation-leading track record of excellence, with 100% of its students gaining admission to a top-choice school in the 2024–25 application cycle. Its students have recently gained admission to Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Northwestern, UC-Berkeley, and WashU (among many others) and are admitted to the Ivy League at a rate 14x the national average (90% when applying early). Web: greatmindsadvising.comContact: greatmindsadvising.com/#contactNewsletter: greatmindsadvising.com/#newsletterEmail: [email protected]: facebook.com/GreatMindsAdvising/IG: instagram.com/greatmindsadvising
More episodes of the podcast The Game: A Guide to Elite College Admissions
The Logic of Elite College Decisions
17/12/2025
Evaluating A Junior’s Profile For Yale
11/12/2025
Crafting An Elite STEM Hook For 10th Grader
09/12/2025
The Truth About Early Decision & Deferrals
11/11/2025
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