Current students who have been accepted to Ivy League schools and are tutors for Upgrade share their EC prep stories.
I am currently majoring in computer science at Upen, and in high school, I scored 5 APs in 9 subjects and 35 ACTs. I think I had about 6 months to prepare for the EC because I was a bit late in deciding to go into engineering.
Because I decided to go into engineering late, I think I did a lot of marketing-related ECs, like debate competitions and business case competitions, but I challenged myself to a short-term makeup project (a project where you prototype a product based on an idea for a product) to create my own story.
After entering college, I realized that many of my friends in the same major had won awards in famous competitions like Intel World Science Computer, and did a lot of activities that you might think of when you think of 'engineering', so I thought they were preparing for related ECs very early on.
I've competed in competitions and won some awards, but they weren't big competitions, flashy awards. I think the important thing is to get meaningful results in an interesting field.
I am currently a sophomore at Yale, majoring in chemical engineering. I've always been interested in ocean desertification and the carbon cycle in the ocean, and I spent a lot of time reading papers and researching solutions to how to stop ocean desertification. I didn't win any competitions or file any patents, but I did some research on my own and was lucky enough to get an opportunity to work as an assistant in a university lab.
After thinking about what I could do that would be unique, I decided to combine my interests in marine and science, biology and art, and did something called aquascaping, which is “aquarium landscaping,” where you design aquariums artistically, but they have to be based on biological information.
Other activities included hosting competitions with friends, volunteering with Greenpeace, and participating as a high school leader in a program where I walked the west coast for a week picking up trash my senior year.
I focused on activities that were authentic rather than objective, and I made sure my application reflected the challenges and accomplishments of my diverse experiences.
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