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| The Student Chloe arrived at Interface in tenth grade believing she wanted to study business. This is not unusual. A significant number of the high-achieving students Interface works with arrive with that assumption, partly because business is legible and prestigious and familiar, and partly because they have not yet had the structured opportunity to ask themselves honestly whether it is actually what they want. For most of them, the answer, once the question is asked properly, turns out to be more interesting than business. For Chloe, it turned out to be art history. Specifically, Middle Eastern art history. The journey from a generic business interest to one of the most distinctive and compelling academic identities Interface has helped a student develop is a story about what becomes possible when a young person is given the space, the encouragement, and the expert guidance to follow their genuine curiosity wherever it leads, even when it leads somewhere unexpected. She was admitted Early Decision to Columbia University.
The Early Years: Exploration Without Direction Chloe’s early profile was, in her own words, well-rounded but not unique. She competed in Public Forum Debate. She participated in DECA. She ran cross country. She was, by any conventional measure, a strong student doing the things that strong students do. She also had no particular idea what set her apart or what she genuinely wanted to pursue. The most counterintuitive piece of advice her advisor gave her came in eleventh grade, when Interface recommended that she step back from DECA, one of her school’s largest and most visible organizations, despite the leadership role she held within it. The reasoning was clear and it proved correct: reallocating that time toward what she truly cared about would produce a stronger, more authentic application than continuing down a well-worn path that hundreds of other applicants would also be walking. |
The Pivot That Changed Everything
As Chloe’s genuine interests came into focus, they surprised her. She had grown up in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and later California, moving between cultures and languages and aesthetic traditions in a way that had quietly shaped how she saw the world. She found herself drawn to art history as a discipline that could hold all of that, a field that takes seriously the relationship between objects and the cultures that produce them, between visual language and political reality, between what things look like and what they mean.
She narrowed her focus, with Interface’s encouragement, to Middle Eastern art history, a specialization that connected her multicultural formation to a domain where genuine scholarly contribution was both possible and needed. She pursued research at UCSB’s competitive Research Mentorship Program, examining how contemporary Islamic artists use environmental symbols, including water, fire, and the imagery of Mars, to comment on the Syrian refugee crisis. She interned at a Palo Alto art museum. She worked as a museum docent. She founded a multicultural club linking art, culture, and politics at her school. She requested an additional letter of recommendation from her research mentor and submitted her research paper, poster, and abstract directly to Columbia as supplementary materials.
The portfolio that resulted was the expression of a specific intellectual life, shaped by a specific history, and pursued with a depth and consistency that communicated genuine scholarly identity rather than strategic positioning.
The Essay Process
Chloe wrote twelve drafts of her Columbia personal statement. That number reflects something important about the quality of the outcome. Exceptional writing does not arrive finished. It arrives rough, and it becomes exceptional through the kind of iterative, sustained refinement that most students underestimate the need for and most advisors underestimate the value of supporting properly.
Interface supported that process with a level of editorial depth that Chloe describes as decisive. Multiple advisors contributed perspectives on her writing, including one who had served as a senior international admissions leader at a highly selective university. A three-day intensive writing workshop created sustained daily drafting time with guided discussion and immediate feedback. A group advisor who was both a Columbia alumnus and a former Columbia interviewer provided targeted guidance on her Why Columbia essay that gave it the specificity and authenticity that generic versions of that essay almost never achieve.
Her strategy centered on two threads: her research interest in Middle Eastern art and its connection to her multicultural formation across China and the United States, and a Why Columbia essay grounded in genuine institutional understanding, the Core Curriculum, the specific arts resources, New York City as an academic and cultural laboratory, and a clear account of what she planned to contribute to and take from the institution. She was admitted Early Decision.
What Chloe Would Tell the Next Student
Chloe’s advice is the hard-won perspective of someone who made a significant pivot in the middle of the process and came out stronger for it.
You do not need to be perfect, she says. She had B+ grades in some courses and no major awards. She was a humanities student at a STEM-heavy school, and rather than apologizing for it, she leaned into it. Universities build a class the way a conductor builds an orchestra: different strengths are needed in different combinations, and the student who arrives with a clear and distinctive identity is far more valuable to an incoming class than the student who has optimized themselves into resembling everyone else.
Identify what you truly love and commit to it with depth. Make necessary tradeoffs: she reduced her mathematics intensity deliberately to protect time and energy for the work that actually mattered, and she has no regrets about it. Use summers to go deep into a genuine interest rather than collecting impressive-sounding experiences. Build real relationships with the teachers who will write your recommendations, because the letters that move admissions committees are the ones written by people who actually know you.
“You don’t need to be the perfect applicant. You need to be yourself, clearly and without apology.”
Chloe, Columbia University
The Rising Gen Lens |
● One of the core Rising Gen practices is intellectual differentiation: helping a student move from a broad, undefined interest toward a specific, original contribution that reflects who they actually are. ● Chloe arrived thinking she wanted to study business. Interface helped her discover what she actually cared about, Middle Eastern art history, and build a genuine scholarly identity around it. The counterintuitive advice to step away from a high-profile leadership role turned out to be one of the most important decisions of her application, creating the space for real depth to emerge. ● Her Columbia admission was the result of a student who found her real intellectual direction, pursued it with courage and consistency, and told its story honestly. |