“I need a remarkable project,” the junior told me, pen poised over a blank notebook. “What should I do?”
I sat back in my chair. This was the third student that week to ask me the same question the same way — as if a remarkable project were something you could order off a menu. As if I could reach into a drawer and hand her one. “Here you go — a robotics nonprofit, that’ll look great on Princeton.”
I told her the truth: a remarkable project that someone else picks for you isn’t remarkable. It’s a costume.
Elite colleges can smell a manufactured project from the first sentence of the essay. They read thousands of applications a year. They know what it looks like when a 17-year-old genuinely stumbled into something they couldn’t stop thinking about — and they know what it looks like when a consultant built a resume line.
But here’s the good news: every student has the raw material for a remarkable project. Most of them just can’t see it yet.
What “Remarkable” Actually Means
A remarkable project isn’t a club you join or a camp you attend. It’s something that didn’t exist in the world until you created it. It has three qualities that make elite admissions officers lean forward:
- Scalable: It can grow beyond you
- Innovative: It approaches an old problem in a new way
- Lasting: It keeps going after you’re gone
Think of it this way. A star student joins things. A superstar starts things. Joining is addition. Starting is creation. Colleges reading 50,000 applications are looking for the creators.
Maya and the Ivy
One of the most remarkable students I ever worked with was a girl named Maya. She was an artist. A real one. She ran her high school’s art club and saw the world the way artists do — in color, in line, in possibility.
Her Berkeley-area high school was old, cracked, and tired. The building sat in an earthquake zone, and decades of tremors had left the concrete walkways split with deep fissures that ran like scars across the campus. Every morning Maya walked over those cracks on her way to class, and every morning something in her pulled at her to do something about it.
Her idea was simple: murals. Bring color to the walls. Make the school beautiful.
She brought the proposal to the administration with her art club behind her. They said no. No murals. No paint on the walls. No exceptions.
Most students would have shrugged and moved on. Maya didn’t.
She walked back outside, looked down at those cracked walkways, and had an idea that would have made her art teachers weep.
If she couldn’t paint on the walls — she would paint on the ground. And she wouldn’t use paint at all.
Maya and her art club began transforming the cracks themselves into works of art. They painted delicate, winding ivy — leaves, vines, tendrils — running through every fissure in every walkway across the entire campus. The cracks stopped being damage. They became stems. The broken places became the most beautiful places on campus.
It was back-breaking work. Hours bent over concrete. Knees on stone. Summer heat. Winter drizzle. Small brushes, steady hands, months of labor. But every day the school grew more beautiful. Every day another fissure became another living green vine.
When the project was finished, the mayor of Berkeley gave Maya an official citation.
The Formula: Passion × Problem × Only You
Maya’s story shows the formula exactly. Remarkable projects live at the intersection of three questions:
- What do you love when no one is watching? Maya loved art. Really loved it — not as a resume item, but as the way she saw the world.
- Who or what needs it? A broken school. Cracked walkways. A community walking over scars every day.
- What combination could only you create? Plenty of students love art. Plenty of students care about their school. But only Maya, standing at the intersection of those two loves — and told “no” by the adults — could have invented the ivy. Only Maya could have turned a rejection into the most beautiful act of civic love her school had ever seen.
The formula isn’t “find your passion.” It’s “find your combination.” And often — as with Maya — the project finds its shape at the exact moment someone tells you no.
What Makes Admissions Officers Lean In
When an Ivy League admissions officer reads about a remarkable project, they’re asking four quiet questions:
- Did this student see a need nobody else saw?
- Did they build it themselves, or did someone hand it to them?
- Is it still growing, or was it a one-time performance?
- Could I picture this kid doing the same thing on my campus next year?
Maya’s ivy answered yes to all four. It saw beauty where others saw damage. It was built by a student, not assigned by an adult. It kept growing as each new crack appeared. And any admissions officer reading her essay could picture her, in four years, transforming their campus in ways they hadn’t imagined.
That application goes in a different pile.
Small Beginnings Scale. Manufactured Beginnings Don’t.
Here’s what I want every parent to hear. Maya didn’t start with a citation from the mayor. She started with one crack and one brush.
Michelle didn’t start with a Stanford project and thousands of dollars raised. She started crocheting baby blankets for her family.
Peter didn’t start with an iOS app that transformed his orchestra. He started noticing that his friends practiced inefficiently.
Every remarkable project you’ve ever heard of started small.
The mistake families make is trying to skip that small beginning — to launch straight into the big, fundable, resume-worthy version. It never works. Admissions officers can tell the difference between a project that grew organically from a student’s real life and a project that was engineered in a consultant’s office.
Start with one crack. Start with one blanket. Start with one kid in a park.
The Question to Ask — Starting in Middle School
The biggest mistake families make is waiting until junior year to think about this. By junior year, Maya had already spent months on her knees painting ivy. The remarkable project can’t be invented in April. It has to grow.
Start asking these questions as early as 6th or 7th grade:
- What does your student love when no one is watching?
- What’s the second thing they love?
- What’s broken, ugly, or ignored in their community that nobody else is fixing?
- What’s the smallest possible version they could start tomorrow?
That last question is the one that unlocks everything. One crack. One brush. One leaf of ivy. Small beginnings scale. Manufactured beginnings don’t.
And if these questions feel hard to answer — you’re not alone. Many families work with a good private college counselor to help draw out the combinations the student can’t see from inside their own life. An outside eye catches what the inside eye misses. Whether you ask these questions yourself or bring in help, what matters is that someone asks them early enough that the answer has room to grow.
Because a remarkable project isn’t something you apply for. It’s something you build — slowly, authentically, over years — until the college application writes itself.
⭐ Help Your Student Build Their Remarkable Project
Barbara Austin, PhD has spent 30 years sitting across the table from anxious families who did everything right and still felt lost. As founder of College Quest, LLC in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has guided thousands of students into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and more. She is the author of the Great Strategies College Guides series.
