## Welcome and why passion projects matter [00:00] Welcome everyone to our webinar for today. We're going to be talking about passion projects that impress you're turning your ideas into impact. We get a lot of questions all the time for the uh from students about what is a good uh passion project. What is something that can help stand out. At the end of the day um it's not about what you do. It's more so about why did you do it, right. Uh so people aren't expecting you to uh go above and beyond and like cure cancer per se. Uh what they want to understand is why exactly are you interested in the field that you want to study and we're going to talk about that today in terms of the strategies on how to figure that out. So uh quick agenda we're going to be talking about why passion projects matter. We're going to take you from the start to the finish from initiating your passion project to conducting the research to building what's called a minimum viable project. Uh if you are uh unfamiliar, that's actually what we call it within uh working in the tech field. They call it MVP, minimum viable product. In this case, it's just project. And then lastly, how to showcase your impact once you're finished. If you don't know me already, I'm coach Victor with Eagle and I used to work at UC Berkeley's admissions office as an outreach coordinator going to different schools, talking about college admissions process, and also I taught a class on how to get into graduate school. Also, fun fact, I went to Berkeley for undergrad and graduate school on a full ride scholarship. And so, uh, that being said, you can trust the information I'm about to provide you. And throughout my entire time in my career, I work in different various fields in education. And now I'm here as the, uh, head of enrollment and admissions adviser here at Google. So, let's go ahead and dig right into it. First off, in terms of a typical common myth that a lot of people uh, tend to think is true, which is uh, you need a nonprofit or something huge to impress colleges. I've been on a lot of calls with families in the past and uh and it's one of those things where if you see that on a college application someone says like I started a nonprofit. ## Myth busting... You don’t need a nonprofit [02:00] 90% of the time it's known that the parents are the ones that actually did the work for that because at the end of the day right it's not about trying to create a nonprofit and show that you've created that like like it doesn't matter about having a nonprofit. You don't need a nonprofit in order to get into these top schools. What matters the most is about your articulation of why did you do it. And so, uh, the really the the big truth about it, right, is colleges care more about the why and how did you how did how you did something than how big it was. So they want you to walk us through the process about how did you come up with this particular project or this idea and what led you to the thinking of this is the uh thing I want to try and what did you gain from those experiences that have helped me understand what I want to do in my college or career. Uh the goal at least for the applications isn't necessarily to name out a profession that you want to be or to uh like nec necessarily like specify your major. What matters the most is what is it that you want to learn in college, right. Because you're going to college to learn about something and your activities and your personal project or passion project is what helps you helps you understand what is that gap in knowledge that you have. So the reason why let's go into why passion projects matter, right. It's uh they're looking for initiative, problem solving, real world thinking and skills that help understand your aspiration and experiences. The goal uh the goal is to really uh show that you don't need to wait till college to really start learning about these uh fields of interest. There's a lot of students uh who I talked to in the recent uh days where they said I'm really interested about studying engineering right and then the question I asked them why do you want to go into engineering and they couldn't explain that right and so the point isn't just to choose a major that you think sounds good or a good fit to you but the goal is to think about what is a major that. ## The real goal... discovering your why and how [04:00] is aligned to the projects that you have accomplished so far and if you are still in the beginning process of deciding uh what your major is or what personal project that you're going to do. That's the whole point of these passion projects. The point of the passion project is to help you explore. And so, uh, quick temperature check in here. Uh, and ask yourself this question, right. If you're a student, right. Why are you interested in applying to blank major that you have thought about. And if you are a parent in this room right now, think about how your child might respond to this. Why are they interested. Is it because it pays well. Is it because uh they think they enjoy math, English, or whatever, so it makes sense. Is it because they they see a family member doing it and so they think that that's the right thing to do as well. Or is it that they actually tried it themselves and they learned that they really enjoyed it. Okay, with the first three options, these are the most typical responses that you would hear from majority of students. And it makes sense why students would say that, right. It's because students don't necessarily have they don't they haven't explored yet in terms of what are the potential fields or majors or kind of subjects that are out there, right. And this is what is going to separate you from the majority of the uh students who are applying. Majority of students who are applying or are just going into a major just because of one of the first three options. The fourth option here about being able to try it yourself and learning uh that you really enjoyed it. That shows that you're taking initiative that that shows that you are actively trying to figure out what exactly are you interested in and this is what the admission officers want to see. So because majority of them always are focused on A, B or C, as long as you're able to think about what that passion project is, it makes it very easy for you to be able to stand out amongst your peers. And also fun fact as well, if you didn't know, 80% of students change their major at least once. So just know that you don't have to stick to a particular major, right. Uh the admission officers already know that you're probably not going to like totally stick to it anyways. So don't feel like as if you have to stay aligned to it and commit to it for the next four years. Uh and majority of the 20% of students who actually don't uh change their major, it's because they actually took that initiative to learn more about their field before they actually chose it. a lot of students uh that are very interested in like for example premed right they've been maybe volunteering for a very long time maybe they shadowed a lot of like clinics they've uh gone out there in the field and practice a lot of these medical practices and it's helped them solidify this is the right path I want for myself if you don't want to change your major in the future then you have to do that discovery process early on and not wait until college so uh and then the last bullet point here in terms of changing majors uh can become costly uh because if you decide. ## Mind mapping your identity, interests, and values [07:00] to switch from let's say like the premed route and then all of a sudden you want to go engineering or business or some or some other kind of field, you have to retake all those prerequisites again. And it's totally possible that you might have to stay an additional year or go to summer school to make up for those pre uh prerequisites in order to change a major. So the the point is is that when you go to college, right, the goal is to be like as laser focused as possible and about your intentions on what you want to learn. And that's through the personal project or the passion project. The passion project helps you reduce the likelihood that you're going to change your major because you've already attempted it. So uh this kind of reiterates my point. Passion projects are just for discovery. And a simple analogy is about food, right. You don't know what foods you actually like until you give it a try. And that's the same thing that goes with passion projects and majors. Your passion projects are made to help you explore just a little bit about this particular field of interest. And based off that you can uh understand whether is this something I might want to pursue or do I absolutely hate it and this isn't something that I don't want to do. And that gives you more confidence about yourself in terms of your own interest and also what's the right pathway for you afterward. So now we're going to go into the specifics now for the initiating the passion project. How do you actually get started. So many students especially this is a really great way to start thinking about it right now because the school year is about to start again or maybe you have one month or two months left until uh school begins again. And so this is the perfect time to start ideating and brainstorming on what that looks like. First off, in order to understand your passion projects, right, the first word is passion. So the most important part is to reflect on your own self, right. Your identity and your interest. One simple way to be able to do it is doing a mind map. So starting with yourself in the middle, right. And then being able to identify your hobbies, your values, your strengths, all your interests that define you for who you are. And this is extremely important to understand what you like because you don't want to do a passion project that you find boring or uh that is not aligned with your own personal goals. And by just being able to do this simple exercise by yourself, which only takes like you know 5 to 10 minutes really to do, this gives you a little bit more clarity about which part of the which of these areas do you want to go in a little bit deeper. So uh the goal is to try to be able to create these different nodes, right. and zoom in on a particular node that you think that you want to explore a little bit more that you've been curious about. And then uh and also it's possible that you can combine a few of these things so that you can try to combine different hobbies, different values together so that you can make a more unique uh personal project. So and once you have done that, the first part is to define your problem. Okay, when it comes to defining your problem, it's trying to better understand what do you actually care about. Okay, there's lots of. ## Defining your problem... not your solution [10:00] problems in this world, right. But there's a particular problem that you care about that other people don't care. And uh these are the things that gets you very hyped up, very interested. And uh you want to figure out like what actually sparks your interest. And based on the problems, right, that you have identified or the problem space, you want to ask yourself like what have you observed or experienced. What have you noticed that made you realize that this is something that uh is causing a uh what's it called. A negative reaction to you that you actually uh care about. Like for example, uh when it comes to like especially uh uh like homeless cats or something like that, right. Uh they're all over my neighborhood at the very least. There are some people who really care about them and there are other people who don't care about them. One of the observations that you might have is like, "Oh my god, who's going to feed these cats?" And also, uh, what would happen if they repopulate and then there's even more cat family to be fed. That's something that you might have observed just from your own perspective. And other people might not see that at all because they don't realize the problem of uh of like uh the population of cats and not being able to uh feed themselves. So this is a unique perspective that you have that you noticed um is an issue. Uh who are the people you like supporting is another way to also think about it, right. Uh you think about what the problem that you care about and who are the people who are affected uh in this process. So it's possible that you belong in a particular identity group or community group and you find yourself volunteering for them. So that is an example of who you might be supporting here. Also, where do you find yourself most excited or motivated. Right. There's at times in our uh day-to-day experiences where uh like you're in this like flow state where you're doing something because you really enjoy doing this particular activity and you lose track of time and you find yourself in this moment where like nothing around you like really matters, right. And so those are those moments of flow states are uh indicators that this is something that probably excites you or motivates you to uh to do the things that you do. And lastly uh question to ask yourself why should you even care about it. Why is it that we should care about the environment. Why is it that we should care about being able to u make technology more efficient and productive. Why is it that we should care about the elderly and taking care of them. There is a reason that uh everyone uh is attached to a particular problem and the most important thing is for yourself to think about why do you particularly care about it uh that no that no one else uh around you uh probably see the same perspective as you. Once you have defined the problem the next part is to uh focus uh double down on the problem and not the solution. very often, right. Uh a lot of students quickly jump into solution. ## Conducting user interviews and gathering insight [13:00] space and think about what exactly uh is it that um we could do. They fall in love with the idea of this new innovation or this new like kind of idea or toy that they've created. But at the end of the day, right, what the universities want to know is how have you understood uh that this is a particular problem and how did you create a solution based off of that problem. By focusing on the problem, it gets you in a better state of mind where you can understand what is the root cause of it. uh so focusing on the problem like helps you develop as I mentioned here develop a deeper understanding of the issue to create something that actually works and then focusing on the solution without understanding problem create solutions that don't work so you don't want to uh create something that isn't useful to everyone so for example sometimes uh uh like some people who are really into programming they create new apps because they love coding they're just trying something out right and there's nothing wrong about building things for fun uh that's that's Okay. But the thing is, if you really want to make it into a passion project, you want to make sure that your app is intentional about solving one particular problem that you really care about. Because in ways a lot of people can create a lot of different apps. A lot of people can create a whole bunch of solutions. But why is your solution going to work. Your solution is going to work because you have a deeper understanding of the problem compared to everybody else. So once you have been able to do that, then you create your problem statement. Uh so you can be able to use this kind of framework that you notice a particular group right so insert a community that you care about whether it's like the elderly the uh folks experiencing homelessness the uh like kids adults uh dogs cats whichever right they struggle with a particular problem right that you notice because of certain root causes this is where you want to start developing an investigative lens to develop a deeper understanding about what these root root causes might look like. You might have a assumption right now and that's okay. So start off with that assumption. Uh so for example you notice that uh folks who are experiencing homeless uh homelessness they struggle with uh you know finding like proper like uh shelter or food, right. And that's because of the root causes that you might expect is like access to resources or that they don't have they don't know where to even find these particular resources. So that can be like an assumption that you create right now that we're going to update. But uh in order to understand what exactly is the problem, we need to conduct research which goes into the next part. When it comes to research, there is a really great uh framework called the double diamond approach. This is actually used a lot within the tech world and also in research world as well to develop a particular solution for a uh for any kind of problem. So you might see this a lot when it comes to uh. ## Building a simple MVP that solves a real problem [16:00] developing new products in technology or building any type of solution. So I'm going to walk you all through through each one. Generally there's the way to think about it is there's two diamonds. The first diamond is the problem space. This is where you do your research to understand the the the problem because you want to design the right thing. The next part is the development or the uh design problem. This is the uh solution space. Within the solution space, you're trying to create something that can solve the problem that you discovered in the first diamond. And by being able to separate the two, you're trying to be able to address the correct problem and also design it in a way that it that actually works effectively. And so just to I'm going to walk you through each one starting with the very first part which is the discover phase. So we're starting from the left to the right and discover is the first part of this uh diamond. And the easiest way to be able to uh understand what the problems are is to conduct user interviews. Just talk to people, right. Ask people certain questions that you uh from the population that you really care about. The easiest way to understand what goes on in uh in this uh of the root causes or the the challenges they experience is to talk to the people that are affected directly. So some example interview questions, right, is like what's something that you struggle with in this in a particular topic. Can you walk me through the last time that this was a challenge for you. What do you wish was different about how this currently works. What do you usually do when you face this issue. Have you ever tried to solve this problem and what happened. Okay, what you're walking through here is essentially a step-by-step uh interview process of getting to understand what is the challenge that they've experienced and understanding what do they currently do to try to address it. So that way you have a better understanding of what their journey is like. They call it like a user a user journey. A user journey is something that from the very start to finish what exactly are the actions that they taken and what are the reactions or the things that happen as they are going uh through this journey. So just to take an example of it right let's say that you really care about uh let's say um let's just say that you really care about uh uh teachers, right. Yeah. You notice that teachers are struggling with uh with being able to grade assignments because that is a challenge that they experience and they're causing a lot of stress for themselves and maybe you know you care about the teachers well-being and you're wondering like hey how can is there a way that we could support you. So, this is where you can ask them like, "Hey, uh, what's something that you struggle with in regards to like grading papers, right. Can you walk me through the last time that you've actually graded these papers and what did you do from start to finish?" Uh, and maybe the teacher might respond in uh, in terms of like, "Oh, I take all my assignments home. I I collect all the pieces of paper. Uh, I uh take it all the way home. I stay up really late at night and then try to grade papers one at a time and then uh I bring it back to school and sometimes it can be very tedious or really tiresome uh because either I lose the papers in that shuffle or that also there I don't realize that there's some students who are missing their papers right and uh then you ask them other questions about uh how they wish it was be different um like what is the other reality that they could have experienced so for example what do you wish was different about how this currently works, right. Maybe the teacher would say like, I just want to be able to easily see like all of the assignments in one place uh where I can easily flip through and I can quick get a quick glance about which students did not turn in their homework. Right. By being able to develop a better understanding of that, right, you've learned that the teacher's goal is to be able to uh. ## Measuring success... usage, impact, and feedback [20:00] evaluate multiple students and really check if there's anybody that hasn't turned in a an assignment before. By being able to understand that, that's the pain point. The pain point is that they are uh disorganized and they have a hard time being able to see from a bird's eye perspective about which students need to turn in their homework. And so this is something that you can use as a problem that you might want to focus on for later on. Okay, so continuing onward, right, we go to the next part once you've learned a lot from these user interviews. And ideally, you want to talk to multiple people, right. Don't just talk to one individual because that will bias your research. You want to try to talk to as many different people as you can, right. And these are the people that you ideally like care about that you want to support. uh so that way you can uh develop a comprehensive uh understanding. Once you've learned uh from a few individuals, the next part is to create user personas. This is where you come up with basic information to describe them. What are the themes that you've learned from interviewing certain people of this demographic, right. So let's just say that uh you are very interested in uh working with like farm workers, right. With farm workers, you might be able to say like, oh, the basic demographic uh and the where are they typically located maybe in the um in the central valley. Uh they're typically a lot older like parents age around like 40 to 50ish uh range, right. And they have a lot of immigrant cultures that are located there. The psychological mindset there, what are their goals, values, frustrations, fears, or desires. Their goal is to be able to uh like feed their family. They really care about being able to uh support them regardless of how difficult the work is. And maybe one of their fears or desires is the uh job security and how difficult it might be to be a like worrying about their bodies not uh being able to keep up with the pace of work for for the next 10 years. That is an example of like one particular user persona after assuming that you talk to multiple of them, right. Other things pain points, motivators and quotes, right. pain points. Uh for example, at least for farm workers, it could be the case where their back hurts because they are constantly leaning over and trying to be able to uh try to pick up some crops. And so back pain is a common uh theme because uh that's something that they have to exercise on a daily basis. And their motivators is what I already mentioned is that they're motivated to be able to feed their families. So based off this, right, you can come up with a lot of different solutions, which we're not going to get into yet, but the goal is to understand like do you have enough information about what challenges or what issues that these groups of folks are experiencing so that you could be able to develop a great solution for them. Okay. It doesn't uh again, we're not trying to think about solutions right away. We're still just trying our best to understand and put our learnings together. And once you've learned that, right, that's where you're going to uh re-evaluate your problem statement. You notice that this group struggles with a particular problem because of root causes. You had an assumption that you've uh that you went into before doing all this user interviews. Now, you're able to get more of that information and really think about what are the true causes, what are the true root causes that are challenging these groups of people. And that's something that you can explain in your uh personal statement and your uh activity section where uh you actively talk to x number of people to be able to understand a particular uh problem that is shared amongst all of them and because of that that really empowered you and motivated you to address this particular problem because you realize how much it impacts them and impacts you. So, uh, this is the way that you can be able to develop a really strong problem statement is. ## Documenting your process and personal growth [24:00] based off the information that you have. And one pro tip is to focus on one problem. You're not trying to solve for everything. Focus on just one thing that matters uh to the to you the most. So, for example, with the farm workers, right. You could uh focus on just the back pain. You could just focus on the fact of how uh about the efficiency, how difficult it is to be able to pick up the crops. You could focus on how like hot or uncomfortable they are uh to be able to uh to do their job. Or you can talk about like uh their connectedness to their families maybe. Uh it it doesn't really matter what it is, right. What matters the most is that you have one particular problem that you care about the most and you're able to explain why does it matter to you. Okay. So for example like for back pain right let's just say that you are focusing on this back pain because it is the it is part of the longevity of their uh of their income and their work. If they were to all of a sudden uh have back pain and like you know and and and break it or anything of that sort then that causes them to lose a majority of their income. They are unable to work anymore. So back pain is a huge risk that they need to prevent and you know that it affects their uh their families and their well-being and they still will push through it regardless because they know that they have to feed their family. So that is just an example of one thing where you're able to pinpoint what why is this problem so significant and you have a deep understanding of that because you've done all these user interviews the next part once we've kind of developed all these themes all these understanding uh the fun part is to develop that minimum viable project okay what I mean by minimum viable project uh and so oh actually sorry before I go in there that's this this is the next part of the solutions um the double diamond approach Right, we already went through the discovery through user interviews. We explored the user personas and the themes that is that helps us kind of refine what particular problem that we care about. And then we updated our problem definition from there. Now we're in this next part where we start to develop potential solutions. And this is now where we ideulate on as many different types of ideas that we can be able to uh do for this particular problem. So a minimum viable project what it is is it's a small quick uh version of your idea that solves a real problem and can be launched in a few weeks. We don't want a large project. Okay, underline in the importance of small. It's small because it allows you to test faster. You don't need to develop like a huge crazy project. The goal is just to try something out that's easy and low risk because you're not going to just be doing this one time. You're going to be doing this multiple times. Your goal is to iterate as much as possible. You're going to be launching a lot of you're going to be launching one particular idea. You're going to test the idea, see if it works, and then if it doesn't work, go back to the drawing board and try again. Right. You're constantly adapting uh your approach to trying to solve this particular problem. And uh and this as I me uh said here, right. It's so that you could test your idea, get the feedback, learn what works, and it gives you something also to showcase as well in your applications process. Very rarely do people talk about how they've gone underwent like a very uh methodological like process to be able to come up with their personal project or passion project. Uh majority of times when students talk about it, they immediately go into um talking about how they've accomplished X, Y, and Z. Like I've created a great event um on the uh on mental health awareness. I launched a really amazing campaign on our campus where we had speakers come through uh gave freebies to everybody uh so that they could learn about the. ## Using your project in essays and scholarship applications [28:00] importance of like depression and anxiety. Okay. So, and that sounds amazing, right. That sounds really amazing to be able to communicate that. But the most important part, right, is actually what comes before that. Why did you see that as a problem. Why did you care about it. So, for example, you could easily communicate uh for myself like I have experienced anxiety or depression and I realized that it affected me like greatly and it was a huge contributor to that was actually the campus climate. It's because that I felt a negative way with the way that other uh peers have treated me or talked to me. And so uh because of that, I felt like the way to uh to address this problem is actually to spread awareness about it. And maybe let me rewind a little bit. I and ideally you would also probably say like I also talked to a lot of other students and they've experienced the same thing as me. Uh many students at our school uh almost one in five of them have experienced some form of anxiety and depression and that is uh uh directly impacted by our peers. And so as a result of that uh me and my uh friends have decided that we want to spread awareness about mental health and because we don't talk about it enough. We talk a lot about physical health but we don't talk about mental health and so we brought this we created this big event where we brought speakers did XYZ and uh and so forth right so what you're doing here is you're walking through walking me through the process of how did you come up to this MVP and this is what stands out in the application process you're able to speak coherently about your thought patterns and your thought process uh to coming up with solutions So uh next part is the brainstorming solutions once you've uh once you understand the concept of MVP the hard part is uh okay what do I do right so um before you kind of go into start uh spitballing ideas on what exactly you. ## Final tips for students starting from scratch [30:00] could try you want to also look past like look in the past what have other people tried uh previously uh because there's probably some learning that they've uh that they've that you can receive from it and also you can easily just make a slight adjustment into it to make it like 1% better. The goal isn't necessarily to do something like uh super uh radical or very different from the others. It again it doesn't matter about what you do. It matters why you did it. Right. All the parts that I mentioned before about the background that led up to this particular event that's what matters more than the actual solution itself. And to be able to talk through like why did you create this solution is what also readers are looking for. So uh instead of thinking about like like crazy huge ideas just think about something that someone has done in the past make a slight adjustment to it about like make it 1% better and uh roll it out that can be your MVP. Uh also you can work with others to develop this solution as well because uh a lot of these brainstorming ideas it doesn't just come from one individual it comes from the uh the collaboration and working of others. It's one of those things like two minds are greater than one if you're able to come together and to be able to think about what exactly are some solutions because it's it's possible that this other person can see in a different perspective than you can. And so by being able to go back and forth whether that's with coach, a peer, adult, or even the user persona themselves about who you're trying to support, that can unlock a lot more ideas for you to be able to try out. Now we go into the final phase which is the uh the solution part where you uh start delivering and you start getting feedback about what worked and what didn't work. Uh so this is where you validate the solution right you want to gather feedback from the real users once you've identified what exactly uh you want to do uh test it out and then conduct user interviews again right uh if you did that mental health event at your school talk to participants talk to teachers right ask them what did they get from it what they uh was it actually helpful or not and by being able to get that feedback you're understanding what kind of adjustments can you make for next Uh also you want to measure those simple outcomes, right. Uh think about not just the qualitative data but also the quantitative, right. How do you know if you were successful. Maybe the success of the mental health event that you try to run at your school is based off the number of participants or signups or the people that are engaged in a workshop or attended a workshop. uh by being able to measure those things, it helps you understand whether if your solution had the intended results that you wanted. Also look for change behavior. Did people use it. Share it, come back. Real world usage is the strongest signal. Right. The again the point of these solutions is to solve a particular problem. Go back to your problem statement. Did you solve the problem that you originally intended to do. And it's possible the answer is no. And that's okay. uh it's not it doesn't mean that you have to uh uh clearly solve it but it's the act of doing all these steps and the act of learning because remember that for the college admissions process right you're applying to learn more about a particular field you're you're trying to get you're trying to enhance your education your passion project has helped you understand that there's a gap in your knowledge that you don't have enough yet to really be able to solve this larger issue let's say that you really do care about mental health, right. Uh and uh to face the truth, like you're still just in high school. And so, uh you probably can do some minimal impacts, right. Which is really great. And you could probably create an impact within your your own community at your school or your friend group. But also maybe there is a deeper issue that you want to uh tackle. For example, maybe you do want to become a therapist and that you want to uh support people uh in ways uh that are really transformational for those people experiencing anxiety or depression and you don't have that skill set yet to really do that because you're not a a licensed or trained therapist, right. And so you're going to college because you want to learn more about that particular route. you want to learn more about mental health and the sciences or physiology uh behind uh about mental health so that you could be able to be a more informed person or individual that supports that particular group of people. That's what these admission officers want to know, right. They want to know how are you being intentional about what you want to learn and this is coming from the personal project or the passion project that you've created. Okay. Next part is the documenting your process. Okay, once you have gone through this entire process, make sure you don't lose anything, right. Because you're going to reuse all of this for your college admissions process. So, when you're telling it uh or when you're talking about it within your application, right, tell a story, not just a task, right. You got to explain this entire journey. Explain from the very beginning about how did you identify this as a problem and then how how did you decide what did you build from uh how yeah deciding what you would want to build or what is the solution that you've created whether that's with yourself or your other people and then at the very end understanding what did you learn from the experience and ideally the learning from the experience can showcase what are the core values or what are the things that you care about and also what's your gap of knowledge okay the gap of knowledge is something that I always stress for a lot students in their uh personal insight questions or personal statements is that this is something that's always missed. They don't talk about why they want to go to college to learn about this particular thing. They just tend to talk about what have they done in the past. Yes, all these accomplishments, all these things that you've done are very important, but you need to talk about what is it that you want to learn. And then also include the evidence, right. try to identify specific numbers that uh that shows your impact that you've made. Uh because uh one of the one of the uh common issues for passion projects as well that some people have done is they don't actually share it with people around them. Like for example, this is most common I've seen for people who are interested in computer science. They create their own website. They create their own application and they show that they're really proud of it, but they haven't rolled it out. They haven't actually like introduced it to people uh to be able to use it. And that's the thing is uh remember for the activities, what the admission officers want to know is will you be a good asset or a good addition to our community in the future. And they want to determine that based off the impact that you've had as a leader in your community. And what I mean by leader in your community, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be like a particular position, but what I mean is how are you uh influencing other people uh through the projects that you have done in the past. So being able to uh to write it out in terms of the uh the impact is what's going to be valuable here or the change behavior that you have seen. Lastly, connect it to your growth. Highlight how the project deepened your skills, sparked new interests or shaped your future goals. Okay, this was I think this was the dirt brill point I was mentioning for the first one which is the most important part. You want to demonstrate that your growth is still going. It's still ongoing. And also this is really a great pro tip also for scholarship essays that many students are probably writing right now which is they want to invest in you because they uh want to think of it as uh they want to make you a poster child of their scholarship. The with these scholarships they're making investments. they're making they're putting a bet on you that you are going to make some type of impact in the future. And so when you talk about your particular career goals or your uh interests uh in the long-term future and you don't have to get very specific about these things, but you can talk about what do you care about or what do you want to address in the future, but you just don't know how. And that's where people are willing to invest into you because they see that drive. They see that passion that you can be able to uh that you could potentially accomplish in the future because you understand the problems. You have tried it out in terms of uh learning directly from this particular audience and you've uh done your best to ideate on some solutions and test it out with the with that particular field. That being said, right, uh this whole entire process from the uh problem space all the way to the solution space is what's going that documentation uh and in an essay is what would get you into these top universities. Okay. And that's pretty much it for my uh for my presentation. Hope folks uh really liked it. Uh I'm going to go into a few quick announcements and then also go into Q&A. So if you have any questions, uh I recommend to put it in the Q&A uh or the questions box so that I can be able to get to it. So if you want the notes and the replay of the session and you found this enjoyable uh you can text notes and replay to 9497750865 uh so that you can be able to get a copy of this. Also, if you are new to our community and let's just say that you uh uh like you have this is your first time being able to uh learn about Eagle, welcome. Uh and we offer a free 15-minute coaching session for every single family that comes through to our community just so that you can learn how to maximize your chances to be able to get into the top schools. And also, don't worry, this is not going to be a sales call or anything of that sort. This is just a pure just trying to help you out and give you some free advice so that way you know how to navigate the admissions process. So you can text coach to 949775 0865. And uh that's pretty much it. Uh so now we're going to go into the Q&A. Okay. So I see a few questions here. Uh first question is where in the college application do you put your passion project. Usually this will be in one of the essays. This is the um uh either one of the personal insight questions. If you're trying to apply to a University of California, this might be in a co in a college supplemental. So, you're applying to a private school. Sometimes you might uh use this especially for the question of like why our school or how will you contribute towards our school. The passion project is a really great way to be able to use it for that and also just even for the personal statement as well. Uh lastly, uh my daughter signed up for the project incubator at the end of May but did not hear back. She went ahead and started her project. Who can she ask to review your project and make sure she is going on the right path. She has done a lot. Uh yeah, if you uh for this person, if you don't mind uh uh messaging our team um I only see iPhone on here, so I don't know who you are exactly. uh if you can write in your email uh then I could be able to follow up with you uh to make sure that we can get that addressed. Okay. All right. Any last questions from this uh from this group here. No questions. Oh, okay. And thank you for that email. I will uh send a message to my team and let them know that you're waiting for a response um on term on terms of that. Okay. All right. Last call in the last 10 20 seconds. All right. Okay. All right. Well, thank you everyone for coming through and looking forward to uh be able to support other people in their personal projects. If you want to come through my office hours, if you're part of the Eco community, my office hours are Thursdays of 4 to 5:00 p.m. And so you're more than welcome to come through and ask me any questions and we can like work on it together. So take care everyone. Have a good rest of the night and happy 4th of July if uh if you're going to be celebrating tomorrow.