Letter to parents

What's your spike?

In today's ultra-competitive college admissions landscape, standing out is crucial. Grades and test scores alone won't cut it.

Generic activities like stacking volunteering hours, playing the violin or joining a random club aren’t world class. Thousands of teens are doing that already.

Totally unimpressive.

Admissions officers at prestigious universities want well-rounded cohorts, not well-rounded students. They don’t care about a laundry list of the same extracurriculars as every other candidate.

What they ARE looking for is intellectual commitment, a distinct passion for something, and most importantly, some tangible evidence of that commitment.

So you need a different strategy to capture their attention.

You need a spike.

Spike:

an unusual and impressive accomplishment that sets a student apart from the crowd. Something that shows a distinct passion, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to a specific field.

For example:

a student who built an AI system to detect cancer…
a film buff who helped screenwriters explode their productivity…
a high schooler who published research in a scientific journal…
a climate warrior who produced a full-length documentary…
a teenager who launched a thriving e-commerce business…

Colleges love students who take initiative and create something novel and valuable, especially in cutting-edge fields. These are the types of tangible achievements that make admissions officers take notice.

This isn't just about joining a "computer club" - it's about using your child’s passion to identify a problem, then doing something to develop an innovative and interesting solution. The act of building a tool or process or service demonstrates initiative, technical ability, problem-solving skills, and grit that colleges dream of.

Students who get into top universities don't just dabble - they go all-in on their passion through immersive projects and tangible creation. It's this depth of knowledge and commitment that earns them a coveted spot. Their "spike" separates them from the pack.

Fun fact:

Olympic athletes have a 75% chance of getting into elite colleges. The valedictorian with perfect SAT scores and a laundry list of leadership positions? Only 4%

Teenagers are at the peak of development during their high school years, and with the right support (and a gentle nudge) they are fully capable of astounding adult-caliber achievements. We want them to be bold thinkers, be exceptionally driven, and be relentless do-ers.

Our schools are not set up to help with this

Schools don’t have the resources to guide students in discovering their passions, thinking critically about problems, or crafting viable solutions. Between classes and homework and mid-terms and SAT prep, there is just no room for programs that could actually make our children confident, capable, and resilient individuals who are curious and excited about the world.

That’s a tragedy!

We are parents of college kids ourselves, with firsthand experience of the crushing anxiety that high school brings (especially college app season).

We started Spike because we saw our own kids grinding through the Cram-Exam-Erase model of modern high school education. They're really smart out-of-the-box thinkers, but not all that great at memorizing things like chemistry equations or the list of countries that signed the UN treaty. Respectable GPAs but not exceptional; decent SAT scores but not outstanding.

We wondered many times how in the world they would compete against peers with perfect scores and boatloads of AP and Honors classes.

However, we knew our kids were passionate, creative and ambitious young leaders. Resilient dreamers and do-ers who never took no for an answer. Excellent at solving problems, masters of storytelling. We saw it at home every day.

They had so much potential that just wasn’t being realized in high school.

Why?

Because schools today are about compliance and conformity, still stuck in the Industrial Era mode of producing compliant factory workers.

Kids show up at school at a particular time, sit in their seat, and are told what tasks to do. When the bell rings, they get up like robots and go to the next class. At the end of the day, they get dismissed with another bell.

The education system has created a generation of kids who are really good at reading a map.

It's a mindless scavenger hunt for points -

I need an A on that math test next Monday, so I’ll cram the night before because I already have a mountain of homework the rest of this week
I need some community service hours on my resume, so I guess I’ll go start some BS non-profit because it will look good on my college apps
I’m not really athletic, but I heard I need to play three years of a sport, so I guess I’ll sign up for volleyball (is chess an option?)
and on and on…

How did we crack this problem for our own kids?

By giving them tools and programs that allowed them to follow their curiosity and build their own map, instead of following someone else’s.

This mindset is singularly responsible for our own kids earning spots in top colleges, despite them being quite average in academics.

During their high school years, they built extraordinary and super impactful passion projects that showcased their unique abilities and created compelling narratives that even highly selective colleges just couldn’t ignore.

RESEARCH

Find problems worth solving

BUILD

Build compelling solutions using tech

MARKET

Position yourself as an obvious choice

We want to help your child develop their own “spike” become a world class change-maker that will make college admissions teams sit up and take notice.

Our program is designed to hand-hold them in identifying their passions, build impactful projects, and create standout profiles.

Even if ...they don't have any project ideas right now
Even if ...they don't have the first clue about coding or AI
Even if ...they're busy with classes and extracurricular commitments

We've done this for our own children and many, many others. We invite you to take a look at our Incubator program and see if it's a fit for your child.