How To Be A High School Superstar Part 8

The Academic Superstar

There are two areas in which the Superstar Effect can play an important role in college admissions. The first is academic performance. Rosen's theory predicts that a valedictorian would receive a disproportionate amount of rewards compared to students who are very near the top of the cla.s.s, but not number one. A researcher named Paul Atwell put this idea to the test in a 2001 paper published in the journal Sociology of Education. Atwell studied a collection of elite public and private high schools. These schools were among the most demanding in the country. To put this in perspective, in 1997, when Atwell began the study, only about 0.7 percent of test-takers nationwide scored 780 or higher on the verbal section of the SAT. In fact, over 80 percent of high schools in the country had no students who scored this high, while an additional 12 percent had only a single student who crossed this mark. The elite schools studied by Atwell, by contrast, had on average at least ten such high scorers.

Atwell entered these bastions of talent to look for the Superstar Effect. His main research tool was the AI (Academic Index) formula used by Dartmouth College's admissions staff to rank each applicant's academic performance with a single score from 1 to 9. The formula combines SAT I and SAT II scores along with a value known as the converted cla.s.s rank, which is an adjusted version of cla.s.s rank that attempts to equalize differences between schools of different calibers. The appeal of the Dartmouth scale is that there exist good data connecting AI scores to acceptance probabilities. Atwell used the data to explore how students at the very top of their cla.s.s at top high schools would fare as compared to those only slightly below. (He focused on top high schools because they tend to have large cl.u.s.ters of students near the top of the cla.s.s with similar academic performance. Less-compet.i.tive schools are more likely to have a small number of outliers outpace the rest of their cla.s.s by a considerable distance.) As Atwell reports in his paper, his results matched the predictions of the Superstar Effect. He discovered that being number one in your cla.s.s provides an increase in acceptance probabilities that's equivalent to adding an extra 70 points to your SAT I scores and 60 points to your SAT II scores. To better understand this result, consider the case of two exceptional students, whom I'll call Peter and Tina. They both have 770 math and verbal scores on the SAT I (Atwell's research was conducted before the introduction of the writing section) and an average score of 760 on their SAT II tests. a.s.sume their extracurricular activities are comparable. Here's where things get interesting: Peter is number one in his cla.s.s while Tina is number ten in hers. From the perspective of their grade point averages, these two ranks are essentially identical. At a school of the caliber of those studied by Atwell, the difference between the number one and number ten ranked student likely reduces to a couple of tenths, if not hundredths, of a GPA point-a difference that can be generated by a few A-minuses instead of As over four years of school. Logically speaking, Peter's and Tina's admissions chances at Dartmouth should be near identical. How much can a few tenths of a decimal point on a GPA really help Peter? The data studied by Atwell, however, reveal that the Superstar Effect ensures that these extra points do matter-a lot. Peter, as it turns out, has a 94 percent chance of being accepted at Dartmouth while Tina has only a 74 percent chance. In other words, the Superstar Effect gave Peter a 20 percent boost in admissions chances even though he was clearly nowhere near 20 percent more talented than Tina.

If we make Peter and Tina slightly less compet.i.tive, the effect becomes even more dramatic. For the sake of example, reduce their SAT I scores slightly, to 750 on each section, and their SAT II scores to 740 on average. a.s.sume Peter is still valedictorian but Tina is now ranked number five in her cla.s.s. The same 20 percent gap in admissions chances remains, even though the difference in their academic records is vanis.h.i.+ngly small. If you drop the scores down to around 700, Peter the valedictorian remains in the running for Dartmouth with a 75 percent admission probability while Tina, still yapping at Peter's heels in the number five spot, has only a 25 percent chance of admission!

The conclusion is unavoidable. When it comes to grades, the Superstar Effect plays an enormous role. Being the number one student in your cla.s.s provides a significant boost in your admissions chances as compared to those students with slightly lower GPAs. In this study, Peter was Pavarotti and Tina was Flrez. The slight difference in academic ability between the two students generated significant differences in their admissions fortunes.

But there's a problem here. Attempting to become valedictorian is an incredibly risky strategy. The Superstar Effect is a double-edged sword. It pours lavish rewards on those who become the best in their field, but it remains savagely indifferent to those who fall just short. It's very difficult to become valedictorian. It's also very stressful. You have to obsess over every test for your full high school career, and just one or two poor performances can scuttle your mission to become the best. And as we learned from Atwell's research, even if you barely fall short of the top spot-for example ending up number five instead of number one in cla.s.s rank-you lose the admissions bonus enjoyed by the valedictorian. One bad midterm can render four years of stress and anxiety worthless.

I described Atwell's research because it proves that college admissions is not immune from the Superstar Effect. But attempting to generate the effect using your cla.s.s rank clearly violates the spirit of the relaxed superstar philosophy. With this in mind, I ask that you take your newfound respect for the effect and apply it to the second area of admissions where your performance plays a big role: extracurricular activities. It is here that generating the Superstar Effect is much easier and much less risky than attempting to juice your GPA.

The Extracurricular Superstar

Imagine that you're an admissions officer reading through a pile of applications when you come across a particularly strong student. The student-let's call him Alex-has good grades and test scores, and he devoted a lot of effort to become the editor of the school newspaper, president of the student body, and an officer in the model UN club. The problem for Alex is that you, the admissions officer, have probably already reviewed applications from students who have done just as well as he in these activities, if not better. Maybe you saw a budding reporter who published articles in a local newspaper, a student body president who helped initiate major changes at his school, and an international relations wonk who won awards at national model UN conferences. Alex, therefore, is not the best you've seen this year in any of his major pursuits-he may have reached Flrez caliber in these activities, but he fell short of Pavarotti-style brilliance. This doesn't mean that you'll automatically reach for the "reject" stamp, but there's no Superstar Effect at play to help Alex get a disproportionate share of your attention.

Now imagine that you come across the application for a student named Jennifer. The application emphasizes one extracurricular pursuit: an obsession with learning about Geminid meteors. As a young child, she saw an exhibit on meteors that snagged her attention and refused to let go. By the time she applied to college, she had become a minor expert who was known by many of the scientists in the field. Presumably you would be more captivated by Jennifer than by Alex. It's unlikely that any other student you've seen this year was better on the subject of s.p.a.ce objects. She was the best in her field, and thus the Superstar Effect works its magic.

As it turns out, this is exactly what happened. Jennifer, who is a real student, was accepted into MIT. The same year that she applied, I happened to have a meeting with one of MIT's admissions officers to talk about their selection process. He mentioned Jennifer as one of their favorite applicants for her cla.s.s. He described her as "a world expert on meteors." In his mind, her status as the best in her field helped her stand out as an applicant. It's hard to turn down a world expert.

I didn't get a chance to meet the real Jennifer, but I've met students like her. If I had to guess, I would say that the time required for her to pursue her obsession in meteors was significantly less than the time required to maintain three major structured activities as Alex, our hypothetical student, did. Therefore, even though Jennifer invested fewer total hours than hardworking Alex, the Superstar Effect put her ahead in the admissions process.

This phenomenon is so important that I've extracted it into its own hypothesis: The Extracurricular Superstar Hypothesis, Part 1 You will receive a sizable impressiveness bonus for an extracurricular pursuit if you're the best at that pursuit out of all of the applicants the admissions officers have encountered that year.

We see this hypothesis verified in the obvious examples of applicants who played violin at Carnegie Hall or competed in the Olympics. Their uncontested talent makes them incredibly desirable to admissions officers. But our example of Jennifer demonstrates an important nuance: she was the best s.p.a.ce-rock expert MIT had seen, but then again, there aren't that many student-aged s.p.a.ce-rock experts. We can imagine, therefore, that her accomplishment was far easier than those boasted by the Carnegie Hall performer and the Olympic athlete-in their fields there is lots of compet.i.tion.

This observation leads to a natural follow-up hypothesis: The Extracurricular Superstar Hypothesis, Part 2 The Superstar Effect bonus holds regardless of the compet.i.tiveness of the activity for which you are the best. Therefore, pursuits that do not have lots of compet.i.tion yield a higher ratio of impressiveness to hours of work required than those that do.

Put another way, becoming a meteor expert is much easier than becoming one of the nation's best young violinists. The impressiveness bonus, however, will be similar for both.

Before concluding this chapter, I have to address an important caveat. Some students interpret the Extracurricular Superstar Hypothesis as a pitch to do something unusual. "If I'm the only applicant who took underwater banjo lessons," they think, "then by default I'm the best at this pursuit and will get the Superstar Effect bonus." Alas, things aren't quite so simple. This final hypothesis adds an important qualification to the above ideas: The Extracurricular Superstar Hypothesis, Part 3 In order to qualify you as "the best" in an extracurricular pursuit, your efforts must demonstrate some marker of exceptional ability. It's not enough that the pursuit is unusual; you must also appear to be unusually good.

Consider the following example of this hypothesis playing out in the real world. An infamously snide article t.i.tled "The Swarm of College Super-Applicants," published in New York Magazine in 2006, included a profile of a student named Vadim from Brooklyn Technical High School. Vadim was involved in many standard activities, but his most distinctive extracurricular was Ping-Pong. He started a club at his school and even took some outside lessons. This is certainly an unusual pursuit. At the schools where he applied-which included Yale, Cornell, and Columbia-he was probably the only student to list this activity on his application that year. But this uniqueness is not enough to generate the Superstar Effect. Starting a club and taking a few lessons do not qualify as a "marker of exceptional ability," as required by the third part of our Extracurricular Superstar Hypothesis. Therefore, this activity remains simply unusual-not unusually impressive.

The admissions expert hired by New York Magazine to critique the superapplicants agreed with this a.s.sessment. "Yale, Cornell, and Columbia might be a stretch," she said. She went on to call the Ping-Pong club a "red flag," potentially indicating that he's a "serial joiner."

If Vadim had gone further with this activity, perhaps getting to compet.i.tion level, or using his skills as an excuse to travel to China and connect with student-aged players of the sport, then the effect would be different. A "red flag" activity might, in this case, be transformed into an indication of a superstar. Once the admissions officers started thinking about Vadim as "the world-cla.s.s Ping-Pong player," he would become hard to forget. But without some marker of exceptional ability, Ping-Pong remains yet another random activity.

If you recall Michael Silverman, the student profiled in the previous chapter, you'll see a good example of all three parts of the Extracurricular Superstar Hypothesis working together. Michael didn't outwork his cla.s.smates. As I established, their quest for 4.0 GPAs and long activity lists required more total hours than Michael spent on his singular focus on environmental sustainability. But by the time his application crossed the desk of a Stanford admissions officer, he was most likely the best "green" student they had seen that year. You can imagine the admissions officers, taking their cue from the slogan on his Web site, starting to call him "the sustainability student," as in, "I really think the sustainability student would make a great addition to our incoming cla.s.s." In this way he satisfied the first two parts of the hypothesis. He satisfied the third part, the requirement for markers of exceptional ability in the pursuit, by including press clippings about his feats with his application. Third-party recognition provides powerful validation that you did something that required ability.

If you become the best at a single pursuit out of all the applicants applying to the same school that year, and then demonstrate this required real ability, you'll enjoy the avalanche of bonus impressiveness predicted by the Extracurricular Superstar Hypothesis. And as in the examples of Jennifer and Michael, conquering one activity can actually be much easier than doing very well in many. This is the magic of the Superstar Effect: doing less can make you more impressive. That is why the Superstar Effect is a powerful weapon in the relaxed superstar a.r.s.enal.

8.

Good Begets Good

IN LATE spring 2008, Our Lady of Consolation, a Catholic church in Wayne, New Jersey, was filled to capacity. Almost two hundred seniors from nearby De Paul Catholic High School, along with their proud families, had gathered for the traditional baccalaureate ma.s.s, held the night before the De Paul graduation ceremony. As the service ended, Sister Jeanne, a respected nun and the vice princ.i.p.al of academics at De Paul, took the pulpit to begin the award ceremony that follows the ma.s.s. Most of the awards were certificates of excellence, given to individual students who had done especially well in specific cla.s.ses. These winners had been notified earlier in the week and therefore were waiting with nervous antic.i.p.ation for their name to be called.

One student among the crowd, however, felt no nervousness. His name was Kevin. Though he was a good student, he hadn't received any phone calls about winning a certificate, so he didn't worry about being summoned into the spotlight that evening.

But then Sister Jeanne moved on to the Delta Award. This was to be given to the single student who over the past four years had shown the most excellence in mathematics. The winner wasn't necessarily the student with the best grades, but was instead chosen at the teachers' discretion for having been particularly engaged in the cla.s.sroom.

Sister Jeanne announced the winner.

Kevin was startled. "Did she just say my name?" he wondered. He scanned the crowded church to see if his friends had turned in his direction, to make sure he had heard correctly before he stood up to claim his unexpected prize.

Five minutes later, the scene repeated. Sister Jeanne announced the Thomas Jefferson Award for excellence over four years in history and social studies. Once again, Kevin was surprised to hear his name called as the winner. Then, at the culmination of the event, when the award for the most outstanding male student of the graduating cla.s.s was announced, Kevin won yet again. The quiet night he'd expected had been replaced by a flurry of major awards that made him the obvious star of the De Paul Catholic High School cla.s.s of 2008.

Kevin's story interests me because he defies our expectations for the type of student who wins stacks of awards. We a.s.sume that it's the brilliant valedictorian who runs a dozen different clubs who is named the most outstanding math, history, social studies, and general overall student of his graduating cla.s.s. Kevin, however, doesn't match this description. Consider, for example, his experience in math cla.s.s. As he explained: "My teachers didn't love me because I was the smartest kid; we had whiz kids in my math cla.s.ses, and I wasn't one of them." Or consider his light extracurricular schedule. Baseball and Boy Scouts were his only significant extracurricular obligations throughout his high school career. He eventually made the varsity baseball squad and reached the Eagle Scout rank. "Wait," you may be thinking, "playing one sport might not be too bad, but becoming an Eagle Scout is a time-intensive activity!" While this is true over the long term (the process starts at the age of twelve), its short-term demands are reasonable. As Kevin explained to me, a lot of the work on his merit badges, for example, was confined to annual summer camp, and he estimates that during the school year he committed around two to three hours per week to scouting-hardly a schedule-devouring endeavor.

As you might imagine, this light extracurricular load supported a relaxed lifestyle. "I was watching my friends stressing themselves trying to keep up with eight different activities," he told me. "But because my schedule wasn't bogged down, I could take that spontaneous trip to the sh.o.r.e, or into the city, or just enjoy myself." Not only did Kevin's focus generate relaxation, but it also provided him tangible rewards in the college admissions process. With his slew of awards, and the stellar recommendations that come with being crowned your school's favorite student (the school's chaplain, for example, wrote him a powerful letter), Kevin easily earned a place at his reach school, Georgetown University.

How did Kevin win these awards and recognition, and then ultimately get accepted at Georgetown, without being a whiz kid or overcommitted? In this chapter, I argue that his success can be ascribed to a curious phenomenon dubbed the Matthew Effect. To understand this effect, and the rewards it generates, I will take you on a brief journey that extends from academia practices in nineteenth-century France to the patterns of citations in scientific journals, and then onward to modern college admissions.

The Forty-first Chair

It's frustrating to attend school with a student like Kevin. It's not that he did anything wrong or underhanded, it's just that everything seemed to go his way. In calculus cla.s.s, when the teacher asked the students to split up into groups to work on problems, Kevin's cla.s.smates gravitated to him with their questions. He wasn't the best student in the cla.s.s, but he was the most patient, and he had a knack for working through concepts with others. After a while his teacher started to quip, "If you have a problem, ask Kevin; if Kevin doesn't know, then you can ask me." It's not surprising, therefore, that he won the Delta Award for most outstanding math student-even though he wasn't the smartest or highest scoring. The teachers loved him.

He won the matching award in history and social studies under similar circ.u.mstances, even though, once again, other students were academically stronger in the subjects. Along the same lines, he was made the captain of the baseball team, even though he wasn't the best player, and was named the most outstanding male graduate, even though other students had better grades and more demanding extracurriculars. It's not that Kevin didn't deserve his awards and recognition; it's just that other students did as well. Accolades were attracted to Kevin, as if pulled by a magnetic force.

A nineteenth-century French novelist named a.r.s.ene Houssaye would understand the frustration of Kevin's peers. In 1855 he coined the phrase "the forty-first chair" to describe the plight of talented individuals, deserving of rewards, who are nevertheless bypa.s.sed as these rewards are garnered by a select few. Houssaye's phrase was inspired by the French Academy-l'Academie francaise. This elite inst.i.tution, founded in 1635 by the chief minister to Louis XIII, survives to this day as the official protector of the French language (and the unofficial molten core of French sn.o.bbery). Some of its most recent activities include the declaration that courriel is now the official French word for "e-mail" (even though French speakers had been happily using the English word for years), and that a blog should be referred to as un blogue.

L'Academie has only forty seats. If you're elected to a seat you retain the position for life. These positions are so important to French society that the members of l'Academie are called "the immortals." An immortal, upon first taking his (or, in an unfortunately small number of cases, her) seat, must begin by eulogizing the deceased member he replaces. The new member is then issued l'habit vert, the official uniform for formal ceremonies. Last updated in the era of Napoleon, the outfit includes a sweeping black robe with wide lapels embroidered with green leaves. It's topped by an eighteenth-century-style two-cornered hat adorned with black feathers. The men get swords. It's all wonderfully French, which is to say ridiculously ceremonial and uptight.

The 710 immortals who have held seats in the academy since the early nineteenth century include some of France's most famous citizens, from Dumas to Poincaire to Voltaire. But when Houssaye coined the term "the forty-first chair" in 1855, he was referencing the equally impressive list of talented French writers and thinkers who never gained a seat-a list that includes Descartes, Proust, and Verne. Their exclusion from l'Academie was not due to lack of ability. It was just that s.p.a.ce was limited, and you had to have perfect timing and connections to enter the ranks of the immortals.

Jump forward a century to 1968. It was then that the sociologist Robert K. Merton referenced Houssaye's forty-first chair in his paper "The Matthew Effect in Science," which he published, appropriately enough, in the prestigious journal Science. Merton noted that the phenomenon of the forty-first chair was alive and well in the world of modern scientific research. He pointed to the winners of the n.o.bel Prize in various sciences. "[It is] a well-known fact," wrote Merton, "that a good number of scientists who have not received the prize and will not receive it have contributed as much as some of the recipients, or more." His explanation centered on fame. Better-known scientists get more recognition than their lesser-known colleagues, which makes them even more well-known, and gets them even more recognition, and so on. He noted, for example, that if two scientists publish a similar result at the same time, the more famous scientist will almost always get credit, and if multiple scientists coauthor a paper, the most famous of the coauthors is the most likely to be a.s.sociated with the finding.

Merton called this phenomenon the Matthew Effect, in reference to a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto every one that hath, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Put plainly, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. In the sciences, this means that once you get some fame you will reap more rewards and therefore become more famous and then get more rewards, in a self-reinforcing loop, while your less-famous colleagues are relegated to the forty-first chair.

Since Merton first identified this effect, the notion has been applied in a variety of contexts. In his 2008 book Outliers, for example, Malcolm Gladwell highlighted a surprising example of the effect in action. He noted that in the Canadian Junior Hockey League, players who were born in the early months of the year are more likely to make it to the pros. As Gladwell explains, when a kid first joins the league, he's a.s.signed to a team based on his birth year. Where exactly he's born in that year, Gladwell argues, can make a big difference in eventual ability. If a player was born in January 1985, for example, then when he joins a team with a 1985 cutoff he's almost a year older than his teammates born in December of the same year. At this early stage, a difference of almost a year in age translates into big differences in size and ability. These larger and stronger young hockey players, born in the early months of the year, are more likely to be tracked into youth all-star teams and receive extra coaching. This increases their advantage over their slightly younger peers, leading to more special attention and even faster growth of their abilities. Over the years, the extra coaching and confidence acc.u.mulate to provide these players a significant edge over their later-born teammates. A small early advantage grows into something large.

Now that you understand the effect, I'll show you how it plays a major role in the subject of most interest to us: college admissions. To begin, I'll turn our focus back to the story of our friend Kevin the Eagle Scout, and his unlikely rise to become his school's favorite student.

Kevin's Abundance

To understand Kevin's success, consider his main focus: becoming an Eagle Scout. When you think about scouting, you probably conjure images of pocketknives and knot tying. But as any committed Boy Scout will tell you, the real goal of the program is to teach the subtle art of leaders.h.i.+p.

"I was a patrol leader at age twelve," Kevin told me. "I would have to go into the woods and be responsible for three, four, maybe five guys. You learn quickly how to relate to their issues, to figure out what they need, and how you can help them."

This leaders.h.i.+p training intensified as Kevin moved up through the scouting ranks. By his junior year of high school, for example, when he launched the community service project required to reach Eagle Scout, Kevin was supervising a team of eleven younger scouts in a year-long effort to digitize the records of a local history museum.

Seen in this light, the path to Eagle Scout can be understood as a half-decade-long process of leaders.h.i.+p training. At an age when most students still struggle to organize a group of friends to agree on plans for Friday night, Kevin had already spent years honing his ability to understand his peers and coordinate their efforts. He had an abundance of leaders.h.i.+p talent, and as the Matthew Effect predicts, this early advantage began to attract and acc.u.mulate more and more advantages as he progressed through high school.

When Kevin was fifteen, for example, he joined the summer-league baseball team of a nearby town. By the second game of the season, Kevin's leaders.h.i.+p ability was well established. "Most fifteen-year-olds wouldn't get a chance to get a word in edgewise with the coach, but he allowed it with me," Kevin recalls. He was named the team captain by unanimous consent, even though the team had several older players. When he made his high school's varsity baseball squad a couple of years later, his leaders.h.i.+p virtuosity once again earned him the role of captain.

As another example, consider his success in math. Kevin wasn't the smartest student in his cla.s.ses, but his leaders.h.i.+p skills, honed by scouting, made him a focal point of his struggling cla.s.smates' questions. It was this that earned him his teachers' respect, and then, eventually, the award for the most outstanding math student.

The deeper you dig into Kevin's story, the more you see that such advantages acc.u.mulated in almost every aspect of his high school career. After Kevin's successes in the cla.s.sroom and on the playing field, for example, he was a natural pick for his school's peer-ministry program, which requires a small group of seniors to work with the administration to help younger students. Once in this program, Kevin's skills made him a standout. "The chaplain gave me all of these leaders.h.i.+p roles," he recalls. "Without my leaders.h.i.+p experience, he wouldn't have come to me; there were lots of kids who had similar ideas, but they didn't know how to implement them." Kevin, by contrast, was a maestro of organizing young people to complete goals. (When you're faced with a setting sun, a pile of firewood, an uncooked dinner, and a group of hungry scouts, you quickly learn how to spur people into action.) "I knew how to change things on the fly, react to issues, and address problems as they arose," Kevin said. The chaplain, like many of the other teachers at De Paul Catholic High School, became a supporter of the young scout, eventually adding a glowing recommendation letter to the many that helped Kevin get into Georgetown.

When I confronted Kevin with the long list of leaders.h.i.+p positions and awards he had acc.u.mulated throughout his high school career, he modestly sidestepped my praise.

"You have to understand," he pleaded, "I had been training to lead people since I was twelve."

Kevin's story is a pristine example of the Matthew Effect in action. His early involvement in the Boy Scouts gave him an edge over his peers in terms of leaders.h.i.+p skills. This early advantage began to acc.u.mulate additional advantages: minor leaders.h.i.+p roles that led to major leaders.h.i.+p roles that led to awards and powerful recommendations-and then college acceptance. Eventually, Kevin became good enough at his one skill that he was vaulted into the ranks of his school's "immortals," while his talented, but not excellent, cla.s.smates remained stuck in the forty-first chair.

The Complementary-Accomplishments Hypothesis

As should be clear by now, the Matthew Effect provides strong support for the law of focus. If you're like Kevin, and you focus on becoming very good at a single pursuit (in his case, leaders.h.i.+p), this initial abundance will attract more abundance. Over time, the rewards will acc.u.mulate faster and faster until you're catapulted into superstardom. The magic of the Matthew Effect is that once you've invested the time required to become good at a single thing, additional rewards come with little extra effort. By spending a reasonable amount of time on just one thing, you can end up with more impressive accomplishments, and less stress, than the student who spends a lot of time spread over many different things.

This idea is important enough to merit its own hypothesis: The Complementary-Accomplishments Hypothesis Once you accomplish something that is unambiguously impressive, you'll begin to achieve complementary accomplishments with little additional effort.

Imagine two students, Amy and Tom. They both want an impressive college application. Amy chooses three independent pursuits: volunteering at the local hospital, playing the flute in the band, and becoming a student council officer. Because time spent on any one of these activities doesn't help the others, she has to devote separate blocks of time to each. She decides to spend ten hours per week per activity. Over time, she becomes a senior volunteer at the hospital, second-chair flute in the band, and secretary of the student council. It's exhausting work, but she's serious about getting into college.

Now consider Tom. Unlike Amy, he decides to focus on a single pursuit: computer programming. He plans to dedicate fifteen hours per week to it. That's a lot of time for a single activity, but it's only half the total time Amy devoted to her extracurriculars.

Spending fifteen hours a week, Tom makes fast progress. He starts contributing to an open-source-programming project and builds his own iPhone application. This lands him a compet.i.tive summer interns.h.i.+p with a technology company. The company then sponsors him to compete in the prestigious ACM student programming compet.i.tion, where he places well. He's soon asked to join his school's Science Bowl team to handle the technology questions. At the same time, his skill helps him ace the computer science courses offered by his high school, and this qualifies him to continue his study of the subject at the local university. (Many schools have such arrangements with nearby colleges.) By the time Tom graduates, his resume seems longer, more interesting, and more impressive than Amy's, even though he spent only half the number of hours per week on extracurriculars. Amy became good at three things, but didn't become great at any. Therefore, she had to invest significant time to earn every accomplishment. Tom, by contrast, became unambiguously great at programming. Because he reached this high level, he was rewarded with an avalanche of complementary accomplishments that required little extra effort on his part. The end result was a better resume that required less effort and stress.

Two Real Superstars

Amy and Tom were hypothetical characters whose stories I constructed to present the hypothesis in an easy-to-grasp manner. Their story, however, is more common for real students than you might imagine. For example, below I describe the accomplishments of two students chosen by USA Today for a list of the twenty most impressive high school seniors in the country. I think we can agree that they qualify as superstars. For each, I'll explain exactly where the Complementary-Accomplishments Hypothesis helped fuel their success.

Arnav A four-time qualifier for the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad summer program; gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Ljubljana, Slovenia; U.S. Physics Team; winner of numerous math compet.i.tions, including the U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad and the Mandelbrot Compet.i.tion; math club; leader of state math team to American Regional Mathematics League champions.h.i.+p; member of Science Bowl team that placed third nationally.

Arnav's accomplishments list can be overwhelming when you first encounter it. You see award after award, compet.i.tion after compet.i.tion, until, eventually, you declare that he must be a genius. I don't know Arnav, but I've spent a half decade at MIT, so I do know about students like him. When I read the above description I don't see an untouchable genius. Instead I see a student who focused on becoming very good at a very specific skill: compet.i.tion math. This skill is a different beast from academic math. Raw quant.i.tative intelligence is less important here than practicing solving certain types of math puzzles under tight time constraints. Arnav focused on this specific skill and eventually got very good at it. Everything else in his description is a complementary accomplishment attracted by this base skill. Once you're good at compet.i.tion math, you'll be invited to partic.i.p.ate on a variety of teams in a variety of compet.i.tions. Each of these partic.i.p.ations, however, does not require a distinct application of effort; they all result from the original push to become good at this specific type of math.

In fact, I would wager that Arnav's schedule was probably less stressful than his resume suggests. He no doubt devoted many hours to practicing compet.i.tion math, and he traveled to compet.i.tions at least a few times a year, but such a schedule is still probably easier than trying to juggle a large collection of unrelated activities, each requiring its own serious weekly time commitment. The Complementary-Accomplishments Hypothesis allowed Arnav to transform an initial advantage into overwhelming abundance.

Here's another example: Geoffrey Researched mechanisms for fatigue and deformation in crystals, finding photon emissions may help predict material failures in crystals; named Siemens Compet.i.tion regional finalist and Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist; won second- and third-place grand awards at the International Science & Engineering Fair; named school Science Bowl president and computing club president; mentor for middle school math team.

Don't let the technical phrases like "deformation in crystals" and "photon emissions" fool you into just a.s.suming that Geoffrey is the next Einstein. You must soldier past the "wow" factor of these details to deconstruct the reality of Geoffrey's path. I looked up his research to get a better idea of what he accomplished. Put simply, his work involves hooking up a sensitive light sensor to a computer and then bending a piece of material near the sensor. Some basic physics reveals that when you bend certain materials they emit photons. The light sensor can detect these photons and therefore reveal information about the stresses being placed on the bent material.

The first point you should recognize is that Geoffrey did not come up with this idea by himself. The open secret of major science fairs is that partic.i.p.ants are almost always coached by a scientist who helps them select an experiment and then guides them through the process. The judges of the fairs know this fact. They're happy to admit that they're not evaluating the ability of these students to generate original research insights. Instead, they're testing the students' ability to understand and discuss the science behind their coached experiments.

Learning the science, of course, is not easy. And the students still have to master the technology needed to make the experiments work. But this is a more tractable challenge than generating original scientific breakthroughs-which is what people a.s.sume is going on when they hear about high school students involved in research. I imagine Geoffrey focused on learning two specific things-some basic material physics and the basics of programming computers-as these are the skills needed to run his experiment. As with Arnav, almost everything in Geoffrey's list can be seen as a complementary accomplishment generated by his proficiency in these narrowly defined skills. The science fairs, the computing club, the Science Bowl, mentoring the junior high school math team-these are all opportunities made available because Geoffrey became good at physics and computers. These skills aren't trivial, but they're not prohibitively difficult or stressful to obtain either. The Complementary-Accomplishments Hypothesis explains what transformed a reasonable amount of focused effort into a stunning resume.

Michael and Matthew