But high school, unfortunately, has a way of making that kind of simplicity disappear faster than you expect.

The US university application system is quite distinctive. Students who aim for the top colleges all have the best grades, which means that extracurricular activities – such as competitions, internships and other passion projects – become the only way to stand out from the crowd.

Slowly, I started hearing the same words everywhere: leadership, research, service, initiative, distinction, IMPACT. People talked about competitions I had never heard of, internships I did not know high schoolers could even apply for, and projects that sounded less like student activities and more like small companies. Suddenly, “doing well in school” did not feel like enough.

At first, I responded to that pressure the way that many students probably do: by trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. But chasing activities just because they were “cracked” and sounded impressive only made high school feel more artificial.

Finding purpose

Purpose, at least for me, did not mean having my entire future figured out. It was not the dramatic “I have discovered my life’s mission at 15” kind of purpose. It was much more practical than that.

Purpose meant having a reason behind what I chose to spend my time on, especially when everything seemed to come with pressure attached. There was academic pressure to keep grades high, parental pressure to make good use of my time, social pressure from watching peers build impressive profiles, and extracurricular pressure to turn every interest into something that was seemingly measurable.

I needed a way to make choices without letting the pressure make every choice for me. So I started to use a simple framework:

Ask: What genuinely pulls me in, even before I know how it might ‘look’ later?

Test: Am I still interested when work becomes less glamorous – when it means editing drafts, preparing competitions, organising meetings, following up or failing and trying again?

Reflect: Is this changing how I think, what I care about or how I show up for other people?

Before I fully understood where that curiosity was leading, Harbingers’ Magazine helped my early interest in economics feel real. Through The Harbinger Prize 2024, one of the first competitions I had ever entered, I wrote a feature on how teenagers are changing global business.

I did not expect much to come from it, so being shortlisted and then winning the Economics prize really surprised me. More importantly, it made economics feel less like an interest I ‘claimed’ and more like something I could actually build on.

Opening doors

The best early piece of college application advice I was given was “bite off more than you can chew”.

At first, I took that almost literally. Try the competition. Join the club. Apply to the programme. Start the project. Say yes, then figure it out later. It was a terrible strategy for my sleep schedule, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend treating your calendar like a dare.

But there was something valuable inside it.

Early in high school, you do not always know what will matter to you. The only way to learn the difference between an activity that sounds exciting and one that actually fits you is to try enough things, to see what survives contact with real work.

That is why taking on opportunities matters: each one opens a door, although not every door will lead somewhere useful. Some lead nowhere, some lead to rooms you know almost immediately are not for you, but a few reveal something important – a skill you did not know you had, a question you cannot stop thinking about, or a kind of work that makes you want to keep improving.

The goal is not to keep every door open forever, or to build a “wow” application by collecting “wow” activities for the sake of it. The goal is to open enough doors to learn which ones deserve your time.

 

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The next step

Now, as deadlines loom and I begin thinking seriously about college applications, the same framework is becoming useful again. It reminds me that the goal is not just to find schools with prestigious names, as nice as the Ivy League or the Top 20s may sound, but places where the questions I have been following can keep growing.

I am still writing, revising, and figuring it out, but purpose has made the process feel less like packaging myself and more like choosing where my work can continue.