Stanford is an elite research university founded in California with a mission to change the world. It’s one of the most competitive undergraduate universities in the world, and Stanford doesn’t get all that much easier once you get in. The 7,841 undergraduate students at Stanford know that they have to love working hard to thrive. They represent 76 countries and 49 states, and have access to 600+ student groups and 81 undergraduate student residences (the vast majority of Stanford students live on campus).
In addition to being known as an astonishingly impressive institution for learning, Stanford has gained a secondary reputation as the home of many of the most elite young athletes in the world. The school has collected more championships than any other university, and a whole host of Olympic athletes call Stanford home. Their teams, like in gymnastics, are even feeders for the national Olympic teams every four years.
If all this sounds absolutely fantastic, you should also know that about 65% of students receive financial aid, and tuition is covered for most students from families making less than $150,000 annually. Also, 20% of the Class of 2027 entered as first-generation college students and the majority came from public schools — so don’t let Stanford’s elite reputation keep you from envisioning your future there. If you have the academic and personal chops, you can thrive regardless of your background. The acceptance rate is under 4%.
In this post, we’ll help you plan your ideal summer for Stanford acceptance so that you can use your summer months to strengthen your application, explore your interests, and maybe even enjoy yourself.
If Stanford is your dream school, send us an email. We’re experts at helping top students get into equally impressive colleges.
What does Stanford want to see from your summer?
We’re going to dig into the details, but first let’s talk big picture. Stanford wants to see three things in particular from your summers.
First, they want to see you pursuing a passion. They want to see that what you emphasize in academics you also emphasize in the “real world.” If you are purporting to love science, taking all of the science classes you can and leading all of the clubs, but if in the summer science is forgotten that’s a bit of a problem. How science continues to express itself can be creative. Working at a science camp or learning about environmental issues through experience on a farm count, for example, if they align with your long-term goals (say, education or innovation in agriculture).
Next, they want to see that you engage with your community. This could be volunteering, but it doesn’t have to be (we’ll get into the benefits of employment below).
Lastly, they want to see that you’ve broadened your perspective. Some students assume this means travel — and it could — but broadening your perspective close to home can be even more powerful.
Keep these three goals in mind as you continue reading!
Emphasize Your Interests
During the summer, it’s important to emphasize your interests (your passions) outside of the classroom or the structure of a school group. We highly recommend that students seeking admission to Stanford do this by getting a job related to what you want to do someday — but “related” can be thought of really broadly.
If you want to go into communications or PR or marketing or anything that involves customer relations and diplomacy, you could work at the front desk of a country club, a pool club, or really anywhere else that requires customer service chops.
If you want to run a business someday, work for a small business. This could be a locally-owned retail store, a landscaping business, a contractor, or home builder, or really any other small business that needs summer help.
Aim for whatever job you land to be part-time for at least the length of the summer, but we don’t hate it if the job continues into your school year a little if you really enjoy it.
You could also emphasize your interests by volunteering, but for Stanford, we really prefer it when our students volunteer during the school year and work during the summer, as jobs look more intensive and serious on your application even if they take up the same amount of time on your schedule and use the same skills. One exception is if there is a non-profit you work with during the year that runs a program like a summer camp that you could be a volunteer counselor for, as this would carry the weight of a job with the bonus points of doing good for your community.
Augment Your Academics
The interests you’ll be augmenting may be mostly academic, but we also like students to use the summer to boost their resume and transcript academically more clearly and directly. We advise our students to find an internship in their prospective field, and we help them make it happen. An internship will help you collect experience, and learn more about the field. Even if you’re at the very bottom of the ladder — which, by the way, is where we all start — Stanford wants to see you striving towards goals relevant to what you’ll be emphasizing on your application.
If getting an internship sounds intimidating, there are also summer programs that provide a more structured way of augmenting your academics. Stanford, themselves, have programs like these. The Stanford Summer Programs are known to be competitive to get into, and are available as a commuter or residential programs for students as young as 6th grade. The cost of the most expensive residential program is akin to a semester of college, and none of the programs are notable for their affordability.
The Stanford summer programs attract the same types of students who want to apply to Stanford as their first-choice school. So, they’re intense…in a good way. But they’re also just intense, and that environment isn’t always the best place to thrive. If the Stanford summer programs were a pipeline to application acceptance that’d be one thing, but it is not necessarily going to give you any more of a ‘boost’ in admissions than doing any other collegiate summer program, except that they are biased towards the prestige of their own offerings.
That said, a very small number of students are able to turn participation in the summer program into a glowing additional letter of recommendation from a professor or administrator, but remember that every student in the most competitive programs, all 500+, wants one of those few letters. And so, the odds of getting one are similar to the odds of getting into Stanford.
Instead of shelling out for a Stanford summer program, we recommend getting a little scrappier and taking classes at a local university of community college with courses open to high school students in the summer. This information may not be readily available online, so be prepared to call and ask about what your options may be. Pair a class or two with an internship and a job, and you’ll be in amazing shape when you submit your Stanford application.
Have Fun
One mistake we see applicants to Stanford make is thinking that all serious all the time comes off well. But the truth is, your application readers are real people. They spend time with friends, they have hobbies, and they can be turned off by students who don’t seem to be enjoying life outside of the ‘go, go, go’ of trying to get into a school like Stanford. If you look like a robotic A+ machine, you’re making it easy for them to say ‘no.’ So, you need to spend time in the summer doing things that are pure fun for you. Learn how to bake a cake for your mom’s birthday. Spend time exploring with a younger sibling. Go for a bike ride down a new road every day. Decide to learn a new skill. Be a human, and they’ll love you even more.
But Not Too Much
Don’t take this directive too far, though. If you just spend your summers having fun, that’s ok — but it’s not ok for Stanford. If Stanford is your goal, you need to keep your eye on the prize and make your summers work for you.
Getting into Stanford is really hard, and they have so many more highly qualified applicants than they can accept. What makes a difference isn’t taking one more AP course or scoring one point higher on the SAT. It’s who you are, at your core, and how you show that on your application.
We work with students to show their truest self to colleges, resulting in exceptional admissions results. Email us to learn more.