When I first taught myself about college admissions, I was worried that I was just going to have to learn about all the meaningless hoops students need to jump through to build competitive applications. I was worried that the work of building a competitive college admissions profile would be at odds with the more important work of self-discovery and exploration.
The reason I stayed in this work, the reason I actually love this work, is because I realized that wasn't true. College admissions officers want students to do many of the things that I also find valuable for young people to do. My job is mainly to convince students and families that they don't need to do a bunch of useless nonsense just because they heard that they need to. I built the Guided Ambition Lab to provide a framework that clearly aligns what is good for young people with what is good for college admissions, and that's what I'm here to share with you now.
The Depths and Domains of Practice, or DDP, is the program's central development tool. There are two versions: one for the student and one for the parent. They work on the same framework but track different things. The DDP is not a to-do list, a productivity tracker, or a self-improvement checklist. It's a map of where you're investing your development and where you're not.
Click the button below to get full access to the Guided Ambition Lab. The Parent Depths and Domains of Practice is located in Module 1: Family Operating System. The Student Depths and Domains of Practice is located in Module 2: Student Development Engine.
What are the Depths and Domains of Practice?
The domains of practice are the categories in which you or your student does things.
Student domains:
Social & Personal
Academic
Intellectual
Community & Civic
Professional & Career
Creative
Athletic
The parent domains are similar, but tweaked to reflect adult life.
The depths of practice are the levels of engagement within any domain. They are the same for both students and parents:
Curiosity
Discipline
Expertise
Initiative
Reflection
The depths reflect the qualitative development of interests within a domain over time. A major mistake students make in college planning is thinking of these domains as categories to check the most boxes in. But the quantity of boxes does not necessarily reflect the quality that those boxes should exhibit over time.
Another major mistake students make is that they hear about the initiative that students take to impress colleges–founding nonprofits, starting businesses, conducting original research, etc. – and they think: “Oh, that’s what I should do!” So they rush to the initiative without building the curiosity, discipline, and expertise necessary for that initiative to reflect any sort of authentic interests. Admissions officers know exactly when you are doing an activity just to impress them, and that can actually make an activity hurt your application, not just waste your time.
This sequence of depths ensures that your extracurricular development follows an authentic line of personal development. It will feel a lot more natural and help your college apps more.
The Domains of Practice
The first two domains are the only required, nonnegotiable domains. Meaning, it is an expectation for both students and parents to invest deeply in their social and personal wellbeing. Why? Because the number one problem that derails student performance in high school is mental health challenges. When students find themselves in spirals of depression, anxiety, toxic relationships, untreated mental illness, unhealed trauma--that's when performance drops across the board. That's when we start eliminating entire categories of colleges from our list, that's when we stop doing the important personal work of exploring interests, and that's when we start the terrible game of catch up. Every semester, we should be thinking carefully about the state of our mental health. This is not the time for teenage BS "I'm fine." There is nothing fine about being a teenager in modern U.S. schools. We're going to challenge our students to think about what they are proactively doing to improve their mental health and social relationships. We'll be checking in on that during our Semester Review.
The second nonnegotiable category for students is academics. At the end of the day, no matter what crazy college application tricks you hear about, the number one thing selective colleges look at is your grades and academic rigor. Ultimately, college is school. If you cannot form a positive relationship to the idea of formal schooling, then college is going to be rough. Yes, college is very different, but the fundamentals are the same. You have to go to class, listen, take notes, study, do homework, and perform on tests. If we have trouble doing those things, that trouble will not stop in college. And as you proceed in high school, this program expects students to push deeper into the academic depth, building discipline and expertise in their academics.
The rest of these domains are up to them. It is in some combination of these domains, usually two or three, that students develop what is known as their "spike." The thing they get really good at that sets their application apart. One misconception we can put to rest right now: Your student does not need one super well developed spike. In fact, selective colleges often prefer students with two or three very well developed interests that demonstrate interesting depth of character. Think of these as hyphenated students. Musician-engineers. Mathematician-carpenters. Politician-Sculptors. You shouldn't feel any pressure to leave behind genuine interests for the purpose of college admissions, and you shouldn't feel pressured to get equally good at all things. Let your interests lead, and then commit to getting really good at them.
The Depths of Practice
The story of any interest begins with curiosity. This is where you find yourself asking questions about things that pique your interest. You can find those questions here. When you and your student go through these questions in your Semester Kickoff, you might not have any answers to some of these questions. That's okay. Leave those boxes blank. If your student is completely not curious about anything, then that's something we can tackle in our lesson on extracurriculars in Module 2.
After we've gotten curious about something, we need the discipline to explore it. That's where we actually carve out time in our days and weeks to really acquire the knowledge and skills we need to become experts in our fields of interest. When you approach this row with your student in your Semester Kickoff, you may find that they're already investing real time in mastering something they enjoy. You may find that they're curious about something up here, but they're not putting any time toward exploring it because they're fine with that subject just being a passive curiosity. That's fine; we just need to be more actively curious somewhere else. Regardless, your student will fill out this row accurately in your Semester Kickoff.
After many weeks and months of disciplined exploration of curiosity, we acquire expertise. This is when you can start answering the questions posed here. Now, your student might be joining this program with a bit of expertise already. If so, that's great. But we really want to save this category for when we really have some serious expertise at a collegiate or junior-professional level. This isn't where we say, "oh I made a little computer game in a coding class in 7th grade." That experience might have sowed some curiosity that you explore in high school. Only when you're coding at a very high level for a high schooler will we mention that here. Once we have expertise, we can identify the gaps in our field. We can see what work hasn't been done yet.
And that's when we can take meaningful initiative. Initiative that flows logically from the work we've been doing already. Yes, it's possible that you're starting this program with some real initiative under your belt, but we want to save this depth for initiative that follows from real expertise, not just helping put on homecoming dance.
Lastly reflection. This is a depth you will revisit at the end of every semester, reflecting on the work you've done in each domain. This reflection may steer you away from certain domains and toward others. Feel free to write here as much as you'd like and discuss those questions, but you'll also be doing plenty of reflection in the Semester Review tab here.
Why do parents need their own DDP?
I’ll be honest: This is the part of the Guided Ambition Lab that draws the most skepticism from parents. What do you mean I need to worry about my extracurriculars? I’m not the one applying to college–my kid is! And I totally get it. But there are several very important reasons why this program asks you to invest in your own health and interests.
When parents focus on their own interests, they decrease the anxiety of the household.
Parenting teens is hard. You don’t need me to tell you that. But the difficulty of this task can manifest in ways that raise the generalized anxiety of the home. They see you running around the house worrying about chores and homework and projects and getting their sister to practice and oh we have a dentist appointment and oh my god, your driving test is coming up, we need to practice driving, and on and on and on.
You know that feeling when you walk into a room and you can just feel the tenseness, the anxiety? That isn’t a space where young people, or anyone for that matter, does interesting, creative, challenging work.
That’s a space you try to avoid, and instead you seek refuge in your most reliable comforts–TV, YouTube, video games, social media. Investing in your own interests, being a little selfish with your time, releases that tension. And our goal is to build systems that release some of the responsibility that you’ve felt like you’ve needed to shoulder. The Parent DDP helps you with that.
Parents can model the curiosity, discipline, expertise, initiative, and reflection they want to see in their kids
For families that have trouble talking about school and college, in which parents feel like they need to prod their students to explore interests and try different things–there’s something you need to understand. If you’re not transparently invested in your own interests, but you’re still more or less a successful adult professional, then you’re not making a convincing case that investing in your interests is important to success in life. You might be living proof that success just requires you to show up, do your job, go home, take care of home stuff, and chill out.
They don’t understand that they are living through a unique period of their lives when they have the privileged responsibility to explore. And they need a reliable adult model of what that exploration might look like. They need a reliable adult model fo what that discipline looks like. Because a lot of students tell me that they’re “interested” in history or “interested” in medicine, when really they’ve done nothing more than watch a bunch of YouTube videos about it. They don’t understand the difference between being interested and being entertained. Your adult commitments can help them see that.
Parents need to prepare actively for the empty nest.
Your student will leave. Depending on where they are right now, that's somewhere between one and four years away. When they go, something real changes for most parents. The structure of daily life, the rhythm of the household, the role that has organized so much of your identity for so many years — all of that shifts substantially when the student is no longer in the house.
The Empty Nest hits hardest when the parent has nothing of their own to turn toward.
A little background on this program. I built this program because I started hearing horror stories from colleges. Horror stories of parents literally following their kids to college, prodding into their classes, requesting information from professors about their students’ performance (which is illegal for the professors to provide, by the way), jumping into roommate conflicts, walking their students to class, and even buying homes in their kids’ college towns, sometimes uprooting their younger children’s lives and friendships.
I was so enraged by this act of sabotage that I decided to build a college planning program that intentionally invested in the parent’s development so that they would not be even slightly tempted to do this.
And right now, hearing those stories, you might balk. Oh, that could never be me. I would never do that ot my college kid. That’s easy to say now. But when move-in day comes around and you take a good, hard look at how ready your kid is to live by themselves, it’s easy to start making compromises. The check-ins get more intrusive. The visits get more frequent. You start checking the parent Facebook groups for your kid’s college and the anxiety mounts. And higher education professionals are now overwhelmed by parents like this, fielding constant communication that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.
This program is designed to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Some of my most motivated students, those with the clearest view of what they want to do in the future, draw direct, explicit inspiration from the work their parents do, whether their professional, creative, or civic work. And they only tell me about that inspiration when their parents have made it very transparent to them. When they talk about the challenging patient they treated that day. When they talk about the big project they’re working on at work.
Ultimately, it’s your family’s decision about how much you want to literally write into these tools as part of your family’s progress. Writing things down can make a difference, though, and I highly encourage you to give it a shot.
