Why Hobbies Are Admissions Cheat Codes
Why Hobbies Are Admissions Cheat Codes  
Podcast: The Game: A Guide to Elite College Admissions
Published On: Fri Jan 23 2026
Description: Many applicants to top colleges obsess over “activities” and significantly overlook the value of more informal pursuits such as hobbies. In this episode, we break down seven major advantages of a student’s hobbies––from piggybacking on existing uses of a student's discretionary time to signaling high degrees of intrinsic motivation and coming across to admissions officers as potentially “less performative” versus other more formal extracurriculars.We discuss how hobbies can play a pivotal role in identifying a student’s core passion and interest––their admissions “hook”––and even make their way into a student’s application via the activities list, additional information section, and essays.——“The Game” is hosted by Sam Hassell and brought to you by Great Minds Advising.Great Minds Advising’s unique, hands-on mentorship program and its deep strategic insight into the application review process have earned the company a nation-leading track record of excellence, with 100% of its students gaining admission to a top-choice school in the 2024–25 application cycle.Its students have recently gained admission to Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Northwestern, UC-Berkeley, and WashU (among many others) and are admitted to the Ivy League at a rate 14x the national average (90% when applying early).Web: greatmindsadvising.comContact: greatmindsadvising.com/#contactNewsletter: greatmindsadvising.com/#newsletterEmail: info@greatmindsadvising.comFB: facebook.com/GreatMindsAdvising/IG: instagram.com/greatmindsadvising