Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has taken popular culture by storm, promising readers that, after following the KonMari method, they will never have to tidy again.

And while the book suggests a number of absurd things, such as thanking your clothes before putting them away and not balling socks because doing so would stress them out, the basic premise of the cleaning manual is important: that you should go through your possessions, one by one, hold each item in your hands and ask yourself, “Does it spark joy?” 

This method can extend beyond your closet and bedroom and into your everyday life, especially in the context of preparing for applications for highly selective colleges – well, preparing for life, really. 

I see many students loading on a wide range of extracurricular activities in the tenth or eleventh grade that they take little to no interest in, simply because they wish to pad their resumes with impressive-sounding organizations. But I challenge these students to metaphorically hold each of these activities in their hands and ask themselves Kondo’s iconic question.

Does it spark joy?

See, college admissions isn’t just a semester-long application-fest with some standardized testing along the way. Instead, it’s the culmination of a process that takes years: self-development. Too often, I see people who think college admissions is the end goal, when in fact, it’s just an achievement that reflects the person you have grown to become in high school. It’s about being your best self – or at least the best you can be at that point in your life, with the opportunities you’ve been given.

You don’t get into prestigious schools because of individual activities you do. Colleges admit you based on what kind of person you’ve become throughout your high school life, and extracurricular activities are only one way to portray that side of you.

Don’t get me wrong: developing that version of you is no easy feat. But the key to doing so is to find that “spark” in your life, so to speak, that guides your life and provides it with purpose. Once you discover that, then you can apply it to every aspect of your life, including applying to college.

My story of discovering my spark began in the 8th grade, when I joined Model UN, curious to understand the hype surrounding it. Quickly, I fell in love with it, and I still owe many of my closest friendships to my involvement with MUN. But it wasn’t just Model UN that I enjoyed doing - I realized that my interest in it actually stemmed from something far deeper than that one activity.

As I’ve gone through high school, I have cultivated a profound desire to improve the world around me, and I’ve done so through politics. I’m sure the same spark could have been lit through science or music, two things I still enjoy immensely; it just so happened that politics was most accessible to me at that exact time, and I was interested in it. It just came naturally – there was no calculation in finding my spark, no path that I mapped out for myself to guide my whole high school life. 

And that’s the key to finding your spark: letting it happen. 

Of course, it was an absolute privilege to be able to choose from an array of extracurricular opportunities, to have been supported in my pursuits outside of the classroom without worrying about anything else, and for that, I am sincerely grateful. But too often, with that opportunity, students – and their parents – try to find the magic formula to gain admission into some of the worlds’ most prestigious universities. The belief that passion can be planned is pervasive, and false. 

For me, Model UN led naturally to youth parliament, which led naturally to volunteering at my Member of Parliament’s constituency office, which led naturally to my involvement with a political party. Whenever I saw an opportunity to deepen my engagement with what interested me, I took it.

Frankly, when I was asked to write something about my spark factor, I struggled a lot to put pen to paper. I described my journey as “falling down the rabbit hole,” and that’s exactly what it was. There’s no particular set way to find your “spark” – you just need to explore your interests and find what makes you tick. 

I got myself into something interesting, and the rest was history.