If you are a student who loves the commercials more than that tv show, who relishes a good billboard campaign or who finds joy in a clever social media strategy, you may be looking towards a marketing major come college. Some of the best colleges in the country have exceptional marketing programs, including the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, and UC Berkeley, just to name a few. But getting into these schools requires more than a strong transcript and a love for snappy marketing language.
When we work with students, we emphasize that the grades have to be there and the scores have to be there, but there also has to be something (a lot) more to your application. Some people call this an “it factor,” others call it a “hook.” We think of it as being an interesting human who has done the introspective work to figure out their interests. You want the person reading your application to want to get a coffee with you, even if they have no interest in marketing. One of the best ways of developing this is through the activities you do outside of the classroom, which is what this post is all about.
In this post, we’ll break down the four things marketing-minded juniors need to be doing to increase their chances of acceptance by their dream school. You don’t need to do everything on this list, but you should certainly try your best. Having a robust activities section that demonstrates obvious expertise, and lots of stories to pull from for supplements, is a crucial differentiating factor when you are applying to schools where there are too many straight-A applicants to accept them all. Doing things that stand out is often the thing that gets you into a top college. So, let’s get going.
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You are a junior who is heavily interested in studying marketing at a top school, so it’s safe to assume that you have been doing more than simply studying for the past few years of high school. That’s good, but we want to make sure that you’re not just doing things — you are doing the right things. Below we’ve broken down four ‘buckets’ that you absolutely must be addressing in some way, whether it’s doing each individually or finding activities that span more than one.
CLUbs
First, you must be in a club that puts your marketing mind to work. Really, you should already be a member of this club, but now it’s time to ensure that you are making the club work for you as a part of your marketing focus. For your marketing skills to best be put to use, this is probably a service-oriented club that does a few big fundraisers or community events each year. We would pick this for you over a marketing-centric club that just studies what other people do to sell objects and ideas.
Maybe you run promotion, sponsorship, or marketing for the events, and it’d be ideally if you can try some new things rather than simply continuing what has been done by this club in the past. In addition to innovating within the club, we also want to see you leading it. Ideally, you’ll be vying for a club head spot, or get yourself another real official title that you can list on your applications that shows you strength and seniority, like “Director of Marketing.”
INTERNSHIP
Outside of school, we want to see you completing at least one in-person internship of at least 4 weeks that is focused on marking. This may be for a big company where you are working with an experienced team of marketing professionals, or for a small company where you are the marketing team. Wherever you are interning, you need to do more than simply answering comments on Instagram. However, we also recognize that social is big in the marketing realm. Even just five years ago, many in marketing rolled their eyes as social media as a marketing niche one could have expertise in. Now, those people don’t have jobs.
However, your internship needs to be more than making TikToks. There needs to be some academic underpinning to your interest as you’re going to be apply to academic research institutions. You should be able to sit alongside the Head of Marketing, or the business owner, and talk about the whys behind what they are doing. This is one of the reasons why the internship should be four weeks at minimum. You need to be able to build trust, show skill, and see if the things that you try pay off from a marketing perspective. In addition to the internship being at least a month, aim for at least 20 hours each week with at least 10 hours in-person.
RESEARCH
We want to see you doing independent research that goes beyond what you may learn about marketing in school (which for most high schoolers is nothing). Pursuing research on your own shows that you take marketing seriously as a field, not simply as something that sounds fun to do. Is there something withing marketing, or from marketing of the past, that fascinates you? If so, study it. Pick a particular marketing moment, issue, or opportunity, and pursue it voraciously.
Before you finalize your topic, though, it helps to have a publication in mind. We love this list of 70 places for teenage writers to publish work from creative expression to purely academic. Pick where you want your work to go, and then work backwards from there. Think about what you need to do to get yourself to that end goal, then execute.
Parallel to zooming in on a particular subject, immerse yourself in books like The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. We’ve read both, and we love them.
JOB
This one is probably the most surprising for the students we work with — and their parents. We want you to work. Yes, it’s time to get a job.
For students interested in marketing, we love summer jobs that combine a customer-facing role with opportunities for putting marketing strategy into action. This typically means a job like being a server, a restaurant host, or a retail sales associate. There are ways to get creative, or even use a job you are already doing in a way that will better support your marketing major. Hey, maybe you can be a lifeguard with a strong “swim safety” social media game.
The window between now and when you have to press submit on your college applications is closing quickly. Taking bold action now can make a massive difference, but you need to make the most of this moment.
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