<p>Hey guys!</p>
<p>Quick question: Do you think it would be more impressive for college admissions if I start my own SAT tutoring business and make like ~$300-$700/ week OR work as an unpaid summer intern for Morgan Stanley in NYC?</p>
<p>If you were in my position what would you do? </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>If you can make 300-700$ a week… doing SAT tutoring… SIGN MY poor self UP! </p>
<p>LMAO</p>
<p>unpaid summer intern for Morgan Stanley = daddy’s connection</p>
<p>Start the business</p>
<p>Yea id go for the buisness, seems like more of an initiative.</p>
<p>What gives you confidence in your business? Do you have particular qualifications, or are you planning on purchasing a particular curriculum?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think this is totally the wrong way to frame the question.</p>
<p>At the majority of colleges and universities in the country, extracurricular activities really aren’t that important. If you meet their requirements for admission, they’ll admit you.</p>
<p>At a relatively small number of selective colleges and universities, extracurricular activities do matter, because the institutions use them to select whom they’ll admit from among the abundance of academically qualified applicants. But if you’re targeting these colleges, I don’t think either one particularly stands out. Neither is bad, and both are better than spending your summer hanging around the pool, playing Xbox or drinking beer that you persuade people to buy for you, but neither one will be the key that unlocks the ivy-covered gates.</p>
<p>Also, I second CuriousJane’s question. I’ll admit I may feel this way because I am a teacher, but I wouldn’t pay some high school kid very darn much for SAT prep. There’s a huge chasm between knowing how to do something well and knowing how to teach someone else to do it, and a pretty wide gulf between knowing how to teach and knowing how you’re going to go about teaching a particular topic to a particular audience.</p>
<p>I say, internship. The business could fizzle and leave you with a lost summer.</p>
<p>Hey 2Cool,</p>
<p>I looked back and realized that my tone came off as more harsh than I intended, posting from the phone isn’t a good idea. Sorry about that!</p>
<p>I am curious about your business plan. I think that the internship is likely to be a pretty “safe” choice, and will look good on an application. The SAT idea is more risky. If you manage to find clients, keep clients, demonstrate increases in their scores, it could be a great choice too. If you turn that into an essay or an interview conversation about what you learned about how people learn, it could be a better choice than the internship. Plus you may have some money at the end of it! But there’s a high chance of failure.</p>
<p>I also agree with Sikorsky, that in general I wouldn’t hire a high schooler to teacher my kid SAT prep, even, or perhaps especially, one with a perfect SAT score. Many people who do well on the SAT do so because they intuitively “get” the test. They are good at that kind of problem solving, and have minds that work the right way. Often times, that doesn’t translate into being able to explain how to problem solve the test. Looking at a problem where the answer is incredibly obvious to you, and seeing not just the answer but what someone else is missing is challenging. Figuring out to explain it so that they’ll see what you see the next time is also challenging. In many ways this task is easier for someone who struggled with what the student is struggling with. Perhaps that’s true for you, and you’ve brought up your score dramatically over a couple of years of hard work. </p>
<p>So, I guess what I’m saying is that if you love to teach, you know you have a talent for it (perhaps you’ve been tutoring for years, or you have a knack for helping younger siblings with their homework, or you brought up your scores 400 points, and then worked with your best friend, showed him some tricks, and he replicated your trick) then I’d say go for the SAT idea. If you’re thinking of it because you got high scores and it seems like as easy way to make some cash and pad your application? I’d go with the internship.</p>