The college admissions process is very unpredictable.

Most people never learn the precise reason why they were accepted to a particular college, barring recruited athletes.

Rishab Jain is a student who got into Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, among other colleges-he knows the reason why he enjoyed these results.

I will break down his story over the rest of the blog post, enabling you to craft insight about the college application process and hopefully gain inspiration for your own journey The #1 Activity Rishab attributes his success to his scientific research.

You may be thinking that this is strange, as he also had many other extracurricular activities such as Boy Scouts and track.

However, as you are probably all familiar with, there are many people that participate in these activities, and the top schools simply don't have enough space to give admission to all of these people.

Science research led to 4/5 of Rishab's Common App awards, as well as 4-5 (out of the 10 allowed) activities in the Common App.

He also used it in his essays.

How Rishab Began Rishab's fascination with science began in elementary school.

It was the year of the first-ever science fair at his brand new school.

The cafeteria buzzed with excitement as students, trifolds in hand, displayed their projects.

Inspired by a 3rd-grade experiment on yeast and carbon dioxide, Rishab decided to explore a connection between a liquid's acidity (pH) and the amount of CO2 it released.

He gathered various household liquids and put his plan into action.

Using readily available materials, he measured the pH of each liquid and the CO2 it produced.

The big day arrived, and Rishab presented his findings at the science fair.

While the judges were impressed by his enthusiasm, there were some questions about his project.

It turned out, that because his presentation incorporated a printed data table made from Google Sheets, it was unique compared to the others.

This, led the judges to wonder if Rishab had completed the project independently.

Even though he didn't win that first time, his curiosity about science remained strong and he continued to participate in these competitions.

In 7th grade, he won at the state-level science fair.

He was also a Top 300 Semifinalist in the National Broadcom MASTERS science fair.

Then, in 8th grade, he won the state science fair again.

He competed in a challenge called the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, winning him the title of "America's Top Young Scientist" and $25,000 of funding.

He also won Top 30 at the Broadcom MASTERS science fair, and competed in Washington, D.

C. , winning a 2nd Place STEM award.

High School Research Rishab used these victories as inspiration and began really getting into science research.

He ended up joining a local lab, though this appointment was cancelled due to COVID-19 and his young age.

He continued his independent research project, and won the state fair, winning it.

For a freshman, this was exceedingly rare.

He qualified for the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) to represent the state of Oregon.

Unfortunately, the fair was cancelled due to the ongoing pandemic.

During COVID, he spent some time on a new research project: ICOR

- Improving Codon Optimization With Recurrent Neural Networks He finished a beta version of this project, which he presented in 10th grade.

He qualified to Regeneron ISEF once again, and competed virtually at the international fair.

He ended up winning the 3rd Place Grand Award in Biomedical Engineering.

The next year, he went back to his local lab, which was possible due to being older and the easing of COVID protocols.

He ended up becoming a published researcher.

Rishab and I have both published in real scientific journals.

I would not recommend high school journals that charge you to publish.

He continued his work on ICOR, and eventually was able to work on it with LatticeAutomation, which is available at GitHub below. https://github. com/Lattice-Automation/icor-codonoptimization During that time, he got results back from the Research Science Institute.

Eachsummer, 100 of the world's most accomplished high school students gather at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the Research Science Institute (RSI).

RSI is the first cost-free to students, summer science & engineering program to combine on-campus course work in scientific theory with off-campus work in science and technology research.

This is one of the most prestigious summer programs.

Rishab continued his work on ICOR and brought it back to ISEF later that year in May.

In May, he won 1st Place at the International Science & Engineering Fair—and, along with it—the $50,000 Regeneron Young Scientist Award.

Then, that summer, he worked on a new research project at MIT's MSEAS Lab.

The project was titled: "GlioMod: Spatiotemporal-Aware Glioblastoma Multiforme Tumor Growth Modeling with Deep Encoder-Decoder Networks".

College Results Rishab applied to the following schools: Harvard (Restrictive Early Action) Stanford MIT Duke Boston University He would have expanded this list by 5 schools if he was not accepted to Harvard, as the result would come out before the regular round of applications were due.

Rishab was accepted to Harvard and is currently a freshman.

Conclusions If you would like to learn about how to craft a similar story, you should join his Discord, which is a community of thousands of students just like you.

It's completely free and linked below. https://discord. gg/Yd5rG94v.