How to Prove a Passion Project When Your School Has No Clubs
A student stayed behind after the last bell on a Tuesday. She wasn’t the kind of kid who caused trouble — more the kind who waits until everyone else is gone to ask something. She stood by the door, shifted her backpack, and said, “So colleges keep saying they want to see passion projects. But our school doesn’t have any clubs. How am I supposed to prove I have one?”
I didn’t have a great answer right away. She was right. In a bigger school, there would be debate team, robotics club, student council, maybe an art club that meets after lunch. But at our small learning centre, there is no after-school programme. There’s a main corridor with posters about food safety, two classrooms, and a computer lab that doubles as the library. The infrastructure for “passion projects” just isn’t there.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that clubs were never the point. Universities don’t actually want to see that you joined something. They want to see that you followed a curiosity long enough for it to turn into something you could show or describe. A club is just one way to do that. It’s not the only way.
So I asked her the question I’ve started asking every student who says they have no extracurriculars. I said, “What do you do on a Sunday afternoon when no one’s asking you to do anything?”
She looked at me like I was wasting her time. Then she said, “I make graphics. Just like, editing photos and making memes and stuff.”
That sounded small to her. It wasn’t.
A passion project doesn’t have to be an official club. It doesn’t need a faculty advisor or a room booking or a budget. It needs a person who keeps doing something because they’re interested, and it needs a trail of what they made or learned along the way. The proof isn’t in a certificate. It’s in the process.
My student left that conversation still doubtful. But the next week, she came back and told me she’d opened a folder on her phone. Every time she saved a design she liked, or copied a colour palette, or screenshotted a poster that worked well, she put it in the folder. That was her first piece of evidence. It wasn’t complicated. It just existed.
That’s where most projects actually start.
When parents ask me how they can help, I tell them to stop focusing on the word “passion.” It makes kids freeze. Nobody knows what their passion is when someone asks directly. Instead, help them notice what they already do. Maybe there’s a teenager who keeps organising photo albums, who watches video essays about urban planning, who repairs their own bike chain, who rewrites song lyrics for fun. That’s the material. It just hasn’t been named yet.
The next step is to pick something small and do it more than once. Not “start a business.” Not “raise awareness.” Something closer to the ground. I had another student, Marcus, who was obsessed with local history. He couldn’t tell you why. He just liked looking at old buildings and wondering what they used to be. He thought that couldn’t count as a project because there was no history club at school. I suggested he pick one building in town and find out everything about it. He walked over after school, took photos from three angles, and went to the public library to ask for old maps. The librarian actually loved it. She pulled out a binder of archived photos and let him photograph them with his phone. He added notes to a Google Doc, one entry at a time, not even in full sentences sometimes. “Main door changed in 1962.” “Window on the left is original.” That was it.
After about three weeks, he had seven pages of notes and photos. He printed it and brought it to show me. It wasn’t polished. But it was real. He’d done something that didn’t have a grade or a club meeting. He’d just followed a question.
That’s the thing to tell universities. It’s not “I started a club.” It’s “I got curious, I kept going, and here’s what I found.”
For kids who feel like they need something to show, I give them three small instructions.
First, keep a collection. It can be a folder on their phone, a notebook, a shared document. The content doesn’t have to be organised. It just has to be there. One student saved every article she read about marine biology into a single cloud drive folder. She never did a formal research paper. But when she applied to a science summer programme, she could point to the folder and say, “I’ve been reading about this for a year.” That was enough.
Second, do one public thing. It doesn’t need to be a website. It can be an Instagram account, a post in a subreddit, a short video, a conversation with a neighbour. The point is to put something out there so the project stops being invisible. My student who made graphics didn’t think she had a project until she posted three of her designs online and asked people which one they preferred. Ten people responded. That turned an activity into a project in her own mind.
Third, find one adult who knows more than you do. It’s intimidating, but it works. I’ve seen students email a local architect, a retired teacher, a veterinary receptionist, even a YouTuber who makes furniture. The email doesn’t have to be long. “Dear Mr. So-and-so, I’ve been learning about X. I saw your Y and wanted to ask you one question. Thanks.” Very few people are good at doing things perfectly, but most people love telling a young person how they do it. That relationship becomes part of the story too.
Parents can help in a very concrete way without getting involved in content. Clear a drawer. Set out a box. Create a small physical space where materials can gather without needing to be tidied away every night. One family in our school didn’t have extra money for supplies, but they had an old corner shelf by the front door. The teenager kept his sketches, a magnifying glass, and a folded map there for three months. His mum told me that just having a place for it made the interest feel legitimate. She didn’t ask him what it was going to become. She just stopped calling it “that stuff on the shelf.”
The other thing parents can do is change the question they ask. Instead of “Is that for a college application?” ask “What made you change your mind about something this week?” That question works because it forces reflection, not performance. When a student can answer that, they can write a personal essay. When they can’t, they’re probably copying someone else’s idea.
I should be honest: none of this is flashy. No student from our learning centre has started a nonprofit or appeared in local news. But a few of them have built something they could genuinely talk about in an interview. Leah, the student who liked making graphics, eventually designed a reusable poster for the school’s open house. No one asked her to. She just did it because she wanted to see if she could. She showed me the file on her laptop, and it was decent. Not perfect, but decent. I noticed she’d already saved three different versions.
I don’t know if her “passion project” will be what gets her into university. Honestly, I don’t think admission works like that anymore. But she no longer asks me what counts or doesn’t count. She just asks if I want to see what she made. That’s a better sign than any club membership form.
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