“Follow your passion” is common advice, especially around this time of year when students are graduating. We hear it a lot in graduation speeches and farewell assemblies.
It’s well intentioned, but “Follow your passion” is also widely misunderstood.
Many students interpret passion as something they’re supposed to discover fully formed: a singular interest that defines their academic direction and future career. When they can’t identify it, they assume they’re behind.
I don’t think passion actually works like that.
More often, passion results from sustained engagement. It develops over time as students commit to an area, as they encounter challenges, and then as they start to see progress in their own thinking and capability.
That distinction matters in university and career counseling.
Admissions processes don’t reward vague declarations of interest. They reward evidence of commitment. Students who can demonstrate how they’ve explored an interest – either through coursework, independent inquiry, or extracurricular involvement – present a far more compelling narrative than those who simply claim enthusiasm.
For example, one of my daughters was interested in girls’ sports when she was in primary school. She played football, basketball, volleyball, and rugby. She did her PYP Final Exhibition about gender inequality in sports. In secondary school, she continued to play 3 sports all the way through 12th grade, both in and out of school. She did service projects that got local girls involved in sports they wouldn’t typically have access to.
Her commitment to women in sports became the central thread of her storyline for all her university applications. It was genuine, it was authentic, and it made her applications memorable to the admissions teams because it helped them see her as a three-dimensional person, not just a profile on paper. She was accepted into her top choice and earned nearly $60,000 in scholarships, even though she doesn’t play a single sport at the university she attends.
The idea of commitment as an avenue to passion has implications for how we guide students.
Rather than asking, “What are you passionate about?” we should instead ask:
- What have you spent time on?
- What have you returned to, even when it became difficult?
- Where have you chosen depth over breadth?
Passion, in this sense, isn’t a prerequisite. It’s an outcome that results from commitment.
And that is a far more accessible starting point for most students when they have to develop their personal narrative for university applications.
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