Passion Project
A Stepping Stone to Top Universities
About
Passion Project provides students an opportunity to initiate a unique project of their own interest integrating their existing skills and developing new abilities. Students will experiment with innovative ideas and methods to focus on a dedicated idea/plan, solicit assistance from others, establish a team, and utilize various resources to accomplish a predetermined objective. This program helps students persevere and overcome obstacles while diving deeper into the project and documenting the process or result through various online media platforms. It also demonstrates students’ creativity, leadership, curiosity, and impact through an individual project.
Passion Project helps students add a distinctive and unusual aspect to college applications to highlight an applicant’s extraordinary profile.
Enhancing Research Skills
Solidify the research process by compiling research findings and reports. Carry out practical actions based on detailed planning, and make adjustments and improvements in line with the research progress.
Structure for the Research Proposal
By adopting the research process, our advisors can effectively help students transform ideas into actions. Students will be equipped with innovative research methods and logic to complete the project.
Professional Advising Team
Our dedicated advising team will leverage our resources while reaching out to domain experts and professionals to help the students achieve his/her goal.
More than 75% of Harvard students have completed at least one Passion Project in high school and believe it has a great impact on their application results.
– A recent study by Acceptitas
About
Get inspired and work directly with professors from top universities to finish an academic research paper! Unlike other programs, RIO student will be submitted as “first author” of the research paper, while the supervising professor will be the “second author”. The final paper could be submitted to international journals, newspapers or major magazines for publication.
IEG will assist students in identifying their direction of research topics, and recommend an appropriate professor and a teaching assistant for the entire session. Students can expect full support during their entire RIO experience.
Improve research skills and garner college-level knowledge.
Advantages
- Gain an edge as a college or graduate school applicant by completing and submitting a research paper as “first author”.
- Obtain a letter of recommendation from the professor from a prestigious university (based on the professor’s own discretion).
- Develop and improve your academic research ability throughout the process.
- Receive in-depth learning methodology from both the professor and teaching assistant.
- Improve academic thinking, research capability, and essay writing skills to better prepare for future studying.
Passion Project & RIO Comparison
| Duration | Professor’s Guidance | Coach1 | Teaching Assistant2 | Domain Expert3 | Recommendation Letter | |
| Passion Project | 6-24 months | Yes | Yes | No | Yes4 | Yes5 |
| RIO | 2-12 months | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes6 |
Note:
1. Coach will work extensively with the student to help develop passion project and ensure the completion of the project.
2. Teaching Assistant will be on every call with the student and ensure the completion of the project.
3. IEG will assist the student to identify and find a domain expert.
4. Domain Expert is only available for Passion Project that lasts one year and above.
5. Recommendation Letter is only available for Passion Project that lasts one year and above.
6. Recommendation Letter is only available for RIO that lasts 6 months and above.
Passion Project
“I want to thank the professor for his teaching style. He guided me by allowing me to explore questions on my own and always answered my concerns.
This passion project experience gave me a very good understanding of the process of writing research papers. I also learned that doing research is a step-by-step process. It added more to my understanding of the topic that I selected.
I genuinely enjoyed doing the project. Time management was challenging especially when I started this project during the school year, but I overcame that by setting mini-deadlines for myself.”
Alek D.
University of Pennsylvania
Research Internship Opportunity (RIO)
“I learned how to structure a research paper into different sections which would benefit the reader. I also learned how to analyze the results conducted from surveys.
I learned how to polish and refine a survey so that I could gain the most out of it. My TA really helped to check and gave advice for how to improve the phrasing of my questions, choices, and simply the order of the questions.
One of the most critical skills that I learned was modeling my hypothesis with various independent variables and Dependent Variables through making a diagram. Writing this research paper also helped improve my critical reading and analysis skills from the literature review.”
Emily C.
Northwestern University
Upcoming Programs
Rolling Basis
Passion Project
Duration: 6 Months/Term
Topic: students’ specific area of interests
Takeaways: report +recommendation letter
Rolling Basis
Research Internship Opportunity
Duration: 3 Sessions for 3 Months/ 6 Sessions for 6 Months
Topic: Entrepreneurship, marketing, business administration, international business, engineering, linguistics, medicine, biology, STEM, political science, and art.
Takeaways: IEG will submit the research paper to international journals, newspapers or magazines on behalf of RIO students as “first author” + recommendation letter
