Zinch
History & Vision
Where it all began and what we have set out to accomplish.
In the beginning…
Princeton had always been at the top of my list. My standardized test scores were average. My GPA was decent. I had never once received any recruiting mail from any of the Ivies because my PSAT and other test scores probably didn’t reach the level they were recruiting. They had no idea who I was. I was a public school kid out of Utah, half-hispanic, and ambitious. No one in the Ivy League had ever heard my name.
And that was fine.
So I went to them. I decided to let them know who I was.
My passions through high school were sports, leadership, and technology. I was well involved and had significant achievements in various activities. Through years working with the high school newspaper (Editor-in-Chief), I had acquired publishing and layout skills. Through years of breaking, building, and banging computers (President of computer club), I became proficient on both the hardware and software side of things. I particularly enjoyed web/graphic design and art. So I decided to put together a sweet-diggity-dog portfolio. My photoshop skills would be put to good use.
On the front page of my portfolio I transposed my picture into a photo of the Princeton campus—beautiful gothic arches behind me—hundreds of years of tradition at my fingertips. I put the Princeton logo on my sweatshirt, and in big block letters above the picture, “Dean Fred, I’m ready to be a tiger.”
I put myself out on a limb. This was extremely risky.
The rest of the pages in my portfolio (probably about 12 total) included everything and anything about me. It had all sorts of funky pictures of me doing what I enjoyed. It talked about my family. It spoke of my hobbies, interests and passions. It gave samples of my design work, my writing, and my photography. It truly painted the picture of who I was. And I sent it to them.
I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference. And I still don’t know if it really did. But the bottom line is that I got the “Yes” letter. And I’m now a Princeton tiger, class of ’09.
I’m not saying that students need to create and send lengthy portfolios to get into their dream school. In reality, some admissions officers discourage this. However, this experience in personalizing the admissions process caused me to reflect on the current process and ultimately, it’s what inspired me to start Zinch. I let Princeton know who I was. The application itself didn’t give justice to what I could do or who I was. So I created something that did. I basically knocked on Princeton’s door and said, “This is who I am. Take me or leave me.”
To be honest, there isn’t a clear process or method to do what I did—to adequately show who you are and what you’re all about. It doesn’t exist.
Most colleges and universities use practice exams and standardized tests as a method of their recruiting. They’ll go to The College Board (administor of the AP and SAT tests) or ACT and ask for the students who got above a certain score. From there they’ll start recruiting these students.
This was the inequality that I recognized. What about the students who don’t take these standardized tests? What about the students who aren’t great test-takers (yet still have amazing abilities)? What about the students who lack the resources and coaching to do well on these tests? With the current system, so many great students are left under the radar, undiscovered and unrecruited.
Zinch is a tool that allows for high school students to showcase their talents, skills and passions to colleges and universities, well in advance of the actual application process. On the other side, admissions officers can do comprehensive searches through our database to generate a list of students that match their specified criteria–and then start recruiting them.
Recruitment efforts by colleges can finally be based on more than test scores. Students are so much more than that. Like me, wanting to showcase my abilities to Princeton, students from all over the world can now do the same to their dream schools–in a way that’s almost effortless yet incredibly effective to admissions officers.
And that is why I founded Zinch: to level the playing field and to provide a means by which individuality and greatness can be extracted from everyone during the college admissions process. Every student will now have an equal opportunity to basically say, “This is me. Love me, hate me, recruit me, or trash me. This is who I am.”
Mick Hagen
Princeton University, ’09
Founder