In short, if you only have a minute: Filip Buscu, our student, was admitted to Stanford. We talked about what it means to find your passion, why resilience matters and why your essays need to be authentic when you apply to top US universities.

Last week was 'Ivy Day'. If you are new to the world of American universities, Ivy Day is the day when high school students from all over the world receive their answer from the Ivy League schools. Admission to top US universities is a dream for many, and institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Yale or Stanford attract exceptional candidates from every corner of the world each year.

There are eight universities in the Ivy League, among them Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Alongside these, there is a series of other prestigious American universities, including Stanford and MIT.

What takes shape, then, is a short list of institutions that students everywhere dream of. Prestigious places, with acceptance rates under 4%, that seem to be launchpads toward a successful future. Places where it is perfectly normal to sit down to dinner with prime ministers, founders of companies valued at over a billion dollars, or researchers working on humanity's most difficult questions.

A handful of Romanians get into such universities every year. Among our students in the latest admitted cohort is Filip, who in August flies off to Stanford. We sat down with him to talk about his high school experience and the application process he went through. Below are three lessons we drew from it.

One. Let yourself be guided by a strong passion.

Filip discovered his passion for aerospace engineering when he was 5 years old. He did not know back then what engineering was or how exactly an engine works, but he loved going out into the fields with his grandfather to look up at the sky and study the planes flying overhead.

He was fascinated by the fact that people, small and fragile as they are, can reach so high, quite literally.

For fun, he began building his own models that could fly. Prototypes of small planes that he could launch and try to keep airborne. Some flew, others crashed. At one point, he worked for several long months on one model. And then it crashed almost immediately.

That was when he realized he needed to learn some serious physics and some complex mathematical models if he wanted to be able to launch bodies into orbit. He was 13 and decided to take his passion seriously. He enrolled at ICHB, one of the top high schools in Bucharest. There he began laying the theoretical foundations for the practical models he dreamed of.

Over time, he ended up launching satellites into space (more details on that below), competing in international contests and following his passion all the way to California, on the other side of the world.

Every great result starts from an initial intuition, a strong desire to see something new in the world or to reach a goal you consider important.

For Filip, the goal was flight. For you, it might be marine biology, genetic models, poetry or applied ethics.

If you want to be part of a prestigious institution, you need to identify the things you care about and do something about it. 'Something' here means a deep dedication to that field, a project you carry out over several years and that grows alongside you.

If you do not know where to start and feel that you have not yet found a passion, we wrote an article about it. Read it here.

Two. Resilience, resilience, resilience

It is one of the traits top universities hunt for. Resilience matters because the world we live in demands it. Almost whatever goal you have, there will be moments when it feels like the universe is throwing all of its weight against you. Moments when the people around you do not believe in your ideas, when you miscalculate the data of the problems you are facing, or when you simply do not know how to get out of a difficult situation.

And this will keep happening, both in your personal life and in your professional one. Resilience is fundamental in people who end up fulfilling their dreams. That is possibly why it is a character trait so prized by top universities abroad.

Filip started from a clear desire: to send into space the first satellite built by high school students in the world. It was also, in fact, the second Romanian satellite ever launched. Before he got there, he was forced to go through many challenges.

At first, he struggled to find funding. After a lot of work, he managed to find a spot on a ship that was supposed to be launched into space, only the ship never took off. And so neither did the satellite. Then the satellite turned out to be too big and too heavy, so Filip and his team had to go back to the start and change the dimensions entirely.

After a long search, they finally secured a spot on a rocket of a SpaceX mission. And eventually the satellite reached space and transmitted its first signal.

If you want to achieve something you care about (and especially if it is something hard to achieve), you have to cultivate your appetite for trying and the emotional ability to try again when you run into a wall.

Top American universities are aware that the road to success involves an inevitable series of failures, so they look for applicants who have understood that reality too. If you can show them that you understand what it means to mess up, to hit obstacles and still keep going, then your chances rise considerably.

Three. The essays you apply with do not have to be perfect. They do, however, have to be written in an authentic voice.

The application to top American universities involves a lot of writing. You have to write a general essay that you send to every school you apply to (the "Common App Essay"). On top of it, each university asks for a few additional essays. If you apply to 20 universities, you will write around 50 essays.

Many people believe these essays have to be written perfectly. To have a certain tone, to use some particular metaphor, to tick boxes x, y, z. The reality is slightly different.

American universities do not challenge you to write because they want to see how well you master the English language, but because they want to see who you are, more deeply than your test scores or your extracurricular activities. They want to figure out what motivates you and what your values are. They want to witness the way you observe the world.

And authenticity, as Filip tells me too, cannot be forced or obtained quickly. You cannot order a ready-made essay that will make you stand out. Instead, you have to go through a process in which you ask yourself serious questions about the world around you and how you position yourself toward it, about who you are and what you want from your own future.

The result you arrive at might not be "perfect". But it is yours, and that is what counts.