Lab Atlanta Applications and College Admissions Synergies

Prospective Lab Atlanta students are currently completing their online applications for our Spring 2017 Semester. The Priority Application Deadline for this round is Monday, February 15, 2016.

Our Lab Atlanta application requires some writing from each student in response to a few different prompts. Interestingly, our prompts are similar in many ways to those posed on the Common Application Essays that many colleges currently use. The 4th of the Common App’s five options is perhaps the closest to one of the Lab Atlanta prompts: 4. Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma - anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.

But these coincidences are just another indication of how and why the Lab Atlanta experience will prepare our students well for higher education as well as life. The Lab Atlanta curriculum will feature creative problem-solving--based on creative problem-finding and uncovering real-world challenges or unsolved issues, in the first place.

Our students will learn--and practice daily--design thinking, and even “design doing.” Building empathy and solving real-life problems through a human-centered lens will be central to our Lab Atlanta curricula. Whether approaching these challenges through more of a STEM-centric or sociological perspective, engaging with real-world problems that the students choose to solve will be central to their learning that semester.