The kid who’s building a future we can all be excited about

Joshua Swift-Rawal is helping your kid get into an Ivy League school.

Even though he’s only a rising high school senior.

Hear me out—

Joshua might seem like your average teenager, and in many ways, he is.

🏸 He plays sports.

🎺 He’s involved with music. 

📚 He enjoys a diverse array of school subjects.

But Joshua has a rare and special gift:

He can see the future. 👀

No— he’s not psychic. He’s ahead of the curve.

Most kids (and plenty of adults for that matter) have difficulty seeing beyond their current situation, never mind the situation of their peers and their planet.

But while Joshua enjoys the daily high school experience, he recognizes that the future is his to build — and the time to start is now.

Why aren’t we doing more?

Joshua lives in Berkeley, California — well-known for its prestigious university and progressive outlook.

So it was astonishing to him that his high school’s cafeteria was using landfill-fattening, carbon-emitting, wasteful food containers.

With 3,000 kids at his school eating lunch 5 days a week, something had to be done. 

He took it up with his school and community, who were impressed with Joshua’s initiative, and connected him with professors and industry professionals.

Over several months, Joshua and one of his classmates dove into university-level research to flesh out an idea to replace the wasteful containers with an eco-friendly alternative.

They determined:

1. The climate impact of the current containers

2. The potential gains of implementing a new solution

And while the implementation of his idea is still awaiting a bureaucratic policy approval process, Joshua is pretty proud of what he’s been able to do.

It takes tremendous confidence to take on a project like this — a life skill that Joshua attributes to his time at an arts magnet middle school, conducting and directing his musical classmates.

“Up until then, I hadn’t experienced that level of arts immersion. It gave me a lot of inner assurance” Joshua told me.

Not surprising. We recently reported that Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely to participate in a performing arts hobby as their scientific peers.

Getting down to business

While Joshua enjoyed his research project, he wanted to build something tangible.

And the best way to do that is through business.

👉 Enter BETA Camp.

Joshua enrolled in the July 2023 cohort, and worked with his BETA Camp peers to develop a professional networking platform (à la LinkedIn) for teens.

He loved the experience of building a product that really helped people, and opted to join AlphaX after completing BETA Camp.

“The counseling and support that BETA Camp has — I wanted to keep having that for whatever I did.”

At AlphaX, Joshua explored a few different projects in:

• Climate

• Education

• Technology

But the perfect project for Joshua serendipitously crossed his path when a few of his AlphaX classmates returned from a sprint workshop in Mexico…

75 Percent Chance

Back in December, seven Prequel kids retreated down to Mexico with one mission:

🎓 Figure out why regular students have a 4% chance of getting admitted to an Ivy League school, while Olympic athletes have a 75% chance.

First, they all dove into research, compiling what’s known as a “second brain” (100+ pages) so they could easily conjure up relevant details as they worked through the development process.

Once they understood the formula for achieving Ivy League admittance (something they’ve dubbed a “spike”), it was time to develop the core product.

They decided on a four-session interactive workshop for high school freshmen.

Why freshmen? 

Because Olympians don’t decide to compete one day, and earn a place at the Olympics the next.

They developed a full curriculum, complete with:

• Presentations

• Breakout sessions

• Exercises

• Comprehension tests

Before leaving Mexico, it was important for the group to develop a bulletproof onward plan.

After all, this was a side gig for these kids — they were already busy on projects like building a safe teen dating app and a supportive lifeline for kids facing challenges.

They knew they would need a CEO to take the project across the finish line…

And Joshua was the perfect fit.

If the CEO shoe fits 👟

Joshua took over the 75 Percent Chance project, and it’s flying.

By April, he was to: 

• Build a waitlist of 2k students

• Earn over 20k followers on Instagram

• Hire mentors

• Execute their first workshop

And heck, it wasn’t easy. 

He knew that the team in Mexico had created a great program, and his first priority was to drive awareness — which isn’t something he had a ton of experience in.

But Joshua likes to believe that, “life is 99% skill and 1% taking a chance,” so he dove into every Instagram growth formula he could get his hands on, and grew their reach to nearly 22k followers.

Wow.

“It validated what I was doing,” Joshua told me. 👊

Joshua also had to step out of his comfort zone to network with and hire the Ivy League mentors he knew the program needed to succeed.

“These Ivy League students are really busy, and they’re a little bit skeptical of a high schooler who wants to give college advice. It’s a really interesting social dynamic.”

Joshua’s upcoming plans for 75 Percent Chance are to:

• Continue to run quarterly live workshops

• Develop a more budget-friendly asynchronous course

• Write a book on the 75 Percent Chance methodology (with the help of AI)

Well done, Joshua. 👏

🎓 Off to college…

So what college does a high school senior who is an expert in Ivy League admissions apply to?

A school he has no clue how to get into. 😂

Oxford University, to be exact.

Joshua is English on his mother’s side, and visits his family in Oxford several times a year. It’s been a longtime dream of his to attend Oxford University, so he’s taking a shot!

States-side, his favorite Ivy is the University of Pennsylvania, so he’s also hoping for an acceptance letter from Philadelphia.

And of course, he’s always considering his beloved hometown school — UC Berkeley.

Wherever he lands, Joshua’s epic curiosity, action-driven attitude, and caring nature will underpin his success.

I couldn’t be more thrilled that kids like Joshua are building our future.

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👉 Want to support Joshua? Give 75 Percent Chance a follow on Instagram, and share the program with ambitious high school students!