Extracurriculars

What are Extracurriculars?

Extracurriculars are any activities that you do inside/outside of school, such as playing a sport, joining the debate team, or community service. Extracurriculars are the most important factor that distinguishes applicants who have similar academic standings from each other in college decisions.

What Extracurricular Should I Do?

Show passion. Don’t do extracurricular activities just to do it. For example, don’t join the debate team for the sole purpose of showing colleges. Find what you love to do and do it consistently for a few years. Always remember quality over quantity. For admission officer, your application looks better with 4 activities that you made a huge impact on for a few years rather than 10 activities that show little impact and time.

How Do I Know If My Extracurricular Is Good Enough?

Time and Impact are the two factors that determine the quality of your extracurriculars. Although Common App allows you to put up to 10 extracurriculars, admission officers will normally only read the top 4 or even 3 of your activities since they have a large amount of applications to read. This means that having one or two stood out activities that admission officer could remember is significantly better than 8 or 10 activities that are “normal”.

Passion Projects

Passion Projects are personal projects that you can undertake out of a strong interest in a particular topic or skill. It’s a strong way to show college admissions your interest in your intended majors. If done successfully, it could be the key to secure admission to Ivy league schools.

How to Start Passion Projects

First ask yourself what interest you? Could be what you want to major in or something that you did in school. Then follow that idea to brainstorm possible projects that you could do using that interest to impact the community. For example, I was interested in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science so I made a website that helps undergraduate students to prepare for the FE (Fundamental of Engineer) Exam by providing them with useful resources. In general, it will never hurt to try to make a passion project in high school. Even if you failed to make an impact, it’s still a joyful learning experience!

If you need help getting started on your passion project, you can schedule with me here