Non-Profit

[skieurope]

Ladies and Gentleman, may I present the most overused EC of 2020. Starting a YouTube channel has now slipped to #2.

Without getting into semantics on the definition of non-profit and 501(c)(3), starting a non-profit for the purpose of assisting people long after you’ve left HS is great. The challenge is that many students want to do so to pad their resumes thinking that college admissions simply requires completing a checklist. Start a non-profit. Check. Publish a book. Check. Get 100K views on my YouTube channel. Check. Unfortunately, admissions does not work that way, and AOs will see right through the obvious ploys.

MIT actually says it really well:

Some students feel so much pressure to get into the “right” college that they want to make sure they do everything “right”—even do the “right” extracurricular activities. Fortunately, the only right answer is to do what’s right for you—not what you think is right for us.

Choose your activities because they delight, intrigue and challenge you, not because you think they’ll look impressive on your application.

http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/highschool

The person who starts a non-profit will intrigue the AO not simply because s/he checked a box, but because of other factors related to it, some of which are intangible. The same, though, can be said for other ECs.