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<p>Denis, you don’t need a long list of ECs; showing leadership in a couple of them would be plenty. Working to support yourself counts as an important one.</p>
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<p>Elite colleges have a sweet spot for community service work, especially when it goes beyond just logging hours. One way to stand out is to create your very own community service project: look around your community to find an unmet need and create a solution. It doesn’t have to be huge and it doesn’t have to be perfect, but doing it from scratch on your own is something few students do. One possibility, given your background, is to offer once-a-week English classes to groups of recent immigrants, perhaps from your home country: get a church to give you a spare room, make up flyers, get a few classmates to help you out.</p>
<p>I know your time is limited, but my son was able to shoehorn in something similar while taking enough classes (up to 10-12 including college and online) to graduate in 3 years. He was accepted to 4 top-20 colleges (including an early-write at Amherst) and received 3 customized letters from the schools mentioning the factors that most impressed the admissions committee: all 3 mentioned his self-directed community service project. He is now attending Brown.</p>