For fellow Brits who have studied at institutions in the States, I wanted to ask - how does one compete with America’s extracurricular culture? In England, we knuckle down and attempt to get A*s/As in our A-levels, and of course we have a few ECs up our sleeves, but nowhere near the breadth shown by American applicants to Ivy League colleges.
What I mean to say is, even if we attain excellent SAT scores and teacher recommendations, surely Brits are disadvantaged by the fact that English schools have an academic, rather than holistic, focus?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I dunno, UK kids do stuff but they just don’t call it ECs. You have D of E etc etc, sports, volunteering, just like in the USA. In the USA it has a label, in the UK, you just do it. Brits are probably more likely to have a job (great EC) and just like in the USA, posh UK kids have better access to better EC opportunities, CC is an unusual demographic, plenty of US kids don’t have the time or money for luxuries and are not applying to top schools either. School based easy ECs are not terribly impressive IMO. But I have seen a science fair kid who was, literally, taking part in helping curing cancer. That is hard to beat. If you want to do ECs, you can do them. being British doesn’t stop you.
ECs are not magic, they are proxies. Too many can be as too few for an American student. The ECs that count show either a sustained interest (and typically some level of achievement) and/or leadership skills. For example, if you have played a musical instrument for a number of years, and participated in various types of formal or informal musical groups, that counts. If you helped out with the local sports team over a period of years, and are now the head of the volunteer group that preps the field, that counts.
From a US college point of view it says that you are somebody who is interested in something, that you have enough interest and self-discipline to keep doing it over time, that within that context others have seen you as capable of taking responsibility for something more than yourself, and that you have learned something about having that level of responsibility.
And, while they do not expect you to have the full panoply of EC that US kids are expected to have, watch out for a tone that can come across as sniffy (we ‘buckle down’ and achieve academically, implying that the easier holistic thing) . The Harvard / Yale / Princeton / Stanford students I know from my D’s secondary school all had top marks in very demanding academic classes (for example AP classes in Calculus, History, English, Spanish, and Chemistry, in the penultimate year of secondary school) plus a varsity sport plus a performing art plus a leadership role in student government. It is hard to understate how hard they work, and how much they achieve (also hard to believe how much they seem to enjoy these things). The next tier down (say, top LACs) has a similar profile, but maybe a couple honours classes instead of APs and (say) 2 strong ECs v 3. They will all have done something (job or activity) over the summer as well.
oops: should be ‘too many can be as bad as too few…’ and “hard to overstate how hard they work”, not understate! that’s what comes of rushing…