I recently founded the democratic club at my high school. Can this hurt my chances of admission to more conservative schools?
Just present it as a political activism club in your apps without specifying its ideology.
I can only imagine a handful of colleges (e.g. Hillsdale, Liberty, et al) where this would be a problem. As a Democratic activist, would you seriously consider any of those colleges?
No, but do not expect that “founding a club recently” will have any positive meaningful impact. The political affiliation is not an issue; the late founding will probably be viewed as the resume padding it is. Students keep on misunderstanding what the adcoms value. Founding a club as a junior raises questions. Sorry to rain on your parade, but you’d much better off to dedicate your energy towards maintaining scores and earning higher test scores.
. . .unless OP was creating the club because s/he is genuinely interested, and doesn’t really care about the college benefits, that was more of a side effect. . .
Or if OP’s an underclassman… but yeah, “political activism club” or something sounds more neutral.
I don’t think being an involved Democrat will stop any school from accepting you. In the unlikely event that there is any one school where it is an issue, you probably wouldn’t want to be a student there anyway.
I wouldn’t expect that recently founding a democratic club will hurt you any more than recently founding the pep club you mentioned in another thread would. I don’t expect that they’ll do much to help your app either.
Is that democratic or Democratic? There is a difference.
My son had a couple of Skype college interviews in a room where we have an Obama “HOPE” poster hung. We took the poster down so that the person interviewing him wouldn’t see it hanging on the wall behind him! Half jokingly, half not!