Teacher recommendation is the most important element in a college application that a student has no direct control over. It could nearly singlehandedly make or break the student’s chance of admission. However, how many teachers are willing to write “the best ever…” type of recommendations? I believe some colleges also track the histories of what individual teachers wrote. Some teachers’ recommendations may also carry more weight because of the accuracies of their prior recommendations. Then there’s the issue of equitability. Some high schools have vastly more resources to support their teachers to craft better recommendations than most public high schools.
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Just what the dr. ordered. Thank you!
May I ask… what is the CDS?
However, there is also a luck of the draw factor, in that how good a recommendation writer the teacher is can be a random variable, and recommendation rationing may keep a student from being able to get the best possible teachers for recommendations.
But this area may be one where prep schools with dedicated college counselors may be an advantage in allocating students to their optimal recommenders without overburdening any or having students rationed out.
CDS = Common Data Set.
If you google the name of a school + common data set you can see all kinds of fun facts and stats about that year’s incoming class and what the school considers in their admissions process.
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A teacher doesn’t have to be a great writer to say “This student is the best I’ve ever had.” No fancy language is needed for a teacher rec. I agree that the best teachers will fill up early for rec requests. I tell students to ask no later than January.
I haven’t read all of the comments yet, but my immediate response is:
If a kid is “pointy” that’s great, it shows commitment and focus and mastery.
If a kid is naturally the opposite of pointy, and involved in several activities with active leadership roles, that is also great. It’s when a kid with no real interest, commitment, etc joins a lot of clubs and lists them, but has no leadership or anything to show that they actually accomplished anything that is a negative and I believe college admissions know how to sort those applicants out.
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Regardless of the impact upon college applications, activities your child engages in will help mould who they are and potentially what they will become. So give some thought to what types of values or skills you would like your child to acquire in those years at home. There are so many different avenues-teams, community service, a job, foreign language, musical instrument- that everyone should be able to find something. Sitting on the coach watching tv or playing video games was never an option for my kids, except for 2 or so weeks in the summer. Otherwise, I expected them to be active.
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Being active is great and I encouraged that in my kids too (who were never interested in video games much anyway), BUT playing video games can lead to an e-sports scholarship. There is money in esports for college and as a career in both playing games and developing them.
I don’t think pointy or round matters at all to most colleges. Kids should do what they are really interested in or try out a variety of activities if that appeals. You don’t need to have leadership roles in everything to get into college either. Everyone can’t be a leader.
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Agreed, but the chances of landing an e-sports scholarship are only slightly greater than winning the lottery, and the chances of adverse outcomes are far higher. I have no issue with parents who let their kids play video games all day, but also no sympathy for them when those same kids become adults who can’t handle college or jobs due to their video addiction.
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Of course, some physical sports are not great in terms of scholarships and future professional career chances due to the volume of competition, with a significant risk of adverse outcomes (e.g. American football).
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Agreed. I would never suggest pursuing a sport with scholarships as the goal. Learning teamwork, perseverance, physical fitness, are all valid goals of athletics.
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For kids who do not really do anything “of note” in their spare time, in the summer, etc, there are still literally hundreds of excellent colleges where this doesn’t matter. U Kansas, U Nebraska, U New Mexico, Iowa, and many more do not even consider extracurricular activities in admissions. In fact, at many of them, such a student could get substantial merit funding.
As just as many, ECs are “considered”, but, in reality, they are of little importance, and an applicant with a high GPA could easily get in with barely an extracurricular activity for the four years.
Even at “top” colleges, these are not always all that important. My nephew is attending UCLA. His UC GPA was about as high as it could be, his SAT was great, but his ECs were school band and one summer internship.
I would guess that more than half the students attending UIUC, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Rutgers, OSU, or Penn State, have a pretty short EC list.
I would claim that for more than 90% of students now attending a four year college, extracurricular activities and achievements had little to no affect on their admission to their present college.
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For those willing to travel to Canada, McGill and U of Toronto also operate the same way.
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Same at European universities. But I suggest that those who do nothing in their youth miss out on far more than something as mundane as college admissions.
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When we were going through this process a few years ago, I noticed from the college tours that the Catholic schools emphasized well-roundedness.
FWIW, I never thought in terms of round or pointy, but instead I thought of interesting. What types of things is my kid interested in doing that not everyone else is doing? And I thought that “interesting” thing didn’t need to be the main activity time-wise, just something they were genuinely interested in that was a little different.
We didn’t care if everyone on the planet was doing what our kids enjoyed for ECs. We cared that our KIDS enjoyed the ECs they chose.
One of our kids went to a Jesuit college, and the other to a private non-sectarian university. Really, both kids had very similar ECs. For one kid, this was very much related to the college major, and for the second kid the ECs had absolutely nothing to do with college major. Oh…and both wrote their main college essays on something related to their ECs.
The key was…these kids really liked what they did, and did it for many years.
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As with many posts here on CC my answer is it depends. It depends on the kid, the family, the school, the major etc. My son started like a circle round. He ice skated, played baseball, basketball, football and golf, and, was a state indoor archery champion and was in the band playing the tuba. He also played chess and loved math. As he got older he became more an elongated oval and stopped most of the previous activities, started playing polocrosse and then polo, taught horseback riding and polocrosse all summer as a counselor, realized he wanted to be a vet and started working for a vet and taking his schools pre-veterinary program. He had great grades but didn’t worry about a ton of APs. Took what he needed to and what the colleges he was interested in wanted. Didn’t want the top xxx schools. He wanted a state school with a good veterinary school and bonus if it had an early admit program. This is an example of where the school didn’t matter and we let him drive what he wanted (within reason). We didn’t push classes or ECs other than making sure he had what he needed to meet his goals. Like sticking through the foreign language even though he didn’t like it.
All situations are different but I would say to look at your child and do what you can to follow what they want. Mine is entering his third year of vet school and even though he went to a school with a high acceptance rate he had great professors, was challenged and well prepared to now be at the top of his class and placed in a national competition for writing a technical paper. So, colleges can like pointy or oval or round but you want your student to find the school that has the hole their peg fits into.
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From the way the OP question is asked, it seems they are interested in college admissions not asking general advice on which activities are good for the young mind.
We have gone through admissions twice, and I believe that ECs are the greatest differentiator for otherwise ‘average excellent’ kids bar the hooks. Where we live there are many, many kids that are strong academically with multiple APs/DE classes and school participation in sports, music or other activities. All these kids apply roughly to the same schools. Teachers LORs in a large public school are mostly generic. You can write only 1-2 ‘once in a lifetime’ reference per year - for a class of 500+.
From what I read (including on this site), adcoms look for ‘talent’ and ‘impact’ demonstrated in a measurable way. Talent in arts or sports or math needs to be certified by somebody knowledgeable and preferably by showing achievement wrt to one’s peers. The easiest way to do that is to have awards - national, state, the higher the better. Impact can be quantified by how much you changed the world. That is why so many kids open non-profits and engage in research.
Top schools build a round class from pointy kids. Some kids have more than one spike. But a tall spike is preferable to a middling performance in many activities at school level.
If the question is about what is best for the kid, I believe it’s best that the kids are left to figure what to do with their free time themselves. This is how my generation grew up and we turned out alright.
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Well, I guess that is the difference-I too was left to myself, as you say, and thus did not pursue any musical instrument, foreign language, or even proficiency in a lifetime sport, all of which I now regret. Yes, I am fully aware those can be pursued in adulthood, but I wish I had done so in my youth.
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I have never pursued a sport competitively. I did and still practice many sports for fun and am in fairly good shape - hiking, running ~ 20 miles/wk, skiing, a little tennis, a little swimming. Same for my H who still plays soccer but never competitively. My friends who did sports competitively all have busted knees or other injuries and are less physically active.
I can appreciate music without playing an instrument. Maybe I don’t know what I am missing.
I do agree about foreign languages. Those are best learned when young. Fortunately, I did learn French and English before I finished HS. My parents facilitated this but did not push me.
ETA: I feel strongly against letting kids spend unlimitted time playing computer games or watching TV. IMO, these are passive activities that do not contribute to growth, physical or mental
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