am a freshmen this year and i heard joining clubs looks good on your application
I just sighed up for the art,FCCLA,and the book club. Do i need to write down the name of the club i joined and when i joined on a piece of paper and hand that in to a collage or something.
When it comes time to apply to college there is a section in the application for you to write down the clubs you have participated in and the estimated number of hours/week you spent on each one.
As a freshman, you are looking to find clubs that hold a particular interest for you and those where you can be a leader. You can move into being an club officer or lead a particular project under a club. Yes, start tracking now so that you don’t forget anything. Our high school also listed the activities/club history of seniors in the yearbook.
Sure, you can start taking notes for a resume… but do not join so many clubs you can’t remember their names without a written record!
You want to join things because they interest you, not because they will look good on an application. Colleges don’t want a superficial joiner with a long list. They want someone who knows what they enjoy and will contribute meaningfully to activities in campus, as they demonstrated they did with their activities in high school. If you do things that matter to you, you will come across as authentic and committed, and that will be great.
Yes, you can track them, on the Coalition Application’s locker section or in your own electronic file or piece of paper you keep at home. This may be helpul if there are awards or contests or events with special names and dates you may wish to remember.
Approach high school activities as something to enjoy in their own right, not as something just done for a college admissions committee. These are four years of your life that can be really fun when you are not in one of the more stressful moments! Be able to look back at high school and know you did things you enjoyed with friends you liked. You don’t get these years back, so live them fully!
When my son started his sophomore year, I realized it was eventually going to be helpful to have a list of his ECs, community service, honors and awards, leadership positions, etc., so I thought back to his freshman year and wrote down everything I could remember he did. Then I started keeping a list of everything he did going forward, organized by year. Just a simple list (not resume format or anything like that) in a Word document on my work computer, but I put every little thing he did on there, when the activity occurred, approximately how long the activity took (e.g., twice a week for 3 hours each time between April and October) and what club the activity was part of, and I updated it periodically as there was new stuff to record.
That list has been unbelievably useful now that he is a senior working on his college applications. When you use the Common App, you can only list 10 activities, and you’re supposed to list them in order of how important they are to you, and how much time you spent doing them. It’s hard to do that if you don’t have something to work with. Having a detailed list helped my son group some small activities together, reasonably estimate the actual amount of time he spent doing things (if you forget all the little things you did, you tend to underestimate), and remember things all the little things involved in a club so that he could develop a detailed resume and present the best summary of his Activities on the Common App.
So, absolutely, if you can get in the habit of writing your activities down, it will really help you in a few years.
That said, when you think about joining activities during high school, do what you genuinely feel drawn to. Don’t do something just because it sounds like it would look good on your college application. Part of being in high school is trying things that sound interesting, discovering what you like to do and don’t like to do, and figuring out what you are good at doing. If you do that, then by senior year, you will likely have a list of activities that really reflects who you are as a person. And you will have good essay material. That is what colleges will ultimately be interested in, i.e., who you are as a person and how your genuine abilities and talents (not something contrived to look good on an app) will contribute to their campuses.
Good luck, and enjoy high school! It will be your senior year before you even know it.