<p>I am thinking about starting a club in school? Will that look good for college, particularly those in California?</p>
<p>Depends on the circumstances. Starting a club about something you’re truly passionate about when your community is lacking in that area? Yes. Starting clubs (yes, clubs as in plural) just to rack up a lot of auto-leadership positions? No.</p>
<p>Anyone can start a club; far fewer can make it successful within their school and community. If it wouldn’t show up in a rec (ie, “kobepau has a remarkable passion for underwater basket weaving. He even started a club at Generic HS, and its membership is really quite impressive–it seems as if the whole senior class is involved!”), it’s probably not going to help you.</p>
<p>What doesn’t look good for colleges are people who look for activities that make them seemingly more impressive – i.e. resume whores.</p>
<p>For colleges that value ECs, only those that really have meaning and purpose are useful. I would hazard to guess that your proposed club is neither – since you’re asking total strangers if you should do it or not.</p>
<p>Agree with T26E4. I’ve talked to enough college admissions officers to know that, beyond sheer academic ability, they’re looking for real people with genuine interests and passions. The flip side is that they’re extremely wary of anything that smacks of resume-padding, and kids who go the extra mile to ensure that their ECs “look good” and in the end don’t really care about anything other than “looking good.” If that’s the impression the readers of your file get, it won’t help you and it could even hurt. That’s not to say you shouldn’t start a club if the purpose of the club is something you’re really passionate about and you think you can bring others along and make a viable, going concern of it, one that outlasts your time in HS. But do it because you really care about the activity, not because it will make you “look good.” And be honest with yourself here about your motives. Is this an idea that came to you because you were genuinely interested in the thing you propose the club to be about (which, by the way, you don’t even mention in your original post)? Or is it just an idea you came up with in the course of thinking about how you could improve your chances of getting into a selective college? If the latter, it’s probably a bad idea.</p>
<p>OT, but why the quotation marks around the word: good?</p>