<p>During high school, I haven't done that many extracurriculars and stuff. I didn't start researching colleges and looking into them until recently, and I never knew what the most amazing colleges expected, so I've never thought about trying to impress colleges that much. I'm passionate about a few subjects and enjoy some activities outside of school, but I don't think the relatively small amount of time I've spent on these things shows that.</p>
<p>I was wondering if it's a bad thing to try to do more my senior year of high school, and also during the summer, and if not, what I could do to help myself both for life and college. Does it look like you're just trying to suck up? For me, while I chose pretty difficult courses and got high grades, I didn't do much out of school last year other than totally unproductive things: AIM, facebook, music... Not to say that it wasn't a challenging year for me, but I know colleges expect more than just APs and SATs. I also think that with all that free time, I could really do more next year and regret not doing so before.</p>
<p>My class schedule this year, that I picked before thinking about all of this, is similar to last year. I tried to get into comp civics because our school has done well in nationals many times and I wanted to both improve my speaking/presentation skills and dedicate my time to be part of a family, but I didn't make it. Now I want to take mock trial instead for similar reasons, and it's also very time consuming, but while I know it will help me as a speaker I don't know if it gets totally busy until after college applications. I'm volunteering this summer, but it's only my first time and my total hours for this summer alone will seem like nothing, and I haven't planned doing/leading any amazing work. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could help me decide what else I could do with my time to help me get into more selective colleges, and hopefully to help me as a person as well (my friends say I'm nice and smart and stuff but also really quiet and lacking in confidence). Some things I'm already interested in are piano, violin, taekwon do, and the little volunteering I've done so far is more fun/meaningful than I thought it would be. It's sort of difficult for me though because I'm honestly not sure how tough my classes will be this year so I don't know what I can fit around them. I'm hoping to not have the huge procrastination problems I had last year that cut into my sleep and energy. And this summer is loaded with homework... for english alone we have to read like 1500 pages. And add college research/applications to all that.. :(</p>
<p>Thank you very much for reading this long post and I appreciate any thoughts !</p>