Hi! I was wondering if I could get some guidance on where the best direction is to take my extracurricular activities, given my college hopes. I don’t have a complete college list yet, but I know that I intend on applying to a few top-tier schools. For reference, I’m adding my general academic profile as well.
- Likely Majors: CS and Economics
- Likely GPA when applying: 4.0 UW, 4.5 or higher W (i know it'll be very high but there are many different scales)
- APs: I should have over 17 by senior year, almost all 5s, a couple self-studied
- All classes that aren't APs are honors
- ACT: 36
- Probably top 10% of class, but I'm in an extremely advanced school program
- Demographics: White (and middle eastern, if that's an option), from CA, public school, applying for financial aid
- SAT Subject tests: 800 on Biology, and probably 800 or close to that on Hebrew, Physics, Chemistry, and Math II (i haven't taken them yet bc of covid)
- 3 years of Spanish
- math including AP calculus AB, BC, and AP Statistics
→ should I do dual enrollment? idk if my APs sort of make up for that but I’d definitely be down
NOTE: in order to be eligible for the school program I’m in, I ended up having to transfer schools in the middle of freshman year, preventing me from joining most of the clubs I wanted to that year.
ACTIVITIES:
things that I will most likely list:
- Science Olympiad (through school): since 9th grade (idk if it counts since I was only able to join at the very end of the year and i missed the season)
- FRC Robotics Team (through school): Since 10th grade
- CyberPatriot Cybersecurity competition (through school): since 10th grade
- Hack Club: a club I’m founding at my school in 11th grade to help get students into programming and to build more of a tech community
- TKS: a highly selective (3% or something) program for tech and entrepreneurship, starting in 11th grade
things that I may or may not list depending on how they turn out:
- CTFs: a kind of cybersecurity/hacking competition occurring many times a year that I could probably get good at and win awards in but it would take a lot of time
- Hackathons: tech/innovation challenges much like CTFs that I could probably win awards in but it would take a lot of time, probably couldn’t do both that and CTFs, I’d probably prefer to do hackathons if i had to choose one but either is fine and I’d choose CTFs if i knew they were better given I also do another cybersecurity competition (CyberPatriot)
- Tutoring organization: I’m trying to start an organization with some friends to give elementary and middle school students support in remote learning
- indie app dev - I like to make mobile apps and I might end up publishing some
- development work - I’m an exec at an company founded by a few friends of mine, but I didn’t found it so ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (I don’t know if there is any way for this to develop into something useful)
things I probably won’t list bc they’re not competitive but honestly idk:
- baseball 9th grade
- Climbing Club - started a club at my school in 10th grade just for fun, i guess it’s not academically competitive
- Piano: I’ve been playing for the past 5 years but I’ve never really done competitions and I feel like it’s too late to start
- Parkour: I spend a lot of time doing this one the side but there isn’t really a way to measure achievement since there aren’t really competitions
- tutoring: every week i tutor elementary school kids for their science olympiad competition
- more tutoring: I currently volunteer to tutor disadvantaged younger students who need academic help through a separate organization
AWARDS:
- National AP Scholar
- Various Science Olympiad medals (idk if I can list these as one award because they don’t have much meaning individually, but I already have a few and could end up with close to 10 from various events in various competitions)
- most likely national merit semifinalist, possibly further
- CyberPatriot national semifinalist (top ~7% of over 10,000 students), likely to happen again (again, can i count this as just one award or multiple if i get it twice?)
- Honor roll all 4 years
- I feel like i need more AAAHHHHH
—> I don’t actually know if awards and activities are separate parts of the application, so if anyone could help with that question it would be great!
- one of the biggest things I'm thinking about is if I should quit one of the school clubs/teams I'm in, since I'll only be able to display one or two full comp seasons due to both covid and the fact that I transferred, to focus more on other ECs.
- As you can probably glean, I have a ton of interests. Given that, I would be happy to dive into another thing if it would somehow boost my profile - I could probably do decently on the Physics Olympiad, Linguistics Olympiad, or Computing olympiad if I wanted to but that would definitely mean giving up a ton of stuff.
- I mostly just would like to see if anyone has any input on which ECs I should devote the most time to and which I should cut out to optimize my profile, because I know that everything's pretty all over the place right now. Should I do the things that'll get me the most awards? Should I make sure to stick with the clubs i've been in for the longest because it's important to show commitment? Should I put a lot of time into the tutoring organization I'm trying to create because that could be really valuable? Or should I just relax because my grades and scores will go very far? I just don't know what to focus on.