<p>My son is involved with activities outside his school(community service, sports which is not offered at his school.....etc) passionately.
I was just wondering since he is not involved with any activities offered in his school what adcom might think. He just has no time to get involved with activites at his school.
I was looking through Columbia application form and it separates in-school activities and out-of-school activities and was thinking why they would do that. Do they prefer either one? My son is thinking of applying to many selective schools. Please will anyone comment!</p>
<p>Most schools don't do that with their applications; I wouldn't worry too much about it.</p>
<p>The colleges don't care about where he does his ECs, just about the quality of the ECs. </p>
<p>They probably divide things on their apps because some students don't realize that activities pursued outside of school count, and such students may not have otherwise included them on their apps.</p>
<p>thank you both for your opinions now our concerns are over!!
But just one thing though wouldn't it look a little odd if there is no activity on one side of the columbia application?</p>
<p>Don't worry about it. There's nothing you can do about it, and it's not necessarily a bad thing anyway.</p>
<p>^ thanks but what do you mean by "not necessarily a bad thing"?</p>
<p>Well, I'm just saying, there's no hard and fast rule about activities in school. A college would probably want evidence of a student engaging his/her community in a beneficial way...whether that community is within the school or outside it doesn't really matter, and that's why I said it's not necessarily a bad thing if the student leaves the school activities column blank (generally we would assume that it's bad to leave a column blank).</p>
<p>It could be bad if the student isn't involved with the school at all, but I doubt that's the case...every kid does at least SOMETHING in school. Colleges might be suspicious if the kid doesn't do anything at school but has a slew of unofficial outside-of-school activities. But, again, that's probably not the case here.</p>