<p>Appointed "leaders" most often use authority, not leadership. To "cooperate and follow the appointed lead" describes perfectly an authoritarian environment, one where leadership is not used.</p>
<p>It is interesting watch true leadership in action. Often the leader does very little talking. Even more frequently, the leader really helps his subordinates pick the best course of action, and then backs such decisions. </p>
<p>If you told me you haven't seen this approach used much in the corporate world, I would not be surprised. My own experience is similar. The working world does not have too many individuals who exercise real leadership, IMHO.</p>
<p>i am sorry, but 759 varisty captains? well, some teams have 4-5 captains EACH, so what leadership is there?</p>
<p>And please do not say, well, being a captain is soooo important...not so important...its a team, and the coaches set al lthe rules, captain, are for spirit</p>
<p>Being a captain of a team of say 18 players for a couple of months? Sure its intense, but skills gained? </p>
<p>So the President of the Debate team gets less respect then the captain of the golf team, with its 6 players</p>
<p>I agree that leading requires the ability to follow at times, that leadership activities can be a "dime a dozen" among college applications when viewed in the aggregate. But hopefully college can look a list of ECs that includes leadership and discern from that what an applicant's passion is!</p>
<p>How specifically would you demonstrate strength in academics and true passion about something meaningful to a college community? </p>
<p>A plea to participants: could we please list more examples of Ivy-level ECs, so that this thread has some relationship with its topic? </p>
<p>I'll give some examples of mathematics extracurricular activities. If we are talking Ivy-level, we go beyond mere qualifying for the American Invitation Mathematics Examination (something more than 13,000 students a year do, some as young as sixth graders) and look at qualifying for the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (recently expanded to over 400 students, most of which are seniors who have already been admitted to some college). But to be competitive at the highest-level Ivies in competition math, you would want to go on to the International Mathematical Olympiad (teams of six students from each country each year). If you don't like competition math, you could try a research project on mathematics that gains a high-level award in a science fair contest. Of if neither science fairs nor math competitions are your thing, you could try studying most of the standard lower-division undergraduate mathematics curriculum BEFORE applying to the Ivy of your choice. That's about the level for math majors at Ivy League schools, particularly at the most desired Ivy League schools. </p>
<p>Could other participants please provide other examples? Thanks.</p>
<p>Here are some examples of things that I've seen that show the passion/leadership of students headed for Ivy caliber schools or that could be headed to Ivy caliber schools if they'd accepted admission offers or had applied.</p>
<ol>
<li>Student lost an election for a top leadership position in the school marching band. The student had a long history of musical involvement. After losing the election, the student took over the job of maintaining the band uniforms, a thankless task requiring a lot of work that in the past had been done by a parent volunteer.The work included making sure that hundreds of uniforms were clean, repaired, and ready for wear each week during football season.</li>
</ol>
<p>Student not only designed a new system to handle this more efficently, she also used her position on the band's executive board to create and implement a new system to help freshmen band members acclimate to the organization. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Because of her interest in reading and because of her leadership, student became the first young person in the city appointed to any board of the public library. The board didn't know what to do with her, but she got the organization to initiate some new programs that would attract young people, and she also redesigned their web page. Both of these things were done on her own intiative, not because she was told to do them. </p></li>
<li><p>I don't know where this student is going to college, but what he did is an example of an Ivy-caliber EC. Student was an SGA officer who managed to start a program in which all of the public high schools in the city contributed to building a Habitat House, the first time anythig like this had been done by high school students in the area.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Obviously, if one is a professional actor like Natalie Portman (Harvard) and Jodie Foster (Yale) were when they applied to colleges, that would be a big leg up -- as long as one also had the necessary coursework and stats.</p>
<p>However, I hope the examples that I gave demonstrate that in most cases, what really makes students stand out is when they creatively and independently follow their own interests and talents, going well beyond what most people would do for "fun." I also seriously doubt that any students would do that much work in order to try to look good to colleges.</p>
<p>"How specifically would you demonstrate strength in academics and true passion about something meaningful to a college community?"</p>
<p>I know a humanities student who demonstrated this type of passion by putting together a college application that emphasized a long-term and unusual course of study: by listing college level course work, in area of interest taken while still in high school: during the summers at typical gifted student type programs and during the school year at the local elite U-- which had a cooperative relationship with the public high school. Student included a graded research paper, with laudatory comments, from most recent course and letters of rec from professors who offered. One letter was outstanding, stating student's performance was superior to that of grad students in the same class. For most colleges, student wrote in applications exactly which courses, with which professors student hoped to be able to study.. frequently citing publications by those professors to explain why student thought that individual was important in the field. Student had multiple ivy/elite u offers and unexpected scholarship offers from non-ivy schools... there was one waitlist at one of the least competitive schools on the list, which, however, called repeatedly when the waitlist postcard wasn't sent back in. Admissions clearly forwarded the apps to some depts because a few professors named in the apps called the student beginning in Feb. MHO is that the gpa/rank (sal) and test scores (mid 1400's) were high enough that the application wasn't dismissed out of hand and that once someone read it, it was unusual enough that it created an impression. Student was just very lucky that impression was positive rather than negative! Student was interested in a dept that is typically very under-enrolled.</p>
<p>This was a very lopsided application because although the student had excellent grades with all highest track courses-- there were no AP math/science courses, no chemistry, calculus, physics at all. This was not a scenario where the parents had spent years trying to inspire the student with a passion that would be desirable to competitive colleges. Parents are not involved in this area of study and in no way directed the student to this passion.. but did provide books/classes when requested by student to do so. Parents assumed that most competitive colleges would be out of the question since the student had decided not to follow almost all of the routine advice by admissions offices and had discussed this with the student as an important reason to include on the college list a half dozen safety schools that would do an excellent job of preparing student for grad school. </p>
<p>Student did not have any published work. Student did not seek out profs on pre-application visits, with the idea that professors have any impact on admissions decisions, but did visit their classes when possible, spoke to prof after class and mentioned these class visits in application.</p>