<p>I am going to be a freshman next year and these are the ECs I am planning to do:
Fall: Cross Country (1st year sadly - not the best at running but will definitely put effort into improvement)
Winter: Speech (1st year, highly interested), Math League (many years of math competition experience - good preparation for AMCs/AIME), DECA (business is a strong skill of mine), Science Olympiad (qualified for Nationals in middle school - high school team is bad)
Spring: Tennis (Set to be Junior Captain at current pace)
I also do Karate year round (not too bad of a time commitment though; 4-7 hours a week).
I also plan on being involved with NHS/Student Council, Band, Science Fairs and possibly the school paper (our high school has an amazing student paper!).</p>
<p>I feel like I'm going overboard and that colleges will think I'm 'padding' my resume, but I actually feel like I'll enjoy everything on this list. Should I drop some things from this list? I mean I could drop Science Olympiad (not too much potential to do well as it's very team-oriented and our high school lacks good coaches) and Science Fair (I've qualified to state twice; my town has the second best representation at ISEF in the WORLD; very tough to qualify to ISEF without extreme amounts of time commitment and resources).</p>
<p>Any empirical or suggested advice? Thanks!</p>
<p>If you love all these things, I would say go ahead and do what you love. Don’t live your life based on colleges will think because it is a waste of time. Besides, don’t forget it’s your resume and you can put whatever you want on it. You don’t have to put all these thigs, if you don’t want to</p>
<p>If you like all these things, then do all these things until you can’t do everything that you’re doing well enough. When you can’t do everything well, you’ll have to drop something. Just don’t let the thing you drop be your school work. Unless your extracurricular activity is dunking a basketball or making Hollywood blockbusters, your extracurricular activities will never be as important as your academics.</p>
<p>Honestly, this isn’t rocket science. And it would be flat-out stupid to decide what you will or won’t do for the next four years based on what you guess the admissions committee at MIT or Princeton might be looking for in January of 2018.</p>
<p>next time don’t tell them your a freshman, they will eat you alive</p>
<p>sincerely
class of 2017</p>
<p>If you like these things, then do them. Few schools in the grand scheme of things REALLY care what you’ve done EC wise. As long as you’re out there doing something you enjoy you’re fine,</p>
<p>@guy1234 So true!!!</p>
<p>It’s not all about the colleges for me; I have high goals for a lot of these (winning at state for speech, qualifying to ICDC for DECA, qualifying for the USAMO-which probably isn’t going to happen, etc.). I know that if I do too many things and take the heavy coursework classes that I plan on taking, I will probably end up falling short in all of these.
I think I’ll just see how things pan out and see what I should drop/add to my ECs.</p>
<p>Bro, the thing is it doesn’t matter how many extracurriculars you have. so what if you participated in cross country? For the really good colleges like Ivy (if that’s what you want), participating means nothing. You have to shine.
I’ll use myself as an example. I founded our school’s DECA, founded the Investment Club, and founded the Guitar Club. But so what? My DECA didn’t win any awards.
I alsocreated an internet company a few years back, made a couple of thousand dollars. Not a big deal, considered what others can do.</p>
<p>RE: post #3. I was maybe a little too harsh. I apologize.</p>