<p>im a current junior and im looking to add some new extracurriculars to look better for college because right now i don't have many. (before you say "you shouldn't be doing extracurriculars to look good on college admissions, everyone does it)</p>
<p>i do dance outside of school but i'm not too advanced. im a member of a few clubs at school but i'm too shy and reserved that if i were to run for a position, no one would vote for me.</p>
<p>any advice? i already do volunteer work at two hospitals but i really need some new extracurriculars to make my college app outstanding.</p>
<p>" ‘you shouldn’t be doing extracurriculars to look good on college admissions’"
Your retort: “everyone does it”</p>
<p>And no one gets any advantage from it. Colleges know this. HS students believe the myth. No extracurric is going to make your college app outstanding.</p>
<p>^ I second this. You don’t get any substance from just joining and putting X Club and Y Club on your app. If you can write and talk about those clubs with emotion, then you’ll impress colleges. </p>
<p>If you’re in a leadership position, then you have a lot of experience to talk and write about, which is when being in any EC even comes in handy. Try running for a position nobody runs for, or just try to make friends and run next time. If you’re not in a leadership position or aren’t an active and dedicated member to the club, it doesn’t mean a lot.</p>
<p>Otherwise, find some more volunteer work to do or do more at the hospital. Volunteering is a great EC, and if you really like it, you’ll add substance to your app by talking about it.</p>
<p>Even if you don’t have a “position” in a club, are there any club activities you could help organize? Like if your club has a fund raising event, or some specific activity they do for the school or something, you could volunteer to lead that effort. It beefs up your application and gives you a chance to accomplish something without a ‘vote’. Heck, if you do a good enough job, you might get votes by the end of the year. But even if you don’t, you will have accomplished something you can talk about on your apps and hopefully for your club as well.</p>
<p>Maybe lots of people do add ECs junior year, but colleges see right through this. You are MUCH better off figuring out how to be a bigger contributor to the clubs you are already in. If they don’t have an event – figure out some options and offer to run one of them. Clubs rarely turn down those who actually want to do work! If you can expand the reach of one of your clubs, that would be better than starting something new.</p>
Look, they’re right. Most colleges in this country pay little or no attention to ECs. There is a myth among HS students that you have to have ECs in order to get into college, but it simply is not true. Other myths include the supposed need to show you care about your community by volunteering (“got to have some volunteer hours”), that you need to show you are well rounded, etc. </p>
<p>If you’re still falling for the “everyone does it” type of reasoning, there probably isn’t much anyone here can say to change your mind. “Everyone” believes those myths about college admissions, and it probably makes you feel better to swim with the tide instead of having the willingness to make the effort to find out the real score.</p>
<p>You can see if the colleges you are considering look at ECs by looking at their Common Data Set filing. If you are aiming at one of the 150 or so most selective colleges, they DO care about ECs. In that case joining this or that doesn’t matter. They don’t want to see kids that are an inch deep and a while wide. As Stanford, an example of a school that most assuredly does care about ECs writes,
Edit: for grins I clicked to see your other posts. Your dream school is U of M. According to their CDS at <a href=“Office of Budget and Planning”>Office of Budget and Planning; on a scale of Very Important | Important | Considered | Not Considered they rank things like class rigor and GPA as Very Important. ECs and Volunteer work comes in at Considered. In other words it is not going to keep you out if you don’t do more. Instead of spending more time doing things that won’t affect your chances, I think you would be far better off spending that time trying to raise that 3.65 GPA since that is a factor they rate as Very Important. But that’s just me…</p>