Good grades, but no extracurricular activities. Am I screwed?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

I am currently going through my Sophomore year of high school. I’ve been getting A’s and B’s in all of my classes (all honors and a couple AP) my GPA is somewhere around 4.4 Im pretty sure. Even though my grades are not bad, Im afraid that my college transcript will look poor with not that many extra curricular activities. I currently only do Football, a business club, and some community service here and there. I guess what I am truly asking is if my lack of activities is capable of hurting my chances of getting into more selective colleges? And if so how could I improve?

2

You don’t need to have a long list of ECs. For the top schools you need a small number of ECs that you care about. For most very good schools you don’t need to be a perfect applicant, which implies if other parts of your application are very strong you hardly need ECs at all. Also, you don’t need to go to Harvard or Stanford to be a success in life.

It sounds like you are doing well. Keep ahead in your homework, do as well as you reasonably can in your classes, participate in the ECs that you care about, and you will do fine. When the time comes look for universities that are a good match to what you have done and what you want to do, and ignore the rankings.

3

Thanks for the reply and the words of encouragement :smiley:

4

You’re doing great I wouldn’t stress about this. I know football can be a very time consuming sport and you are in other activities so I wouldn’t worry. Do you feel that you have a lot of free time and are bored?

Find a couple activities you really enjoy and do them. I remember doing community service a couple-few times a month doing 10th and 11th and during senior year I was a student ambassador for the entire program! Kinda just thrown at me though, principal said, oh you know you’re a student ambassador right? Uh yeah ok I eneded up enjoying it doing a few extra things+ community service, but they were things I wanted to do(mostly) so it gave me something I wanted to speak about enthusiasticly to colleges come senior year.

Am now a freshman at a top college… it’s hard! Just keep moving forward and don’t dwell on the past and most importantly have fun in high school! Good luck!