<p>My high school is very small, it only has 1,000 students (We're a 6th-12th grade charter school). There's only a few clubs, and only half of those actually do things and meet up, all others just sort of disappear in the midst of finals week. Starting a club is also very difficult, as there's not enough people that are interested in one thing. I do volunteer work occasionally and will begin do it more often, about once a week. What would you suggest for any additional EC's? If you do anything outside of school how did you hear about it, do you find it easy to keep up with it? </p>
<p>If it helps, I live in Houston, TX.</p>
<p>Size isn’t necessarily a determining factor in club/activity offerings; my kids went to a school with only about 220 in the high school, and they still had a lot of activities. The teachers were willing to help run clubs if the students wanted them. Stuff like a writing club, library club, Amnesty International, math club, programming club – all are student run clubs, and I am sure there are a lot more, I only know about the ones my kids did.</p>
<p>What about getting involved in something like yearbook or the school newspaper, if your school has one? Or if your school does any theater productions, either acting or handling tech duties or working on the sets/costumes/etc. Those are activities that tend to be a little more stable than student run clubs.</p>
<p>Outside school, my kids did things like scouts, 4H, one of them trained in a club sport (rarely competed, just liked to train), collected insects, monitored a local bluebird trail (entered the nest data into Cornell’s Nestwatch system). A couple of kids at our school joined a FIRST robotics team at another nearby school, since our school didn’t have one (after a couple of years they came back and started one at our school, but for a while they just worked and competed with this other school). They volunteered quite a bit with a couple of organizations (one worked on political campaigns, the other worked with a local food bank). One self-studied for the USA Biology Olympiad (a teacher at school was willing to help with signup and test proctoring if we paid the fee for the test, which wasn’t very much). She also took a free Udacity online course one summer in a subject she wanted to learn more about (Statistics), but couldn’t fit into her high school schedule. She also likes to write poetry, and has entered and won some competitions to have her poetry published both online and in books.</p>
<p>The boys across the street from us completed training to be lifeguards during the school year, and now have summer jobs in it (and skills they can use to work during college if they need to).</p>
<p>If you are interested in the sciences at all, check out this website:</p>
<p><a href=“http://buhlplanetarium2.tripod.com/FAQ/citizenscience.html[/url]”>http://buhlplanetarium2.tripod.com/FAQ/citizenscience.html</a></p>