<p>I'm an international student and my school doesn't offer elective classes or any of that stuff. It's really unusual for people to have ECs here (most take ESL classes, but I graduated before I even started High School, athletic people choose sports but I'm not one of them, and the extremely rare person will volunteer somehwere), so I never worried about that (mostly because I wasn't going to apply for colleges in America until September 2011).
I don't know what to do now. It's too late to start anything new (I really don't have the time since I have to study for the SATs and school and other stuff), and I really don't want to be rejected because of that. It's really a cultural thing, I guess. We're not encouraged at ALL. My school doesn't care about ECs at all, so we're actually encouraged to focus on school instead of "wasting our time" with community service or stuff like that.</p>
<p>These are the activities I thought of putting on my common app:
1. Participated in NaNoWriMo 2011 - wrote 51k-word novel draft in 24 days
2. Model UN - Been to a medium-scale event, organized a small one, and will attend a large-scale (national)
3. Head of project in school's fair - responsible for entire class' work
4. Local college advertising exercise - we had to come up with a Burger King ad and our group won
5. Keyboard classes, 4 presentations (3 years, but they'd be 7th, 8th and 9th grades so counts as only 1?)
6. Singing classes, 2 presentations (1 year)
7. Wrote and read graduation speech. It's not the same as a valedictorian because the school is much more flexible about who can do it, and also I'm not guaranteed quite yet, but it's very very likely</p>
<p>Do these sound too half-@ssed? Should I delete any?
Are ECs even that important for me? (Maybe International Students are seen differently?)
And should I try to explain why I didn't do more or will that sound too defensive/apologist and hurt my chances?</p>