<p>As long as you are a U.S. citizen, you’ll be considered a domestic applicant, no matter where you live. That’s good. At most selective colleges and universities, international applicants face much tougher competition for admission, and need-based aid for international applicants is severely limited, if there is any at all.</p>
<p>Moving abroad may create problems for you if you’re looking at public colleges and universities. Unless this is a temporary move, you could end up being a resident of no state at all. That would mean you didn’t qualify for in-state tuition anywhere, and you’d be in the more competitive out-of-state admissions pool. Depending on the circumstances of your move, this may or may not be the case, but it’s probably something worth investigating early. None of this would be an issue at private colleges or universities, where your state of residency is of little or no consequence.</p>
<p>As for extracurricular activities, I don’t think you have a huge problem here. For one thing, most colleges and universities in the U.S. don’t actually give a hang about extracurricular activities. There are over 2500 four-year colleges and universities in the U.S.; of those only the competitive ones, maybe a couple hundred or so, use extracurricular involvement to make distinctions among academically qualified applicants for purposes of admissions. (I will admit, however, that those selective schools, however many they are, to account for about 98% of the traffic on College Confidential; hardly anybody around here posts a question wondering how to get admitted to, say, Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. No offense intended to any FHSU Tigers who might be reading.) Of the ones that do care, most of them will understand that moving from the U.S. to Turkey is likely to cause some disruptions to your schooling, and that one area that may be disrupted is your involvement in activities.</p>
<p>But even at the selective colleges and universities that do care about your extracurricular life, they’re not evaluating it by a checklist, or some other kind of quantitative metric. They’re examining your extracurricular activities to get a sense of who you are. Are you an artist or an athlete or an entrepreneur or a social activist? Are you likely to take the point, or are you more of a dependable team player? When you enroll in a college or university, what contribution are you likely to make to the non-academic life on campus? At colleges and universities that ask these questions, by the time they get to this point, they’re no longer just tabulating applicants’ scores. Instead, they’re trying to assemble a class that will be interesting, lively and diverse. And within a college, what they’re trying to assemble may change a bit from year to year. If you’re looking at such colleges, having spent your senior year in Turkey will probably be much more distinctive by itself than anything that you do while you’re living there. And if they’re looking for applicants who’ve recently lived abroad, they’ll be interested in you for that reason. If they have an abundance of expatriates when you’re applying, then the deck may be kind of stacked against you at that college for that admissions cycle. You really can’t predict these things.</p>
The bulk of my extracurricular experience comes from volunteering and community service. Sometimes, if you look on the websites of various museums, you can find volunteer opportunities for teenagers and young adults. Also, have you thought about tutoring children in various subjects or babysitting? That can also provide good extracurricular experience. Hope this helps some, and good luck with your applications! :)</p>