<p>Basically, how important is it to get involved with school (for future employment)? Do employers really care whether I was involved with Engineers Without Borders or some BioEngineer's club? Will they think I did nothing but study if I have a 3.5+ GPA if I did nothing with the school?</p>
<p>I'm going into my second year in ECE. It's a commuter school in Canada, so there's not much school spirit or frenzy that I seem to see on the forums here. I don't really mind the impact of not getting involved with the school, and I'm only wondering this from a future employment perspective.</p>
<p>They are as important as proper grammar is.</p>
<p>Seriously, though, your question is too vague because not all extracurricular activities are created equally. IMO, just being a member of “Engineers Without Borders or some BioEngineer’s club” is pretty useless, unless you guys actually worked on a project. For example, being on your school’s robotic car team and doing design work would be more impressive. </p>
<p>Any activity where there is a “tangible” engineering project focus is fairly useful and important: building your own projects on your own time, going to a hackathon and building a cool gadget in 24 hours, etc.</p>
<p>Furthermore, an internship sort of counts as an extracurricular, and internships are very important.</p>
<p>In my relatively uninformed opinion (since I’m still in college), having relevant project/internship experience slightly edges out having a high GPA when it comes to getting a job. Why? GPA is not going to get you the engineering job. How you handle the technical questions in an interview will, and having actual real-world experience will help with that.</p>
<p>Canadian schools tend to be ‘commuter schools’ but good luck using that as an excuse. I know for a fact- since I work at one- they have tons of activities, clubs, causes, sports to join. Moreover, there is the entire community around you that you can also be involved in, whether its doing volunteer work, interesting community leadership or various types of work. </p>
<p>IMHO, if you are in ECE, and all you can show after four years is that you studied a lot at your parents house (and worse, blame it on your school), you are going to fall into a stereotype that probably isn’t going to help you (unless of course it takes all your waking hours to get a competitive GPA, which is a primary necessity). It also means you wasted four years missing out on a lot of interpersonal development and building character, and building leadership and management skills, and developing a chance to show the world you are interesting, a go-getter, able to work effectively with other people. Then again, if your only interest and motivation for getting involved in the world around you is to create some kind of resume facade, that isn’t going to take you very far either.</p>
<p>I think getting if you can get summer job experience with engineering firms or research experience (i.e. NSERC), along with a nice gpa, that would be pretty impressive and should cancel out the “no extracurriculars” to employers. </p>
<p>and @ starbright, although my school has a bunch of clubs like you said, it just doesn’t really have that school spirit like what the OP experiences. For example, I read on the school newspaper that < 10% students voted in the student elections…</p>