Let’s see:
D13 was mostly involved in competitive figure skating (8-10 hours 9 months a year generally before school and on Saturdays, 25+ hours per week in summer plus weekend competitions - maybe 4-5 times a year), theatre / singing (another 10-12 hours per week after school/evenings for most of the school year), community service activity (about 30+hours in summer total, plus 3 hours per week and missing school once or twice a month for the school year). So that probably averaged 20-30 hours per week for most of the school year. She had a rigorous load of honors / AP classes and often struggled to get enough sleep since she had to leave the house by 5:30 a.m. most mornings and often had theatre rehearsals into the evening before she could even start on HW. In retrospect, I wish she could have gotten more sleep but I don’t know what she would have dropped. She absolutely loved all her ECs (and did pass on several vocal groups because she felt it was too much) and she also dropped down to honors level for most of her math / science courses as she is more of a humanities person.
S16 seemed like an EC slacker compared to D. He had soccer (varsity in Fall - maybe 12-15 hours per week including practices and games and dropped back to two indoor / club teams in winter / spring totaling maybe 5 hours per week plus some weekend tournaments). He also had music (5 hours per week private lessons and practice plus marching band in the fall – typically either Friday nights or essentially all day on Saturdays, rehearsal was during school). And he did a small bit of volunteer coaching – about 3 hours per week in the spring. One year he also spent quite a bit of time outside of school preparing for National History regional and state competitions. S16 had an extremely rigorous academic schedule - 10 APs spread across all subjects (calc bc, chem, bio, APUSH, Eng, German, Econs, physics C, American Gov) – basically took the hardest schedule he could without skipping lunch or dropping band. So he probably topped out at 20 hours per week for ECs but heaviest in the Fall each year.
Neither kid did any typical HS clubs.
Both of my kids rarely if ever did homework on Friday or Saturday nights but both spent all day every Sunday on it (plus of course HW during the week - often 4-5 hours per evening). Both kids had very good but not perfect GPAs (mostly As with one or two Bs each year). Our HS does not give +/- final grades – both my kids prioritized and were typically just on the right side of 90% for most of their classes. Both were pretty much A- students (but probably could have had higher grades if they had more time / saw the benefit to work just a bit harder). Both had 32 ACTs that they couldn’t manage to raise after 2 attempts (although they did only a limited amount of prep for either attempt).
Neither kid picked activities to build a college resume although I remember “encouraging” (read nagging) son to do more or maybe even get a job. We felt their activities (S especially) were pretty typical for high achieving students in our HS and likely necessary to be accepted into the selective colleges they ended up applying to. D reached higher than S in terms of her applications but didn’t get in to any of her reaches. S ended up not even applying to any high reaches both because he didn’t have a strong interest in any particular college when he started the search and because his GC didn’t think he had a strong enough EC resume for them. Both kids were accepted to similar ranked schools - mostly LACs/mid-sized research universities in the #20-50 range (although D had one acceptance to a top #20 LAC) and both received a range of merit offers (which was awesome since we are full pay until we had two in college at once).
I see both my kids as very smart, hard working kids who have a few nerdy tendencies / interests each, good social skills, and are generally nice to be around. I have no doubt that they are well prepared for and will both do quite well in college but they aren’t necessarily uber intellectuals.
They both would have had to exhaust themselves to get better grades, higher test scores, do / lead more and still with no guarantee of getting accepted to “better” colleges. And, for what? They both landed at great places that are probably just where they are meant to be.
So I say, it’s fine to research what others do so you get a sense of the overall applicant pool but really every individual has different interests, tolerance for stress / busy schedules, need for downtime, etc. And for the vast majority of colleges, most decent / good students who do something / anything outside of the classroom will be able to put together a very solid application and have a lot of great options to choose from. As they say on CC, YMMV but I think it’s extremely important for each student to “run their own race” and for parents to try as hard as we might to let them.
Sorry for the extremely long post - I didn’t intend for it to be. I just see so many people stressing about ECs.
