<p>Maybe all students should be required to have some “extracurricular” credits. All successful premeds need to do a lot of these any way. Why not formalize it so that the college can help control the quality/quantity of the extracurriculum, or at least help double-check whether the students really do it.</p>
<p>Although medicine is not consulting/i-banking, the following description about how the top business/law/consulting/i-banking companies recruit their new hires is “interesting” – At least the academic record counts a little bit more for premed students:</p>
<p>“while recruiters don’t particularly care about the quality of applicants’ academic records, they do care about extracurricular activities – but only as long as the applicant graduated from one of the select five schools. And from there, headhunters attempt to filter out “tool[s]” and “bookworm[s]” by targeting those with stellar recreational resumes (crew looks good, ping pong does not).”</p>