<p>i totally agree with pearfire!!</p>
<p>"well, apparently, if u live in the US, u will have lots and lots of oppurtunitites, not just EC wise but also awards wise and so on."</p>
<p>If your schools in your country don't offers any EC opportunities, you can make some opportunities yourself. A letter from your employer praising your Work ethics would be much valuable than an academic award. I head of this kid form Saudi Arabia, his school didn't offered any EC. He started an project to increase dialogue between Jews and Muslims. These are the types of ECs which are actually praised by adcoms of Selective colleges- Taking Initiative, Taking Risk</p>
<p>If you live in the US and you can work, you are eligible for work-study to help pay off your tuition.</p>
<p>I'm in a weird case where I'm in the process of gettin my green card, so even though I'm am international student, I may be eligible for domestic aid in upcoming years. I don't know if this helps, but Stanford told me that they take situations like this into consideration during the admissions process.</p>
<p>Other colleges have told me up front that I would have an advantage amongst other "real" internationals who need finaid, but only if my stats are competitive enough. </p>
<p>So, I guess it really depends on your situation and the school.</p>
<p>Abhi, I totally see your point. I didn't say ,however, that living outside of the US means that you have no oppurtunities and no chance of getting into a good college at all. Just think about what kind of achievement this Saudi Arabian kid could have attained if he had lived in the US. I think you can barely deny the fact that the US offers many more oppurtunities. Of course, you can do community service in, say, Germany as well. But very very few ppl do this, you're less likely to have something like this on your application. In the US, however, soooo many ppl do it that it almost seems obligatory. So yea, I think you get my point now: The US will prep you better for college admission to top colleges. So getting is harder, but not impossible.</p>
<p>How does a kid not living in the US spend his/her time outside of school (provided school doesn't last until 6 pm)? Even intls should spend their time in a reasonable way. They may hold a part-time job, play a sport or an instrument, take care of their siblings. The only kind of student that top colleges do not want is the kid watching TV all day.</p>
<p>Don't forget that this forum is not quite the best representation of the American high school student body. At the US school I attended for a year, hardly anyone (if anyone at all) had an EC list of the kind you see here on CC all the time. What you see here is the cream of the crop. And when I just look at my German high school in comparison, certainly fewer students do have "ECs" at all. But there are a couple of students that are doing things that are quite impressive as well (one just went to Hungary for a week to play the percussion, a girl has started and now coaches the first female football team in the region, I got a prize at a national math competition) - and none of those oppotunities were handed to them/us on a silver platter.</p>
<p>YES, this is exactly what I'm talking about!!! No one in Germany had it handed to him/her, whereas in the US, students tend to have to do stuff, like community service and some ppl in AP classes have to participate in competitions. It's so much harder to have the decent ECs for a German than for someone living in the US. Like I said, you just get so many oppurtunities that ppl outside of the US can only dream of. And I say this as someone who has lived in both countries. Had I lived in the US all my life, I would have a much better chance of gaining admission.</p>