I go to a very small school and although this is a negative in the sense that I have very little “guidance” for college admission (and I don’t have helicopter parents), it allowed me to advance heavily in Extra Curricular activities. With that being the case, I have about 6 clubs which I’m the founder and president of, and I’m also captain of the debate team, and president of student gov’t and things of that nature. My extra curricular activities don’t have much correlation (one activity I’m the president of the stock market club, and second I’m president of the volunteer club), so will that hurt me?
And another question (didn’t want to start a new thread),
I saw from scrolling through certain decision threads that people are saying “president of MODEL UN”, or “Captain of MODEL CONGRESS”, and what does that mean? I went to Princeton Model congress and Yale Model UN as the only participant from my school, so how will I write that on my Common app? Do I write “president” or just label who I was at the conference?
The fact that you do stuff and take initiative matters a lot more than what you actually do. Half the freshmen don’t know what they want to study anyways so they shouldn’t fault you for being all over the map in terms of interests.
Based upon my reading of the above, anything an applicant does on their own because their high school doesn’t offer that many extracurriculars is a plus factor. However, most students – outside of recruited athletes and Yo-Yo Ma like musicians – are NOT accepted or rejected based on their EC involvement. If I had to make a list of the import factors in Admissions, I would put EC lower down on the list, as in next to last:
Transcript, course rigor, GPA
SAT/ACT scores and any curriculum based tests such as AP tests, SAT Subject Tests, IB Exams
Teacher recommendations and guidance counselor report
Hey @gibby,where in your list would you include major awards?
And the reason why I made this thread is because I wanted to ask whether or not colleges would think that I’m only doing these EC’s to get in, because that truly isn’t the case (at least with me it’s not), so would that be an issue?
A major award, such as being an Intel Finalist, being a national or international winner of a prestigious contest, or having your research published in an established, noted scientific journal, would probably be on par with teacher recommendations. I would probably rank a local or state award after essays, but above EC’s.
College’s look for long term involvement (one to three years) in EC’s. Activities joined at the last moment, or activities that don’t require much of a time commitment are IMHO looked upon as fluff. Admissions Officers are experts are looking over an EC lists and determining long term involvement vs. padding. Watch this video till the end and notice how an exStanford Admissions Officer easily pokes holes in a student’s EC list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96XL8vBBB7o
Sorry @gibby but I couldn’t disagree more with this statement. I’m sure you understand the enormity of the difficulty of being an Intel Finalist or being an international winner of a prestigious contest (or even getting a paper published in a noted scientific journal for that matter.) How could these things possibly be considered on par with a teacher’s recommendation? Teacher’s recs can be highly subjective and not all teacher’s have experience with knowing how to write a great recommendation even if they wanted to. I believe your experience is colored by the fact that your kids went to Stuyvesant where the teachers are trained in rec writing and top colleges rely on their opinions to help them sort through a huge pool of self-selected stellar candidates.
I would say a quarter of the teacher’s at my kids’ high school are too new to have enough experience to understand who the real standout superstars are and at least another quarter of teachers don’t know how (or care enough) to write more than generic recommendations for most of their students.
Becoming an Intel Finalist (or winning IMO, etc) will almost certainly guarantee you entrance in at least one, if not most, of the elite schools (providing the rest of your app is sufficiently strong), whereas, a stellar teacher rec(s) guarantees you nothing (even with a sufficiently strong app).
^^ Point taken. Over the years, I’ve known a handful of Intel Science semi finalists and finalists, and they’ve all gone to HYPSM. Some have received multiple acceptances, but none that I’ve known have been accepted to all of those schools. So maybe a major award as I described guarentees acceptance to at least one top college, but not necessarily to Harvard.
Certain things matter much more than others. Intel finalist or winner, or having your paper published in Science, is almost certainly an admission to at least one HYPSM (assuming nothing else is egregiously bad.)
So, I guess in that regard, I agree with @gibby as well!
I know an Intel Finalist this year who was deferred by a top Ivy SCEA. Since becoming a Finalist, however, they have received a couple of Likely letters and acceptances to MIT, Stanford and Caltech. I expect them to get more good news in 35 minutes and I wouldn’t be surprised if the school that deferred them “showed the love”.
Being named a Hamilton Scholar is not in the same league as being named a semi-finalist or finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, Siemens Competition or Gates Millennium. So, no IMHO, I wouldn’t consider it a major award. See: https://student.societyforscience.org/intel-sts
But Intel would float better if the student was applying to be an engineer or have his intended concentration in he science field… So, let’s say that a student is applying to concentrate in social science , or humanities, would Intel still have as much weight as a Hamilton scholar ?
IMHO, being named a Hamilton Scholar is just not going to carry that much weight in the Admissions process at Harvard. It’s a minor award for a place like Harvard that admits the best of the best. And the best humanities students usually enter and win prestigious writing contests, such as http://www.artandwriting.org/about-us/