Question about We the People Constitutional team

Applying to College
1

This is a bit of an urgent question since my teacher wants a decision by the end of today.

I am a rising senior and have the opportunity to join our WTP team which has historically done very well at nationals (consistently top 5). However, it takes up loads of time (say 20+ hours a week) and it seems like the program is altogether unknown by those who don’t participate in it. Is this a worthwhile investment in my time for senior year? Do top tier colleges acknowledge the amount of time and effort sunk into this program? Do they even know what it is? For reference, these are the colleges I’m thinking of applying to:
Carnegie Mellon
UCLA
UC Berkeley
Georgia Tech
Northwestern
Stanford
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Michigan State
Purdue
Cornell

In addition, the team is probably going to be a whole lot smaller this year since there were scheduling conflicts for a majority of students so team members may have to do up to double the work that past year students had to complete.

I really don’t want to screw myself over, writing mediocre essays or getting bad grades in senior year since I will be spending so much time in WTP.

I really wanted to get this off my chest and receive some advice of others. Thanks for any input and thanks for reading.

EDIT: also, what makes this decision even more difficult is that colleges will have already made their decisions before we go to nationals in April. Even WTP teams who traditionally do poorly and put in little effort aren’t distinguished from nationally ranked teams.

2

While I’m personally not aware of this program and I don’t know if colleges are, on your applications you get to list the time amount spent per week on each activity. Admissions officers will know from that how much of a commitment this was, regardless of if they are aware of the program/competition.

Also, depending what time of year the competitions take place, you may not even be able to let your admissions officers know of how well your team did in competition before admissions decisions are made.

If you think your grades or essays will suffer due to this commitment, don’t do it. In general, extracurriculars are the “least” important part of the application. The order of importance in general terms is GPA/Course Rigor > test scores > essays/letters of rec > extracurricular activities. Of course this is a broad generaliztion, but it is something to consider.

This depends primarily on 1. If you can balance it successfully with school and 2. If you enjoy it. Don’t do activities just to add to a college app, it usually isn’t going to make a huge difference.