You should be planning to be involved in whatever these clubs do…not just be a figurehead president. My opinion.
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I mean I will be coming up with ideas and things like that and plan ways to implement those ideas which is the main job of the president and then just delegate the rest.
No, from what I’ve seen in my experiences with students, it doesn’t work that way. As the leader, you are expected to be proactive and set the example by being in the trenches with the club. You show up early for each activity, and you stay late to clean up and send out the follow-up and latest emails.
Any person can plan ideas. That can easily be done online. What would be the difference if you just plan and delegate when it can be done online? The college admissions officers are very savvy. They can snuff out club padding. In your essays, you may have to use your leadership activities to explain a cause or effect in which you, as a participant, had to make an aversive choice to finish a task.
Don’t do anything to impress colleges; do activities that you like.
The adcoms don’t want a laundry list of clubs that you think will get you in. They want to see what you do for yourself that impacts others in a positive manner.
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Well…in my opinion, you also need to be doing the doing. But that’s my opinion.
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Just to add another voice, this is not how it works. If the club is going to accomplish anything, the president must be the leader not just the thinker. The president will be doing more work than everyone else in the club. Why do you think that other people are going to be willing to work on the ideas you come up with if you don’t work on them yourself?
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yes, exactly. Another thing that is important for a leader to do is to listen.
In high school for my senior year I was president of the chess club. The problem was that I had absolutely no idea what to do as president. The way that I handled this was to ask other students, and gather their ideas. Then we jointly worked to put their best ideas into practice. This turns out to be pretty much exactly what a leader should do. It got others to understand that their ideas would be listened to, and got them involved in helping to make the club work for everyone. Another part of being a leader is to gently discourage bad ideas, but this did not happen to come up at the time.
Again exactly right.
Also, you do not need a long list of ECs. A few ECs that you do well is fine.
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FWIW, your reasoning of “COVID” is irrelevant. You’re going to be compared to your peers - all of which had the same obstacles because of that. All the essay and extra-curricular guidance we got related to S23 stated explicitly “we don’t want to hear your COVID story we want to know what makes you unique/different”.
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Also do I need to have even more impressive awards or no? Because one state award is seen as a level 2. So would me winning the AMC(in case I win-prob won’t happen very easily) help and probably the AIME because that happens before the admissions right? Because a lot of other people are there with 5 states awards, so increasing mine to two or three will be more helpful so would me all of a sudden winning a bunch of awards before admission next year(I am going to study for all the events so increase my chance of winning) look like I am trying to do activities just to get in. But atleast I have already gotten one award this year, so if I get 3 awards next year it won’t seem too excessive right?
So for example, if I run like a competition for a club, would me coming up with the competition questions count as more of like the hands on part of me working in the club.
This year, I have been starting to be more involved in generating a bunch of different ideas but the problem so far was the implementation and I had made a few first steps but things popped up that prevented that. So I have kind of learnt how to implement the ideas a little more now from the experience this year. Because this year, I came up with an idea and even got some people to sign up for the chess competition I was going to create between all the clubs but everyone was busy with other clubs especially since it was suggested at like February. But I have kind of had the experience so now I can try to properly implement it now.
I wasn’t completely uninterested in the clubs I joined when I did join them and already had more of an interest to the clubs I did join, but I also additionally factored in the impressiveness of the activity when making the decision between two top activities. It was a factor but I still enjoyed the activities I did. For example with business, I have been interested in that since end of 8th grade which initially arose from me watching youtube videos about investing and then it kind of grew over the years of me watching and reading more things about the topic. It was only really this year however, that I was able to participate in the club due to just the past two years being kind of troublesome. It is just that I factored in college admissions when choosing which of the top activities I wanted to do because I had to prove that I had interests in those fields so this is where impressing the college admissions part came in and it was just more of a guidance in terms of how I was going to show my interest.
You still don’t get it. You still seem to have a checklist of what you think a college will want to see. You don’t seem to understand that you are not supposed to “invent” things that you think will make you look impressive to an admissions committee.
I worked at a high school for 10 years and I saw the students who got into the top 20 colleges (including my own kids) and their amount of work as leaders. None of them were doing it to “look prestigious” and get admitted. They did sports and activities that they LOVED! If they could spend 24hrs per day on their activities, they would.
Your example, of running a competition, by developing questions, tells me that you are only doing so for admissions-keeping some sort of a laundry list of: prestigious/busywork. Sorry to be so harsh, but you are making it so easy for the colleges to reject you. Some applications have less than 10 spots for EC’s and awards. A laundry list just makes you look desperate.
How does your “coming up with competition questions” fully involve your few members of the club and exist to continue the core values of the club after you leave the school?
Your activities need to come from the heart and show why you are so passionate about those activities.
You have to absolutely love what you do, SO MUCH SO that the WHOLE school knows that you’re the “Sierra Club” guy-who puts out recycling ~20 bins for plastic, and collects those bins weekly and drives them to a local community group that sells products made from the plastic you’ve collected. (Surfer kid who got tired of finding poor water quality and plastic trash when he surfed; got into Stanford).
Or, the kid that led a club with a couple of blind students (one of them his sister) who got permission to place baskets to collect old prescription glasses, at local malls and ophthalmology offices, to recycle and make glasses for low income patients, at a local free eye clinic. He assigned a schedule of collections, trained the freshman students on how to collect and clean the glasses and prepped the other sophomores and junior classmen to continue his program long after he graduated. (I believe he got into Harvard).
There were throngs of students who tutored middle school students after school. In my son’s case, he worked with a friend who organized an after school tutoring program. They got permission from the school district to keep the middle school open after hours. Each of the five classes had about 30 middle school students and those kids were helped with math (2 different levels), History, English, Science, and a “special subjects” class if time permitted. The HS students organized a rotating schedule such that when tutor athletes were in competition, there were other students who were assigned that quarter’s tutoring. There was a committee with each of those HS students who were responsible for different aspects of the tutoring (advertising, parent concerns and contacts, scheduling, teacher liaisons, etc.) My kid got into most of his top ten schools. The kid who developed this tutoring system, got into all of his choices-he chose full ride at USC. They loved tutoring! Both my son and his friend were athletes, but they absolutely loved making an impact.
You have to have the passion, heart and desire to do EC’s that you like and not because you think it will look good on an application.
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THIS. This is what it’s all about. Do what you like…like what you do. The DOING part is important.
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OP- first and foremost, colleges are academic institutions. Which means that the single most important aspect of your college application is “What classes did you take and how did you do”. More rigor is better than less. Doing well academically is better than struggling.
After that, you have multiple opportunities to show who you are as a person. So not just a person who gets A’s in class- but someone who has an impact on their community. Volunteering in your town? Organizing a coat drive for the unhoused? Leading a petition to get lights installed in a public park so kids can play in the early evening? Or in your case- having an impact within your high school by taking on a meaningful role in an EC that you care about. You don’t need to be president to have a meaningful role- and being president won’t move the needle if it wasn’t a meaningful contribution.
During Covid, there was a kid in my community who saw the long lines of families outside a local food pantry and got really upset about it. Rain, cold, whatever the weather- hungry people, often with their kids, lined up on a sidewalk in masks waiting for a very long time to get their bags of groceries. He created an online appointment system-- if your timeslot is 10 am on Wednesday, get there at 9:55-- and your groceries are waiting for you with your name on it. People were lining up because the perishables go quickly (eggs, milk) but with the appointment system, people knew they were getting what they needed without standing out in the rain for hours.
He then extended the system to the donors- so that the trucks coming in from the grocery stores and restaurants who were donating excess foods didn’t all show up at 6 am on Monday morning, creating a long backlog as the workers inside the pantry had to unload and stock. So now the donations are spread out more efficiently, which means MORE donors want to help because they know they won’t have their trucks tied up for three hours every time they drop off a few hundred loaves of bread.
He got into every college he applied to-- the highly rejective ones. He was president of nothing. He won no awards (except now he’s getting local recognition, Citizen of the Year type of things). He had lots of blank spaces on his college applications-- leadership roles? Zero. Athletics? Zero. No EC’s. Except he saw a problem, took his programming skills and created a solution to the problem, then met with leadership of the food pantry, social workers from various organizations, deployed his Spanish language skills to reach out to the pastors and religious leaders to get them on board, met with the District Managers of the local supermarket chains, and got an ad agency to donate time to creating a new campaign to inform the community “no more waiting”. And got OTHER people to volunteer to help, since a lot of the elderly people in the community did not know how to use a computer to make an appointment (or did not have an internet connection at all).
So no EC’s…just a sustained commitment to making the world a better place in his tiny corner.
So stop obsessing about your EC’s. Just do stuff you care about, show some initiative, and the rest will follow.
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But how would doing those things show to colleges that I actually contributed though because they still need concrete things that you did as part of the club right? So would just doing those help.
So I can basically do something similar to what they did but more in my field of interest.
So like being innovative and creative with the events that I create that also help others is something that is seen as positive. But the issue is that it has to be big right so if I just make it so a lot of people are helped out then it can look good. Thing is I am going to start schoolhouse.world tutoring sometime this week and get up all the credentials and everything so that can show that I am passionate about helping others because I am willing to tutor or does it have to be even bigger.
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Also I am interested in my activities, I just do not know how to show that interest without any concrete statistic or something that I can show to prove that I am helpful because just saying that I helped a thousand people or tutored a thousand people isn’t really that big of a deal unless there is concrete proof.
I mean I have tutored math as part of a club before as well, but nowhere near a thousand but like 40 students so that doesn’t really matter.
Please, please stop trying to put together activities based on what you think will impress colleges. They’ll see right through you.
Instead, be authentic - put your heart in to the one or two activities that you’re genuinely interested in, and make an impact.
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