Hi, I’m a rising junior.
Throughout my first 2 years of high school, I wasn’t completely sure about my career path and future major. I finally found my passion, engineering, but none of the activities I did earlier shows my passion. I’m thinking about joining robotics team and engineering club next year and starting the organization, but I feel like it’s too late at this point.
Will top colleges care if I start my extracurriculars that show my passion in junior year?
None of my extracurricular activities had anything at all to do with my major. That did not stop me from attending MIT for my bachelor’s degree. One daughter had almost no ECs at all until her senior year of high school. She still got accepted to every university she applied to, with merit aid from most of them.
You do not need to have ECs that relate to your major. The use of ECs for admissions is mostly for the really top universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford level) to choose from among a long list of applicants who are all academically very close to perfect.
Perhaps a more important point of ECs is for you to get some experience doing whatever you want to do, while interacting with other people, and while showing the ability to stick with something and do it well.
You should participate in the ECs that make sense for you. Whatever you do, do it well. If you Google “applying sideways MIT” you should find a blog on the MIT admissions web site that basically says this also: Do what you want to do and do it very well.
If you are interested in robotics, then join the robotics team. To me this seems like great fun and a great thing to do. Even if you just have a few robots rolling around on the floor in your high school and never enter a competition, it still seems like great fun and a worthwhile activity to me.
When it comes time to apply to universities, make sure that you apply to at least two safeties and keep your budget in mind, and look for schools that are a good fit for you.
I do not think that you have anything to worry about.
But I do wish that my high school had a robotics club when I was there!
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–Agree with the above post that ECs do not have to be related to your major.
–You have no way to start ECs earlier at this point so just move forward and get involved with clubs you find interesting/fun and that you can make a positive contribution to.
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So - your title says you did no ECs - but then it says you did earlier activities.
Great ECs - jobs, band, sports, walking dogs, helping at hospitals, food drives and many many more.
If you enjoy robotics, great join. If you want to help find books for the libary, do that.
If you did stuff your first two years - keep doing it. You want tenure, impact and responsibility (whether named or not - i.e. you don’t need a title like president).
Your first two years activities (if you had them, I’m unsure) will be equally as important as robotics club.
Do what you enjoy, what makes you feel good and helps others.
When you get to college, you may have 100 people in your major and hopefully they have 20 or 30 or 40 unique backgrounds. No one wants clones!!
Be yourself - and you’ll be fine.
Same here.
I love this sentence…but it is something of an oxymoron, and I say that as somebody who grew up with engineers, married into a bunch of engineers, has an engineering child, and taught in an engineering school.
IMO, the whole “found my passion thing” is overblown. You have discovered a new interest- hooray! so follow it and see where it leads you. “Engineering” covers a very, very wide spectrum, and if that world is your happy place, figuring out which end of it suits you best is your next job. So, yes check out robotics. Join the engineering club.
And: look at the specifics of a bunch of engineering programs. Marinate in their websites, find the student stuff, see whose pages have things on them that make you think ‘oooh, that sounds like something I would love to do’. Keep notes (you will forget why you liked program X), and see what patterns emerge. That will help you identify programs that are a good fit for you (engineering programs can be surprisingly different).
Also, good news: engineers are born not made (don’t be @ing me, people- you won’t change my mind), and if you are an engineer by temperament there are almost certainly hints of it in the choices you have made over the years. We saw it in the collegekid by the time she was 7; she was 20 before she saw it in herself (and we had a very fun evening coming up with examples of her latent engineering-ness scattered throughout her childhood).
And finally, as others have noted: nobody expects (or even wants) students who are only their subject. Keep up the ECs that you enjoy, that mean something to you.
Define top schools?
The truth is, most engineering schools care very little about ECs. They do want to see a few things in there but overall, your GPA, standardized scores and ability to pay will determine whether you can attend a school or not.
Do what you love and try to enjoy your last two years of high school.
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