<p>I am thinking of teaching myself German this summer; hopefully I'd reach a decent level of proficiency. I'd be doing this for myself, not to pad my resume or anything.</p>
<p>But of course I have to ask. Do you think adcoms would be interested in this if I was a competitive applicant at their school?</p>
<p>I definitely believe so. On my college application, I put down teaching myself French and Cantonese as regular extracurricular activities. As long as you are passionate about it and can somehow show it to them that this activity has meaning to you, then you will definitely start to stand out.</p>
<p>I got into Columbia, just to let you know. :D</p>
<p>Thank you and congrats!</p>
<p>I put down learning Spanish by myself as one of my ECs, and sort of showed how, despite the lack of resources (very few classes available in my area, the ones we have are pretty frickin expensive, and hardly any Spanish speakers in this part of the world), I tried to teach/familiarize myself using the internet and books from the local library, as well as media (movies, podcasts, songs).</p>
<p>Of course I never really got anywhere with this style of learning--I did it for about two years, and I had to take a break senior year because school work and ECs were taking up too much of my time and energy.. I've forgotten a lot of what I'd "learned"--but I plan to finally formally study Spanish in college. So, that make it seem like what I was doing actually had some sort of focus/purpose.</p>
<p>And yeah I kind of mentioned all of that in the ECs section of my applications, so don't worry so much about it, just do what you feel you should.. and it's great that you're doing this out of your own interest.</p>
<p>I have no idea how the adcoms viewed this component of my application, but I'm an international student and I got into Mt Holyoke, and just recently off the waitlist at Wesleyan.</p>
<p>Yay, someone else is trying to self-study a language! GO FOR IT!</p>
<p>I am trying to teach myself Japanese and I probably will put it on my app as an EC (if I can keep it up).</p>
<p>wow this is a really interesting post. Now I'm thinkin bout teaching myelf a language over the summer!!</p>
<p>my s is teaching himself italian....got into villanova business school. he has lots of other things that he does as well, but he wants to do an international internship in marketing. he has been doing so for about 18 months.</p>
<p>showing that you are successful in doing what you are doing will be very helpful. scoring well on an sat subject test would be very, very impressive.</p>