I’ll try again, but I dug through this forum and it looks like the question has been asked several times over the years and never answered or even responded to. But the Coca Cola Scholars app has a section for school activities and is quite explicit over and over again that these activities must be at school. Then there is a section for community activities which seems pretty geared towards community service, volunteer work, clubs, and internships. This seems to leave a gaping hole in all the things that people do outside of school because most or all schools dont offer it and in some cases people train in these activities for 20-40 hours a week for years, they perform, they compete, and in some cases go to various national and international competitions. Things like gymnastics, ballet (or dance in general), figure skating, swimming and diving in a lot of places where schools dont have the facilities, and more. Thats just a few off the top of my head. Is this application seriously not giving a spot for these people to list their activities and accomplishments? (you could also add a lot of music into this category as well, and theatre etc)
I guess nobody wants to ever answer this question because they don’t want competition? So I’ll provide more context. Not only does the wording in the community activities section not really seem to fit well, but you can only add 3 activities and can only add leadership roles like President, VP, Treasurer and stuff like that, which makes no sense. Additionally in the school section you have like 8 categories where you can add details for between 2 and 4 activities each. So for school you can add like 25 activities but for community you can try to awkwardly wedge in only 3 activities but you cant provide any detail about them so it provides no context and shows nothing about level of commitment or dedication. (Honestly the school side isn’t much better but you can overwhelm them with volume on the school side).
The instructions that I just checked cite recreational/travel sports as examples of community activities, so it should be fine to list ballet, figure skating, etc. in that section.
I don’t have anything useful to say about being able to list only 3 community activities other than that an applicant’s fifth- and sixth-most important activities probably aren’t going to make a huge difference in the decision process.
I reached out to them about this to ask a similar question. ANYTHING done outside of school can be entered in that section. And because they offer scholarships to students from throughout the country, they don’t want to over-reward students in places where they can do a lot – from what they said, those who advance through the process typically have 3-4 meaningful out of school things they can do. Since more students have the chance to do the usual types of school actibities, that’s why that section is larger. ANd the leadership/participation levels allow for the traditional Pres, VP, etc., but also for highest leadership (which could be captain of a team, first chair, lead dancer, etc.), other leadership, or simply participant. Good luck to your applicant.
Thanks for finding that, but the fact that it cites recreational/travel sports just indicates that they don’t understand what these kids are doing. There are kids that train outside of school at impressive and elite levels, these are not recreational sports. They do so because schools don’t offer these sports and the same goes for performing arts - in many cases and definitely not at this level of training. The application needs revamping. It is clearly a numbers game the way it is set up for phase 1 (which probably makes sense to some degree to get to phase 2) and with no way to really tailor what the student enters, the student who participates in the most things regardless of the level of participation is going to move on and the student with almost nothing on their school side because they train/rehearse/compete/perform 7 days a week is going to be dropped. Since on the school side applicants can note 118 activities and give more “details” about 25 of them vs the community side where they can note up to 9 and give “details” about only 3. But really they cant give any details about anything and then on top of that those loaded up on school activities can add 3 community service activities on the community activities page. While the students who are training at elite levels 30-50 hours a week and performing or competing outside school, and may do so in 2 or 3 different organizations and then may have different nationally reputable summer programs that they had to audition or compete to get into may actually have 5 -10 very valid things to list but can only list 3 and cant give any details at all about them. There is no way to quantify that work or commitment on this application. So if the outside of school student lists Gymnastics, or Ballet or Figure Skating or whatever for 4 years, with no way good way to list levels (because president doesn’t work and they don’t offer equivalent options like varsity and jv, captain etc like they do for sports on the school page) and there is no way to indicate the time commitment - even if they can list two orgs or 3 - that is not going to be able to compete against the school stuff just because of quantity. Also, What if their 4th item is studied at Juiliard (intentionally spelled wrong to not create a hyperlink) for the summer? Or studied at Berklee (not spelled wrong but wasn’t creating a hyperlink) summer program? No room, because the first 3 things were the primary things they needed to list. Also, because the student had to list their main items here, they also have nowhere to list community service now, which is also obviously a key component of this award. I mean, I know these things are long-shot uber competitive anyway, but this doesn’t help any. I just wish these application designers would think more before they made these very restrictive applications. At the very least, they need more “Other - fill in the blank” fields and also in the case of this one, it needs to ask questions about how much time you spend on those main items you detail.
I guess they could use highest leadership or other leadership, it just doesn’t seem to fit quite right, but better than nothing, so it’s a good suggestion, thanks. The biggest problem I have is the kids doing this level of training outside school don’t get to do the stuff in school and outside of school because nearly every normal hour is spent training outside school. Just doing that is hard enough. But, like I said, they can only list 3 things on the community side. BTW, I also tried calling their help line the other day, just got a recording saying to look at the website. But thank for the feedback. I think between the shortcomings of the common app and this and all the deadlines piling up, and everything I was just feeling a little frustrated for my child. But like I said, I know this is a super long shot anyway. So, good luck to everybody who applied or is applying.