What’s a typical number of hours for decent ECs? We’re overseas and so I don’t have a good sense of that; there are no mandatory community service hours for graduation or anything and the importance of ECs isn’t stressed at all here. S has graduated (is doing a gap year) and seems to have about 600 over four years of high school, just estimating casually at this point. How does that stack up? I have no real sense of it.
600 hours would be fine. Some of it is how many different ECs does he have?
If it is 600 hours of band and nothing else, he won’t stand out as an applicant to those colleges who emphasize ECs.
It’s generally not about the number of hours but rather what was accomplished as a volunteer. Did the student just do what was asked of him/her, presumably showing up reliably and doing the job cheerfully? That’s good. Did they take it to another level by developing the training/orientation for future volunteers, document procedures for future volunteers, do a study on retention of volunteers, etc…Better. Was the 600 hours done in 10 different places? That’s fine. All at one place? Better. You get the idea.
But 600 hours over 4 years is more than enough given that it’s really not necessary in the first place. Some colleges (not all) want to see some form of engagement in some ECs, and selective colleges want to see, in addition to engagement, some form of accomplishment in those ECs.
It’s a pretty interesting mix. (Or at least I think so.) It expresses who he is and what his interests are, which is what I’d hope they’d be looking for. He’s not looking at highly selective schools, but at holistic schools that are CTCLs or similar, or at larger unis where I gather it may or may not be a factor.
He’s doing a gap year now; any idea how that would be listed? Are gap year activities also ECs or listed in some other way? I’m pretty sure he’s not going to write the essay on what he’s doing during gap year, because he’s already got the essay topic planned, and it’s a good one IMO. But I’m wondering how gap year work is usually recognized on applications.