Hello everyone,
when it comes to the crucial factor of ECs, probably the best advice is “quality over quantity”. I have seen many threads in which people refer to their ECs as strong, standard, weak, etc, so how do we actually measure the competitiveness of our extracurricular activities? Is it obligatory for someone to win some international/national, prestigious awards so that the relevant EC counts as strong? Or is it just the commitment (hours per week, every week per year, etc) and the passion the applicant shows in the essays?
Thank you 
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The very vast majority of college applicants do NOT win national or international or prestigious awards.
The commitment to doing the ECs is what I think matters.
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I think it’s what you do within your activity that matters.
For example, you might join a foreign language club, which might be viewed as a “typical” activity that HS students might participate in. What do you do in this activity? Do you “just” attend a lot of meetings, or do you take the lead, organize, and participate in tutoring students in your school and possibly other schools in your district?
You might join the yearbook committee, which might be viewed as a “standard” EC. You may earn the position of yearbook editor, which is a leadership position within a “typical” EC (my opinion, my daughter was yearbook editor). What did you do as yearbook editor, besides the obvious? When my daughter was editor, her “team” entered and won third place in a multi-state competition, making trips into the city, meeting with various adults within the competition etc.
Most students are not winning national or international awards. In my opinion it is really about taking a “standard” activity and running with it.
Also remember that students are accepted to college all the time even if they “just” attend meetings and do not take it to the next level. It might not be the “prestigious” colleges that you have in mind, but it is college and they have earned the right to be there.
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Tenure and impact.
If you have a summer job at the grocery store, it’s fine.
If you have a part time job at the grocery store which continues through a summer or two and you get promoted to cashier, it’s better.
Play in the band a year…ok. Play four years - great. Get first chair, better.
Awards are nice but not necessary in my opinion. You don’t get an award for walking dogs at the shelter…just lots of kisses. I also don’t think stated leadership is critical - not everyone can or will lead. But everyone can be focused and impactful. People like consistency - just like at work - while when you are young it’s a great time to try things, many like to see tenure, not job hoppers.
There aren’t enough awards out there for everyone or hardly anyone - and I don’t think they matter much. I think what you did to get the award - that matters - whether you got the award or not.
There’s also many schools that don’t look at ECs at all.
Good luck
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I forgot to mention that having a part time job in HS is great.
Spending your HS years visiting an elderly neighbor every Sunday and spending time listening to their stories- amazing, and shows a lot about character.
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So two related thoughts.
At highly-selective colleges, it appears there is often some sort of internal rating system, and it appears to me it often has a type of normal (or similar) distribution where most of the EC ratings are going to be clustered in the middle range, and then the highest ratings become very rare, such that even most admitted students do not have ECs like that. Here for example is what the Yale Admissions Podcast said:
MARK: –when it comes to things like your extracurricular activities and your letters of recommendation, we use a 9-point scale. So 9 is the strongest. 1 is the weakest. In practice, we primarily use the middle of a scale. You’re almost never going to see something that isn’t a 4, 5, 6, or 7–
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: –on a printed slate, even across hundreds of applications in a typical day.
HANNAH: Yeah. So for example, when we’re rating your extracurricular accomplishments, we occasionally see some super, super extraordinary extracurricular accomplishments, like an Olympic medal.
MARK: Yeah.
HANNAH: So we reserve those top, top ratings for something like that. Most people are going to fall in that middle range.
The second thing I would note is many valued ECs are not competitive in nature. Again the Yale Admissions Podcast has a great episode all about activities, and one thing they stress is they value many activities not competitive in nature, like work experience, volunteering, hobbies just for interest and self-improvement, and so on.
OK, then they kind of put this together in that podcast:
[Mark] And we use a rating system. It is sort of a shorthand, though. I want to make clear, this is designed to help us communicate with other members of the admissions committee. It is not being fed into some sort of rubric somewhere.
[Hannah] Right.
[Mark] And we do not have a formula that’s going to award a certain number of points for being a varsity athlete or being the lead in the school musical, or something like that. It is a nine point scale, but the overwhelming majority of applicants, including admitted students, cluster right in the middle. We’re using it to communicate quickly to the members of the committee when they’re looking at our printed slate. So we talked about this in an earlier episode about committee. We can look down a sheet of paper at a series of applicants and get a sense of where the strengths lie in a particular application. It’s like I said, a little bit like reading the matrix, and this can be one of those things, where if we’re about to talk about an applicant and I see a really high value on this extracurricular rating, I know, oh, the student has really distinguished themselves there. But that is not the case for a lot of applicants, including a lot of our admitted students.
[Hannah] Right, right. So just so you know, if you completely left this section blank, you might get a one on that scale. A student who is active in a typical collection of activities without a whole lot of distinction might get a five, and someone who is extremely unusual in their commitment or distinction would get a nine, but that might be an Olympic athlete or a Tony Award winner or something like that.
[Mark] I have never seen a nine.
[Reed] Yes.
[Mark] I don’t know if you have, I have never seen a nine. I have never given a nine, I’ve never been in committee with a nine. I know they exist, but–
[Hannah] Yeah.
[Mark] It’s very, very rare.
[Hannah] Right. Maybe one or two a year.
[Mark] Yeah, I would say probably 99% of our admitted students are rated somewhere between a four and a seven on the scale. And you heard that correctly, right. We admit students who haven’t really distinguished themselves with their activities outside of the classroom. It might be for some students a really important part of their application, or it might not be very important at all. There might be other parts of the application that are really making the case for the student. Remember, it’s not part of a formula.
[Reed] While this place is indeed a place to brag a little bit about yourself, I think it’s important to remember that this is only in service of a bigger goal, which is to help us understand who you are. The context that you’re coming from, and help us see how you’ll engage on our campus. College students are super, super engaged, active people outside of the classroom. Many people are going to tell you that they learned so much from their extracurriculars and their college activities, as sort of compared to their courses. They’ve learned lessons in leadership and collaboration and creativity. And so we want students who are really going to be engaged outside of the classroom here. You’re coming to learn, yes, but you’re also coming to live and to engage in a community.
[Hannah] Yeah.
OK, so that’s a lot to take in. And in fact, a lot of similar information and insight came out of the Harvard litigation. And if you start paying close attention to what AOs from many selective colleges say about activities, with this sort of insight in mind, it starts to kind of click together.
And I would summarize my takeaway as follows. There are some applicants who get admitted to these colleges with some very high level of achievement in some competitive activity as a main factor, the sorts of people who might get an 8 or 9 from Yale, but they are very rare–like probably 5% or less of admits. These are your Olympic medalists, and similarly rare competitors.
Some people are also getting admitted in like the 4 or 5 range (“active in a typical collection of activities without a whole lot of distinction”), but I would also suggest that such people at the most selective colleges would face longer odds without something else unusually strong in their application.
Then I think the vast majority of admits to these colleges are doing better than that Yale 4-5, but less than their 8-9. So Yale 6-7s.
And the emphasis at that point is on having a clear vision of how this person will be able to come into a community of highly-active, highly-engaged people, and participate enthusiastically and contribute back meaningfully to that community.
And there are many, many different ways of showing these colleges you will be such a person. Competitive activities is one way. But there are many other sorts of activities too. And it can be a mix.
But I think sometimes, some people, get this idea the only way to do it is with competitions. I think that is wrong, and also potentially counter-productive. Because frankly, to get to an 8-9 score with competitions is extremely hard, because it is extremely hard to impress these colleges at that level. And I think reading all this carefully, it becomes clear most people who devote themselves to competitions may at most end up in the 6-7 range, along with people who didn’t do that sort of thing at all.
Which is fine, but then they are also going to be looking at your academics, and your recommendations, and whether you are known as nice and helpful, and whether you developed into truly important leadership roles, and whether your school will really miss you when you are gone, and so on. And I think sometimes the kids killing themselves to get individual competition awards have neglected all that other stuff. And because realistically all that didn’t really get them outside that 6-7 range anyway, they may not have really maximized their chances at admission.
OK, so, first, do what you love. Second, do try to challenge and develop yourself within what you do, whatever that means for that type of activity. And third, think about whether this is just a thing for you–which is fine sometimes–or whether this shows some sort of community engagement that could translate in some way to an active college community. And try to do some of that sort of community stuff, in a way that would be truly meaningful to you and your community, and not just checking a box.
And do well in your classes, and be nice and helpful, and take on leadership positions where relevant, and so on.
And then I think you will have done what you can for these colleges.
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It seems like AO’s are pretty numb to the “typical” EC’s - like the lists of all the honor society memberships (math, social studies, foreign lang., etc.) unless you’ve done something exceptional.
Also (just an observation) but they don’t seem overly moved by class presidents - again, unless they’ve done something noteworthy with it.
I think holding a job matters, while maintaining good grades, playing a sport, etc., It shows you can manage all those things at once and handle the stress that goes along with it.
If the student has a passion about what they want to major in and is able to tie in a track record of EC’s that support that passion, that helps.
I worked with a low income/first gen student who wasn’t able to do a single EC because her parents worked, and she was responsible for getting her younger siblings off the bus and started on their homework, while she made dinner. That’s important too and I made sure she told that story on her applications.
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I just want to note this is ONE sort of story that might help some people, but many successful applicants to highly-selective colleges do not have such a story. This is true for a couple reasons.
First, a lot of these colleges actually expect people to explore their interests during college, possibly changing their minds one or more times. So having done that in high school is OK too.
Second, a lot of people are doing activities that are non-academic in nature, and that is fine. You can be the captain of a lacrosse team that loves French poetry. You can be the pre-med kid who loves standup comedy. And so on.
So focusing your activities on your academic interests is an option, but I think people hear it is helpful and turn that into thinking it is somehow bad not to do that. Instead, I think it is equally helpful to show you have strong non-academic interests. And so whatever approach makes sense for you is fine, as long as you do it with sincere enthusiasm and dedication.
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Just to be clear, it’s obviously perfectly fine to have multiple interests that are explored during the high school years - this is the case for most HS students. But there are some students out there who know what they want to do and will not veer from this path during their college years, so it makes sense that those students would gravitate toward EC’s that support their academic interests in addition to doing other activities.
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thank you all soo much for such detailed replies, I’ll constantly come back to this thread for advice reference next year during the college application process! 
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As an aside, I don’t think it is possible to really know that for sure in advance. It will definitely be true in retrospect in some cases, but that is not the same thing as knowing that will be true in advance.
But it doesn’t matter, because I agree if that is where your true passions in HS take you, then great. And I don’t think we are disagreeing among us, I just know people sometimes read things about having ECs related to their intended major and get really worried if that is not what they have done. And so I tend to make a point of elaborating that is not necessary, it is fine if they have done different things instead, just to make sure those people do not get concerned.
Please see my use of the word, some, in my post above yours.
Again, I believe I was pretty clear in my original post where I said this:
Emphasis on the word, “If”
But, after you quoted my original post, I again, clarified in another post:
At this point, I think it’s a dead horse issue.
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