<p>Hi, my son is a rising senior at a top-rated high school with a rigorous curriculum. He has a 2230 SAT (he wants to retake, since is math was under 700) unweighted GPA 3.9, has 5s and one 4 on 9 APs, is taking dual enrollment and will have 60 college hours & an AA degree at graduation. </p>
<p>He has very minimal participation in school activities. You might say he is "philosophically opposed" to engaging in something he has no interest in just to beef up his resume. (To be fair, the school is small, and he did volunteer for some clubs that didn't get off the ground.) He is doing Quiz Bowl this year, and has over 100 hours of community service volunteering with the local NPS office doing GIS mapping and stuff over the past 2-3 years. </p>
<p>How should he handle his lack of ECs in regard to the CA? </p>
<p>Play up the mapping as interest #1. Quiz Bowl is #2. He could get a job, right now, and list that. What schools will he apply to? There are many that will admit students on numbers alone.</p>
<p>@Maggpie We’re in FL, but he would prefer to go OOS: Duke, Upenn, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, UNC-CH, UVA, Wake Forest. Florida State or Florida in state. His major is econ and he wants to get a PHD.</p>
<p>ECs aren’t just at school, they are anything that is NOT an academic or other requirement in order to graduate high school.</p>
<p>No ECs would be that he took his classes, went home and played video games. Any kind of volunteering or work would be an EC.</p>
<p>IMHO, his mapping experience is a great EC, far above many others based on time and uniqueness, especially if he is going into a related field.</p>
<p>(and I do think that even if he did have “no ECs”, the fact that he will have an associate’s degree as well as a high school diploma when he graduates HS means he wasn’t sitting around doing nothing.)</p>