I have one more spot available on the 5 extracurricular activities on the UC app. I don’t know which one I should choose between these two:
Astrophotography: (taking pictures of celestial objects through a telescope) 9th-12th, personal hobby, not a part of any particular club and I haven’t won any awards or anything. I think it is more interesting, and better demonstrates my passion for science, but I have heard that unless the EC is a part of an official club, then they don’t care.
Literary Scholar Society: 11th-12th, club at school that discusses literature and writing. I have devoted less time to this, and I don’t have an official leadership role, but I have helped run meetings by operating the powerpoint/smartboard.
I think astrophotography would make a really good personal statement, but I don’t know if it’s really an extracirricular. It’s interesting and unique though, so if you’re open to rewriting your personal statement, I think that would be a good place to mention it. Do you happen to have a blog online where you publish your photos? You could use that as an extracirricular, though I wouldn’t put astrophotography on its own.
I was in a similar situation when I first started the application-- one of my hobbies is language learning and it’s played such a significant role in my life that I definitely wanted to find a way to put it in my application, though I feel like language learning on its own doesn’t really count as an extracirricular (it’s like reading a book or having a conversation–not really an extracirricular, but sometimes it can be so significant that you want to mention), so I started a blog where I regularly post language learning tips–that’s something I can put as an extracirricular because I’m documenting what I’m doing.
I would suggest you do something similar if you really wanted to make it an extracirricular for your app. Good luck!