<p>I am going to a semi-online charter school in my district (Visions in Education's EDGE program, if anyone has heard of it) , which makes it hard to get ECs through school. I am a semi-founding member of a local hackerspace, and I spent a year and a half organizing a Linux convention. I have also custom-made a working UAV, which is a common Senior(!!!) project for Electrical Engineering students, which is my prospective major. </p>
<p>I am the 9th grade rep in Student Government. I am planning on self-studying eight AP classes by the end of Junior year while maintaining my full-Honor's workload.</p>
<p>What other sorts of ECs can I do? I wish I could have done stuff like becoming an Eagle Scout, but I was very sick through most of middle school.</p>
<p>My kids were all homeschooled and did nothing through the school. Yet they had plenty of ECs, they did competitive sports, volunteered, participated in 4H, shadowed a professional in a career they were interested in, one raised a seeing eye puppy. There are so many opportunities out there.</p>
<p>I think you can find something else more worth your worry.</p>
<p>Most colleges and universities don’t care very much at all about your extracurricular activities. They’re looking to fill their entering classes with the best academically qualified students they can get. (Sometimes, they’re just trying to keep the seats filled with students’ butts, period.)</p>
<p>A relative handful of really famous, really selective institutions don’t have trouble attracting freshmen who are extremely good students. These lucky colleges and universities could fill their entering classes several times over with students who can do the work, and do it very well. They have a different admissions goal: they are trying to build a class that will be interesting, diverse, able, accomplished, and ultimately a credit to (and maybe also generous to) the college. So these colleges are interested in knowing both what kind of student you are and what kind of person you are. They want to know your story.</p>
<p>For most teenagers, extracurricular activities tell their story, in part if not in total. So even at the colleges that do care about ECs, they usually do so in the way that a biologist cares about a microscope: the microscope may be perfectly nice in its own right, but its value to the scientist is the view it gives him of something that would otherwise be hidden. </p>
<p>You have a personal story. If you’ve been chronically ill, you may even have a personal story that you can make interesting and compelling. If you’re applying to those selective, build-a-freshman-class colleges, you’ll have to tell that story in some way other than your participation in the cross country team, Model UN and the spring musical, but that’s OK. Those colleges and universities are the ones that practice what they call “holistic admissions,” a process in which they read your application to try to get the best picture they can of you in the context of your own life story. What have you made of the academic opportunities that were available to you? What have you done other than schoolwork to show that you’re a self-starter, or a leader, or an artist, or an athlete, or an innovator, or whatever it is that you are? You’ve already listed some things. And it doesn’t really matter that none of them is math olympiad, the Gay-Straight Alliance or the Spanish National Honor Society.</p>
<p>My "dream schools are UC Berkeley, which has it, and Stanford which is Stanford. With everything I read, I feel like I might need to leave my current situation with my friends and my awesome teacher, if I want to be in a good position for tippity top colleges. I like them because of the schools themselves, not because they are so highly ranked. What I am looking for is a school in a suburban or urban enviroment with small class sizes, which only seems to come in highly ranked and hard to get into.</p>
<p>As a dyed in the wool engineer, I wouldn’t be happy at some middle-of-nowhere LAC that doesn’t even have my major. 3-2 programs could be a solution, however.</p>
<p>OK. Go ahead and worry if you want to.</p>
<p>IMO, if you don’t get into Stanford or Cal, it won’t be because you went to online school, and it surely won’t be because you didn’t have school-based extracurricular activities. But if you think it would be better to leave your friends and an awesome teacher so that you can be vice president of your school’s robotics club, it’s not my call to make.</p>
<p>Homeschoolers get accepted into “tippity top colleges” all the time. A school isn’t going to make or break your ECs. You’ve already been doing ECs that show your passion and standout from the normal student body president type thing. Your situation has actually caused you to pursue what a lot of students wouldn’t because they have access to the “easy” Ecs.</p>