If you’re worried about how colleges will view your child’s involvement in activities outside of school, keep in mind: there is no magic formula for the perfect list of activities.
Your child’s interests and natural inclinations are at the heart of finding the best-fit activities and summer planning. That’s it. Pretty simple, actually.
Here’s the thing: colleges care more about the quality of engagement with these activities – be it with volunteer work, sports, artistic involvement, or an independent project – than the name of the activity. Colleges get excited about students who take initiative and make positive changes to better their communities. They appreciate the qualities students possess, such as persistence, creative thinking, innovation, or hard work, more than the number of activities on their resume. In fact, many colleges ask potential students about these qualities developed through their involvement in activities during the college interviews. Read more about interviews in this blog post here.
Young students who are solution-oriented, or who see a problem and engage in a deeper way to connect, are the ones who cause admissions officers to sit up and pay attention.
And you don’t have to spend a lot of money on resume-building activities to make them meaningful. At Colledge, we can help you find something local, within the community, or even at home.
Here are some great ways our students have been involved in activities.
- Tom Sawyer Camp counselor
- Ethics Bowl
- Club and school sports teams (Captains and non-captains)
- National Charity League
- Union Station Homeless Services Volunteer
- Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts projects
- Girls Who Code
- Peer Mentor
- Founder of School Cultural Club
- Mission Haiti through Church
- Feline Network Volunteer
- The list is endless…
Here are some of the excellent pre-summer programs our students have attended:
- Stanford Summer – Biochemistry Research
- USC SHINE Program
- Kenyon Creative Writing Summer Program
- Ohio State Linguistics Summer Program
- Alban’s Public Policy Summer Program
- RISD Pre-College Program
- Art Center Auto Design Summer Course
- U of Chicago Math Summer Program
- Wolfram Math Summer Program
- Georgetown University Summer Discovery
- And many more…
Figuring out the best way for your child to deepen into their extracurricular activities during the school year or the summer can be overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. We can expand their horizons beyond what they’ve already tried and help them think outside the box with local (or national) activities and programs. We can inspire further exploration that inspires deeper knowledge.
Working with your child, we think critically about their innate qualities, and come up with ideas that work for them and your family so they are ready for college interviews and college applications.
If you’re not sure if your child’s resume is developing with college in mind, let’s talk. Our team can help you sort out what matters to colleges with extracurricular activities, and what doesn’t really matter. Click here for a free phone consultation.
