If you’re worried about how colleges will view your child’s involvement in activities outside of school, especially this past year, 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 right-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 (at home or in person) – 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, even while learning from home, 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, and socially distanced or online.
Here are some great ways our students have been involved in activities.
- Ronald McDonald House
- Club 21
- Red Cross Club
- Debate
- Mock Trial
- National Charity League
- Habitat for Humanity (Pasadena)
- Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts projects
- Girls Who Code
- Teen Hotline
- Amnesty International Decoders
- Club and school sports teams
- International mission trips
- Feline Network Volunteer
- The list is endless…
Here are some of the excellent pre-college summer programs our students have attended:
- Georgetown Medical Summer
- LMU Pre-College Programs
- Brown University Precollege program (online)
- Stanford Summer – Surgical Skills
- DaVinci Camp (Caltech)
- USC SHINE Program
- Kenyon Creative Writing Summer Program
- UC Cosmos Program
- RISD Pre-College Program
- Parsons Pre-College Portfolio Program
- Wolfram Math Summer Program
- 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, national (or online) activities and programs. We can inspire further exploration that deepens their knowledge-base.
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 to schedule a free introductory call.
