Skip to main content
1
4 years ago
Admissions Advice

How can i boost my extracurriculars?
Answered

Hi everyone,

I'm a Colombian student, and here extracurricular activities are not important for admissions, so then opportunities for doing them are fewer for high schoolers.

At the time i have some extracurriculars, they are:

Music:Piano and drums player.

Sports: Player of a nationally recognized team.

Academic: Canada exchange, math olympiads (national semifinalist, Although it is a challenge to be a semifinalist, the number of semifinalists is high)

Work experience: I'm working on an international institution named Kumon, where students can learn math, english and spanish skills, there i assist and sometimes i help math and english students.

And next year i'm thinking about being my class president and also being the representative figure of students.

I was wondering if any of you knows how can i boost my extracurricular activities for my common application.

commonapp
extracurriculars
1
11

Earn karma by helping others:

1 karma for each ⬆️ upvote on your answer, and 20 karma if your answer is marked accepted.

1 answer

2
Accepted Answer
4 years ago

So without divulging personal info

• In sports are you a starter or a captain? Becuase it doesn’t matter for admissions if you are a 3rd string on the best High school in the country you haven’t done anything. Hope this makes sense.

• For music is it a hobby or do you have a band?

• For academic exchange programs are a lot more culturally and or essay based not really an extracurricular. For math semifinals are you interested in STEM if so semifinal is great despite being a big number of them it’s more a % base. 1000 semifinalists isn’t impressive until you realized 100000 competed for them.

• Work expierence depends on your job expierence/Responsibilitiesas an intern it is impressive especially if it was a contest based for the position.

• Class president is impressive but it’s kinda seen as a popularity contest and not really merit based. In the US there is 20 thousand plus public high schools each of them have a class president and consider Harvard only enrolls 1600ish a year and not only class presidents are accepted it isn’t super impressive but it is a good thing especially if it has significant responsibility like planning graduation so I’d focus on that not being elected to president.

Without knowing where you want to go I can’t say if you even need to improve your extracurriculars as they are really impressive it depends on wether you are interested in a very selective school like the Ivies UCLA Rice etc or if you are interested in a school that admits 80% of applicants.

I’d look into anything that is related to what you want to study in college like for engineering you might want to look at a engineering club or for teaching focus on tutoring. Even with what you have your ECs are really impressive especially for an international student. Best of luck!

Please comment so I Edit my advice specifically about the above paragraph.

Hope this helps and please comment if you need clarification as I’d be happy to help clarify!

2
What are your chances of acceptance?
Your chance of acceptance
Duke University
Loading…
UCLA
Loading…
+ add school
Your chancing factors
Unweighted GPA: 3.7
1.0
4.0
SAT: 720 math
200
800
| 800 verbal
200
800

Extracurriculars

Low accuracy (4 of 18 factors)

Community Guidelines

To keep this community safe and supportive:

  1. Be kind and respectful!
  2. Keep posts relevant to college admissions and high school.
  3. Don’t ask “chance-me” questions. Use CollegeVine’s chancing instead!

How karma works