| People should calm down about the ECs and take the recommendations of other posters with a grain of salt.
I got into 7/10 schools I applied to, including MIT, which I now attend. Trust me, I wasn't out there solving world hunger or anything like that. My ECs that I consider relevant included:
- 4 years of varsity cross country (I wasn't incredibly good at it, a little above average, but I ran more miles in practice than anyone else on the team), co-captain as a senior
- 4 years of Quick Recall (the Kentucky version of Quiz Bowl and the like)
- 3 years of Science Bowl, co-captain as a senior
- 2 years of Science Olympiad, some state-level individual medals and a national top 25
- 12 summers of summer league swimming and 6 summers of summer league diving. Not especially successful at either, but damn, it was fun!
- Volunteer springboard diving judge for my summer league starting when I was 15
- Worked on the state ACLU's post-9/11 Education Committee as a senior for a while. It was kind of an adventure. There were committee members who wouldn't host meetings because they were afraid of violence if their neighbors found out they were affiliated with the ACLU. It gave me some interesting perspective on politics.
- Babysat my brother, 12 and a half years younger, for what probably came out to at least 15 hours in an average week, while my mom went to law school and my stepdad worked.
See? No published novels, international academic olympiads, student government, or 40 hours a week volunteering in a soup kitchen. No honor societies. Some of the ECs that I know of that my friends at MIT did include ballet, guitar, designing circuits in the basement with one's dad, axe-throwing competitions (I swear I didn't make that up), and working as a shift supervisor in a factory. |