I work extremely hard for all my extracurriculars and love participating in all of them. But now instead of worrying about getting involved I have to worry about getting involved TOO much?! Would this list of leadership positions make me seem spread too thin or actually work against me rather than for me?
Here they are:
President of DECA
Co-President of Hope Club
President of Spanish Club
Founder and Co-Captain of Debate Team
Co-President of Valley United Way Youth Leadership Program
Valley United Way High School Volunteer Council Group Leader
President of National Honors Society
I feel it could work against you in two ways: 1. Too much stuff to do which leads to no free time for HW, sleep, or social activities, or 2. Spreading too thinly and not stepping up to your roles. But if you can somehow manage all those positions and still get high grades and enough sleep, more power to you.
I think that it’s great you are a leader for so many organizations and clubs - and colleges love that stuff too. They want leaders and people who have leadership colleges. So, no, I don’t think it can go against you.
It does seem to be getting to the point that it may not look believable, because you shouldn’t have time to hold all those positions if you’re balancing schoolwork and other commitments unless you’re extremely bright - either that or the clubs you have positions in require very little work from you (which devalues the leadership role). Your recs will certainly be scrutinized to make sure you’re the real deal. If your teachers/counselors and your app can back everything up, you should be in good shape.
Floating around in some CC posts is a youtube segment of an actual or former Stanford admissions officer discussing the profiles of several applicants. One had a super long list of top leadership ECs. Frankly, she discounted them, saying that it was hard to believe that this person actually was dedicated to that many and any depth. Like @MITer94 said – spread too thin or worse, resume-padder or liar. I think @dblazer’s advice for you is solid.
If I were interviewing you, I would ask what you accomplished as being the leader of these clubs. So if you just hand meetings of the Spanish club, I would not care that much. But if you organized a Spanish trip, trip to a spanish movie, and spansih food day I would be impressed.
Also you can always not include some of those if you don’t want to.
As a leader, you have more responsibility than typical members. If you are a leader in excess of 5 clubs, it will seem as though you don’t actually play the role of a leader and it’s just a title. Realistically speaking, you cannot devote yourself to all of these clubs and actually out genuine effort into all of them.
The OP doesn’t have any more hours in the week than anyone else. If I were an adcom I would also suspect these are a bunch of fancy titles with little behind them.
It looks like a reasonable, balanced list. I can’t imagine it working against you in any way. Why would it look better to drop any? The rationale sounds irrational to me. If you enjoy these activities, don’t let any anonymous strangers on the Internet discourage you from participating in them.