<p>How much does EC count towards your grad admission decision?
Many different clubs already exist at my university, so I don’t think there are new clubs to be made.
For grad school, is it really worth it to be a president or leader of an EC group?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>On-campus groups isn’t the ONLY way to organize, and you don’t have to be president of Southern Asian-African Ping-Pong Anime Club to demonstrate initiative on your part.</p>
<p>I’m not interested in starting random clubs. I want to make one that is related to my major, but I obviously can’t start such club in my university because similar clubs already exist. As you said, on-campus isn’t the only way to organize, but I think it would be harder to start it anywhere else, because it needs more effort to run the club. ECs carried out at campus have advantages over out-campus ECs. As an example, on-campus ECs are supported by the university on things like finding or deciding on a meeting room, organizing the groups, and club advertising at campus. But out-campus ECs don’t have all these benefits.</p>
<p>Out-campus “EC:s” have diverse membership (hopefully) and will take you a lot closer to the real world, teach you a lot more, and have you navigate in an organization without as strong of a safety net - all of which is a huge plus in an application. Of course, if you are only wanting to do EC because of a gold star when applying, you may not learn much in either place, so.</p>
<p>Hey! I don’t want to hear anyone dissing the South Asian-African Ping-Pong Anime Club! I’m a proud member of that club and I take my membership seriously. SAAPPAC for LIFE!</p>
<p>By and large ECs of any kind are pretty much irrelevant unless <em>directly</em> related to your field. </p>
<p>It would be much more appropriate to organize (with a supervising professor) a colloquium series, for example, or a less formal “brown bag lunch” series where local professors present their current research to students.</p>
<p>You can even do “crazy” things - I’m a Classics major and this coming Wednesday I’ll be cooking with one of our prof’s as part of a “Roman Dining” evening at his house. This one is rather informal (i.e. little academic content) but if it is reasonably successful we may do a “real” colloquium next year with invited speakers, museum participation, and so forth.</p>
<p>By organizing this sort of thing, you demonstrate a variety of non-academic skills that will be expected of you as a grad student and ultimately professor, including (but not limited to) planning and communication skills, ability to work with your academic peers and superiors and so forth. </p>
<p>Anything like this goes directly to the “service” section of your CV (which is often completely non-existent for most undergrads) and possibly also “papers presented” if you give a presentation or chair a session.</p>
<p>I still think EC’s are a good thing to do and they at least show admissions boards that you are involved and active in other things beyond studying. As Will said, if you can find something that touchbes your field, even remotely, try doing that. I realize that it is also hard for undergrads in some fields (i.e. Political Science) to get any real work experience related to their field, so sometimes EC’s are the only way to go, I suppose.</p>
<p>My program does not care anything whatsoever about ECs in our graduate applicants. </p>
<p>The only exception would be honor societies. And we do notice if applicants were the president of their academic major association. But that’s it. Really.</p>