<p>I picked AP Human Geography over Journalism for next year, but now I’m wondering if I should add Journalism and take extra classes.</p>
<p>The downside is that Journalism would lower my GPA. Would being in Journalism again look good as an Extra-Cirricular?</p>
<p>Also, I’m planning on being an Eagle Scout and Founder and President of a Rotary Interact club at my school. How important are those? What if I can’t get to Eagle Scout? How many members does my club need?</p>
<p>forget about the GPA, take classes you enjoy. Unless you want to be an anthropologist, don’t take AP human geography. Don’t do these things just to try to get into college, they’ll know you did it out of interest rather than your own liking. I went through high school doing what I thought was fun and satisfied my interests. In my case it was engineering and it is genuine.</p>
<p>I agree with Alex. My son pursued his interests and finished second in his class to someone who clearly gamed the system to become the valedictorian. He could have taken more AP classes, but stayed in the band and dual-enrolled at a local college. He ended up at his #1 choice, MIT, and she was rejected at several schools. This isn’t a guarantee of success, of course, just an observation that being intellectually honest will serve you better in the long run, wherever you go to school.</p>
<p>What Alex said times three.</p>
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<p>Let me give my personal experience, which might give a slightly different perspective. What if you don’t get into MIT or similar schools? Remember, it’s hard for the best candidates to guarantee at all their admission into such a school. Quite a few other good schools might be very numbers focused, and I’ll admit, I’m talking here from my experience with the UC system – I imagine it’s similar at many good public schools. Now, no one course is going to hurt you, but I think building up a good GPA is unfortunately more important than I’d like it to be. </p>
<p>Gaming the system to become valedictorian is, however, not necessary at all. When you’re splitting hairs like that, don’t worry about it, and just do what you like…but if you need to take some AP classes that you don’t adore to get a good GPA, I’d say do it – I know more than a few very bright math and physics students who didn’t quite make it to MIT, who had tons of trouble getting into other good schools for their tastes (less so than, I’d say, much less bright people who overloaded APs and got high GPAs), and I conjecture it’s mainly that others had similar math and physics grades, and there was nothing special about them visible to universities. </p>
<p>I mean, left to me people, I’d have done nothing academic but read math books for fun. I don’t think I’d have gotten accepted to many schools if I did that, even if I’d be super qualified to enter their math programs. However, I strongly discourage doing way too much to please colleges – just be practical, though, and make sure you’re able to market yourself to them in some way or the other. Being a superstar doesn’t matter unless you can show the colleges in some way, and I’ve found that inevitably, some things are more easily marketed than others.</p>