Is not being in NHS a red flag for Yale? Or HYPS in general? In my school (Stuy), the student board members are extremely picky with who they chose to be a part of NHS. Having a high average isn’t enough because you also need to write 3 essays. I know students with 98 gpa’s that didn’t get it to NHS. I was just wondering if this was a red flag for the Yale AO’s or just HYPS in general since so many of their applicants will be a part of NHS. The rest of my EC’s are pretty solid. I will appreciate any response.
No. NHS is so common, that it pretty much is ignored in most college evaluation. I was in the club, but because I only have 10 slots for everything, I did not put it on my application.
Ditto. NHS means nothing by itself and being in NHS surely will not be what gets you into Yale.
Except, they might know about The Stuy. Whether they care is another question.
So many students are in NHS that it happens to be commonplace and not worth particularly much in terms of admissions. Stuyveyant sends many students to Yale each year, so I doubt that’s what will keep you out
I am now wondering what percentage of the Yale students from Stuyvesant were in NHS.
My Ds HS didn’t even have Honor Society at her school. It’s high performing, but very egalitarian. No class rankings or the trappings of pitying one kid against another. They all end up in great schools. But her school is not the norm.
Our school is vey much the same as Tperry1982’ s school. They don’t have NHS and they don’t rank students. They don’t even have AP classes, but it is a college-prep school that has no elective classes, requires Latin, studies the Great Books and has an all-Honors Curriculum. They have never had an issue of getting kids into the Ivy’s or other high-ranked schools.
I think what will make more difference for you is to not spend a moment longer worrying about anything you didn’t do. Don’t think about what others did either. Just concentrate on how to market the thing you DID do in the best light. Make a genuine total package application out of what you know most about.
As Tperry1982 and MidwesternHeart’s schools, DS’s didn’t have NHS, as far as I can remember anyway. DS’s school also had some misbegotten popularity contest for cum laude honors. For reasons extraneous to your concerns, DS didn’t get cum laude, although he was accepted to Yale despite his sub-laudable achievements 
Yale admissions will know about Stuy’s NHS participation, as they probably knew about my DS’s school’s cum laude honor, but I don’t think they’ll make any more of your situation than they did of my son’s.
Good luck.
I agree that NHS by itself won’t make a big difference one way or the other. In addition to the points noted above - at some high schools there is a required community service component for NHS, and some students who quality academically choose not to join if they can’t fit the service in their schedules.
I doubt that they will pay any attention to the presence or absence of NHS in your activities list.
Long-time CC’ers will knowthat I bring up Richard Feynman at the slightest opportunity. And here is one! Feynman went to Bronx Science, where he was a member of the Aristos, a top student group which seemed to spend most of the time debating which students were good enough to elect. Later on, Feynman resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, because he felt that the group spent too much time debating which scientists were good enough to elect.
Incidentally, one of QMP’s friends had NHS election delayed by a year, reportedly because a teacher did not like the fact that she had included in an essay the statement that Bill Clinton was impeached. It is unclear whether the teacher did not understand that this was a factual statement, or whether the teacher thought it was in poor taste to bring it up. In any event, the friend was elected to NHS too late for college applications. I was very happy to see that this particular friend was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year of college.
“Stuyvesant High School” might be a red flag. (I won’t badmouth Bronx Science though: Harold Bloom went there.) 
No: not being in NHS won’t keep you out.
If I were a mod I might end and lock this thread with the immortal Groucho: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”
For all Yale knows, you didn’t even both with the NHS application process (at least at our schools there is an application process). My D2 didn’t bother, and she got into some top schools. Do not worry about it at all.
Both my kids attended Stuyvesant High School (daughter graduated Salutatorian from Stuy, but was rejected at Yale, waitlisted at Princeton and accepted to Harvard, where just graduated Phi Beta Kappa in December as a mid-year graduate. My son is currently a senior at Yale.) Both kids – with GPA’s of 97.8 and 96.7 – were members of ARISTA (Stuyvesant’s chapter of the National Honor Society), so I understand better than most the level of competition at the Stuy: http://stuy.enschool.org/ourpages/auto/2013/3/7/37096823/Stuyvesant_Profile%202014-15.pdf
Given that virtually ALL the top students at Stuy – students with GPA’s of 95+ – are members of ARISTA, not being a member IS a red flag. It also probably means that your GPA is lower than than 95, in which case you should heed the following advice from the Stuyvesant College Handbook as Yale will be an ultra high reach for you coming from Stuy.
@gibby Half - the - class … OMG.
^^ OMG is right! Coming from Stuy, if a student is NOT in that group, they are at a disadvantage,
I don’t know whether to pity or envy the faculty and staff.
I’m sorry, I am going to have to respectfully disagree. There are much more meaningful activities than NHS and sometimes students don’t feel the need to put it on there because most students have it and it is not distinguishing in any way. It would be like putting “made honor roll,” “AP scholar,” or something of similar value. Not putting it on there doesn’t mean that you didn’t make it (assuming you had a high enough GPA) but that you did not feel the need to put it on your application.
My cousin, who was also accepted to H, only put 6 of all of the extracurricular activities she was involved in on the Common App, ones that she participated in a significant capacity. Colleges don’t want to read through a bucket list of 10 activities if they are not meaningful to the student. For most students NHS doesn’t involve significant commitment besides one induction, paying dues, and turning in community service hours. Similarly, my other friend didn’t want to do the community service component of NHS so he dropped out and excluded it from his app. He was admitted to CMU and Caltech, which I would argue are of the same academic caliber as Yale and Harvard.