Middle School Extracurriculars?

intparent
Tue, 16 Feb 2016 18:58:16 +0000

So monitoring your local bluebird count is worthy of including as an EC for colleges, but putting thousands of hours of training into an activity and winning awards at the national level, with external sponsorship, is not? I think I’m missing something here.

It is the volume of hatching over 250 birds over a period of time that made it worth listing. And my kid did put a lot of time into it in high school. Only the high school hours were actually listed. The MS time wasn’t listed as a separate activity or anything. I think the way she did it was create activity called “Bluebird Trail”, and then bulleted out in the additional activity section the 4H awards (including ribbons at the state fair) for her bluebird related projects, the participation in the Cornell Nestwatch tracking project throughout high school, and then a bullet for the number of birds hatched over the period of time. If she had hatched 250 birds in middle school with no HS activity, it wouldn’t have gone on the list at all. Not sure if she would have even listed the trail monitoring as a HS activity if she didn’t have the 4H projects and the Nestwatch data collection work, either. But because the metric of number of birds hatched over 10 years fit as a bullet with the rest of the narrative, she included it.

If you don’t keep up in the sport or maintain the external sponsorship into high school, then no… I don’t think colleges would really care. Students are really very different human beings at 18 than they are at 10 or 12. And so many middle school kids are either pushed into their activities by “stage” or “sports” parents, or are competing in what is reality a very small stage because there are very few competitors in their age group. If the kid burns out or fails to succeed at a high level once they reach 9th grade, then I am not sure it is even beneficial to point that out to colleges. An elite college admissions officer might say, “Really? That’s what you’ve got for me – middle school accomplishments?” And if they have continued to soar, then the HS accomplishments speak for themselves.