Too many extracurriculars?

aristotle1990
Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:56:41 +0000

Simple question: will extracurriculars too diverse look bad? I don’t mean the compulsive-club-joiner type extracurriculars (I don’t have too many of those), I mean actual, real, passionate extracurriculars. I have a few:

-I’ve been taking ancient Greek as an independent study course since middle school.

-I’ve been doing research for quite a while now (science/medicine related)

-I co-founded a business last year that was very successful. We created a website and a few Mac software programs which were downloaded literally hundreds of thousands of times

-I reviewed some products and wrote a bunch of front-page articles for this popular Mac website (800,000 - 1,000,000 views per month, 70,000 unique views per month).

Random : I’ve won various awards ( and stuff, tutored lots and lots of kids (both for profit and for nothing), participated in a few clubs (interscholastic Chess club competitions, some computer club competitions, some that I’ve forgotten about), e.t.c.

What concerns me was that I was reading another thread, and someone said that it wasn’t good to have too many random, diverse extracurriculars; rather, one should exhibit passion in a single area. Do you think the above would look good on an application together? Should I minimize some of them and exaggerate others? In case you’re getting the wrong message, I’m not one of those kids who’s paranoid about his extracurriculars - I’m fine with what I have, and I know what I have is pretty strong, but I’m just not sure that ancient Greek/Latin vibes well with science research and entrepreneurialism and writing. To an adcom, it might suggest a compulsory extracurricular seeker who’s solely interested in impressing colleges, even though I’m not that sort of person. I simply happen to love studying ancient Greek, being caught up in the thrill of business, writing, and researching.

I’d really hate to simply omit one or two of the above on a college application. Please help!

Thanks in advance.