<p>Hi,</p>
<p>Which kinds of activities count as “OK” hooks, which are considered “good” hooks, and which are “excellent” hooks? </p>
<p>Thanks. ^^</p>
<p>I’m trying to understand why you would ask that question here. first very few actual admission officers actually post here. second, many kids may think they know why someone got in to that great school, but unless they were told by the school, they don’t know for sure. third, each school is looking for different things each year: they may already have a blind set of valdictorian siamese twins who play soccer at their school, so those hooks are out for this year. It would be better to be 2nd, from Utah and interested in neuropsychiatry with parents from Hogwarts…don’t tie yourself up in knots and just try to be the best you can be at what you care about. the passions show through…</p>
<p>I meant: what levels can one do an EC at? What constitutes doing something in an “OK” way, doing it in a “good” way, and doing it in a “great” way?</p>
<p>For example, I’m a writer, and you could say that an OK hook would be to get published in the school paper, a good one would be to get published in a few writing magazines, and a great one would be to publish a novel.</p>
<p>not to beat a dead horse, but its always going to be part of a very great context. If YOU were an admissions officer, would you pick the kid from Tahiti with no internet access, no connections who gets a book published or the kid whose father runs a major NY publishing house. As an admissions officer from one of the most selective schools in the world once told me "For kids who have the basic requirements, the admissions process will give the appearance of being random to them. They will never understand or know the complexity of the specific process which led to their acceptance or denial because it is in the context of ALL the other acceptances, denials and who else applied in the first place. You can’t “Game” the system with simplistic questions like yours. Just try to do what YOU do best…in a blunt common sense way, you KNOW the answer to your own question anyway, and what we think, not being the Admission officers of the specific school you are applying to, doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>write what you think makes you interesting. if you’re not interesting, then prepare to face the consequences for being only a book-worm. </p>
<p>but if you want a good story, i know a guy with a 3.4-ish, 2200s, Cs on transcript, full IB diploma who got a full ride at Wash-U, and was accepted at places like Tufts, Amherst, and Hampshire. As he describes it, if there was anyone who was admitted to a school based on their ECs, it would be him.
The guy is an avid musician, plays guitar, jazz, sings, is big in school’s theatre program, throws shot put for track, has a black belt in some sort of martial art, and has done service trips around the world. He’s pretty much awesome. And is quite the ladies’ man lol.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for this thread. I’m the Mother of a daughter who I thought had a very strong resume to get into colleges this year. The results were not what we expected, rejections and wait listed at schools I at least thought she had a shot at. Well meaning people have said, you should have done this, you should have done that. I’m glad to hear that it wasn’t something that we did or didn’t do, it was more about the other applicants that determined her result.</p>
<p>In the end I think a person needs to be themselves anyway. What if you do something just because you think it will look good on a college application and then it doesn’t work? Then that was a lot of wasted time that could have been spent doing something you enjoy. In the end my daughter got a really good choice that I think will work well for her.</p>
<p>Activities are not hooks unless you achieve something that few other applicants ever do. So writing for the school paper and being published in teen magazines are not hooks at all. Writing a novel is only a hook if it’s one that is published by a major publisher, sells well and gets you a major deal as in the case of the plagiarizing Harvard student.</p>
<p>Does step-parent count as legacy?</p>
<p>I think the only really reliable “hooks” are URM with competitive stats, recruited athlete (at some schools more than others), and legacy with major development potential. Other than that it’s pretty much hit-and-miss. Colleges have long since caught on to the fact that all you CCers out there are manufacturing your HS resumes by filling them out with ECs that you think will look good to adcoms. The admissions people I’ve spoken to lately claim they can see through that, and they’re not impressed. They’re not looking for the number or size of the merit badges, so much as they’re looking for “passion” and authenticity, and for kids with a genuine story to tell who will lend depth and diversity (in any number of ways) to the matriculating class. That shows up in your background, your ECs, your essays, and your interviews. But those things need to hang together as a group to allow them to make sense of you as a whole person. If that sense of who you are as a person doesn’t come through, no number of community service hours or published works is going to get you over the top at the most selective colleges.</p>