What colleges don't care about extracurriculars?

mathmom
Sun, 04 Apr 2021 15:14:29 +0000

You don’t have to belong to a lot of clubs. But most kids do something outside school. As an example my younger son got roped into helping our local neighborhood association organized their old newsletters and correspondence to get them digitized. For a short essay about “what was your favorite EC” he wrote about what he learned from reading these documents. One was about how an issue of whether the school playground should be open to the neighborhood went back and forth as each generation of parents forgot the previous history of what happened. Another was how he was fascinated to see how there was a huge fight about whether the schools should have open classrooms with many documents in the files, but then it just stopped with no indication as to what the resolution was. He said it made him feel like a real historian as he realized the limitations of primary sources. It wasn’t a fancy EC, but he was able to show his critical thinking skills, his thoughtfulness and also his sense of humor in the way he told the story.

A friend of mine’s daughter did a similar thing with an essay about what she learned from a summer job at an ice cream shop.