Engaging in extracurricular activities

- So while I was traveling in the fall, I realized that not everyone really understood what they should be talking about when they tell us about what they do after class and that's the phrase I use, "What do you do when you go home from school?" - For some students that might mean significant family responsibilities. If both of your parents are working and you're picking up your brothers and sisters from school and tutoring them on their homework, please let us know that because we won't expect you to be doing all of the same things that someone who doesn't have those expectations placed on them are doing. So I always suggest to students to really give us more when it comes to extracurriculars. Everything outside of the classroom is really what extracurricular means. - Leadership positions are great because they show commitment, but we want to make sure that students are doing things that are meaningful to them, that they're spending time doing them and they're doing them well, whatever it may be. - If you're spending your time by learning how to build formula one racing cars because that's what you want to do and there's no club for that at school, we still need to know that that's what you spend all of your time doing especially if it's something that you're accomplished in. - What we also want to understand is how the student has really made an impact in their school community or greater community through the different interests and passions that they have. - So admission is also going to look at your summers and what have you done in your summers. Ninth grade summer probably not the most important summer they're going to look at, but certainly tenth grade, eleventh grade summers they're going to start to take a look at what are you doing in that time frame. That doesn't mean you have to go and spend a lot of money on a program to look impressive to a college. My advice to you would be think about something you want to do in the summer that could really be exciting to you. That may be having a summer job, learning how to manage your own money. It may be there's an academic program that you want to take online or at a local college that could really be exciting, you've always wanted to try, you know, architecture, and there's an opportunity to try that because there's no chance to do it in high school. It doesn't have to be something fancy. It has to be something that's really exciting to you. - Ultimately, what we want to see is depth, what we want to see is commitment and what we want to see is leadership in some of these different activities. - When we're looking at the extracurriculars that you are involved in, it's important that you're giving us accurate descriptions of what they are. So while you may know what it means to be leader of the organization for protecting animals, we would like to know a little bit more about the specifics. What does that mean? What have you done? How many hours do you spend on that? So make sure to tell us in detail what those extracurriculars actually look like in your day to day life.