As part of the holistic admissions process, highly selective colleges care about more than grades and test scores, for two reasons. First, there are too many students with nearly perfect grades and test scores for these colleges to accept them all. Second, these colleges want to avoid “academic drones” who like to spend all their time in the library.
Instead, the highly selective colleges want students who are strong academically, active on campus, and likely future leaders of the country. To find these students, these colleges look into a student’s extracurricular activities. They want to know what the student did outside of required classwork.
But more important than the number of hours spent, these colleges care about the student’s impact in those activities. In particular, the most selective colleges prefer students who show exceptional talent in one area (i.e. a “spike”An exceptional talent in an academic or extracurricular area... More) over a student who is well-rounded. This post will help guide activities selection so that you both enjoy them and they have a positive impact on admissions.
Find things you love to do
I have repeatedly emphasized on this site that your activities should be things you love to do. Because developing exceptional talent needed to create a spike takes considerable time and effort, it would be misery trying to do so in an activity you do not enjoy.
Let’s suppose there is a student named Sally who really enjoys math competitions, painting, fencing, and neuroscience (I realize that’s an eclectic mix). How can we help Sally shine on the extracurriculars portion of her application?
Focus on areas of talent and external recognition
Among the activities she loves, Sally needs to find one or two where she has (or can realistically develop) significant talent AND receive external recognition for that talent. Examples of external recognition include nationally recognized medals, awards, peer-reviewed research papers, and acceptance into highly competitive summer programs.
If Sally believes she has significant talent in math competitions, or art, or fencing, then her path is relatively clear. For fencing, she would try to win at nationals. For math competitions, she would aim for USAMO. And for painting, she could demonstrate her talent with a Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medal. There are certainly other ways to win recognition in these areas, but the point is that these three accomplishments are immediately recognized as worthy by admissions officers.
Let’s instead suppose that Sally believes she has a real interest and developing talent in neuroscience. The way to showcase her talent here is less clear, and so she has to develop this path organically. She cannot simply just volunteer at a hospital, as tens of thousands of students do that. One possible path to showcase her talent would be through competitions such as the Brain Bee, leveraging that to get a position as a lab assistant with a local neuroscience professor, and ideally finishing with a research paper. The post on developing a spike explains this process in more detail.
Some Activities Can Be Just For Fun
You don’t need to go full intensity on all your activities. It’s completely fine to have some you do just for fun. If Sally loves painting but isn’t particularly good at it, she can continue to do it as a side activity.
Go Deep, Not Wide
The Common App has ten spots available to list activities, leading many students to think that they must fill out all ten. That’s not true.
It is a much better strategy to have one to three activities that you go deep in, and a few more you do with moderate interest, than it is to have ten activities you dabble in.
