Work experience might seem more like something you would put on a job resume rather than a college application. However, including this kind of experience when applying for college is a smart move. Having work experience, such as a part-time position, shows that you are responsible enough to hold down a job. When you have experience at a job, you might also have gained valuable experience interacting with others as part of customer service.
Your college application is about a lot more than your grades. The best extracurriculars for college grades include clubs or teams you have been part of in high school. These academic groups have provided you with a way to deepen your understanding of a certain subject or pursue an interest, such as chess clubs or science Olympiads. If you have been in several academic teams and clubs, should you include all of them on your application?
You should also include information on your role within these groups, especially if you were a captain or leader. Putting creative activities on your application is an effective way to show this.
Creative pursuits can also show colleges that you have the dedication needed to develop your skills and talents.
Keep in mind that it takes effort and discipline to excel in these kinds of activities. Technological skills are another important extracurricular activity to include on your college application.
While colleges generally expect students to have certain basic skills, such as typing skills, online research skills, experience with commonly used software programs, and knowledge of online etiquette, other skills can help you stand out. Being politically active can help you gain attention from college admissions departments when you include this information on your application.
Student activism has been on the rise among high school students and in local communities. These kinds of extracurricular activities show colleges that you keep up with current events while also being willing to stand up for your beliefs and rights. While a family vacation might not give you the right kind of experience to discuss on your application, going abroad to study or volunteer can be a great way to include travel when applying for college.
Travel essays for college applications should help colleges see you in a positive light. Focusing on what you learned from traveling or how it has impacted your life are good ways to talk about these experiences on your college application.
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Thank you for inquiring. You must be a licensed RN to qualify for entrance into this program. If you are a Registered Nurse outside of the U. While admissions officers want to see excellent grades, they also want demonstrations of responsibility. This shows schools that you understand the importance of hard work and commitment. High school athletics are more important than many may realize, especially when it comes to scoring your dream university place.
Students who participate in sports, especially team sports, can show they understand teamwork, communication, and dedication, as well as the ability to successfully balance the demands of sports and education. Are you passionate about local, state, or national elections? Clubs are great, especially when they have an academic focus. Students who are engaged in high school are more likely to be involved at university, which is the kind of student universities want.
As a result, demonstrating you have the technical skills that will help ease your transition into university can help move you closer to the top of the acceptance list. If you are well-traveled, it would probably be beneficial to mention that in your applications.
However, if your travel is limited to family beach vacations or trips to Disney, you might want to reconsider adding that. Instead, focus on including your experiences traveling abroad and meeting new people from all over the world -- or other opportunities you may have had to immerse yourself in and learn from other cultures.
One of the best things you can do to make yourself stand out is to be generous with your time. Find a cause you believe in, and devote yourself to it. High school student Elena Kloss is one student who donates her time to serving her community. At high school, she's been involved in basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, and football. Inspired by her Human Biology class, she decided to become a nurse and intends to go to Carroll University to pursue a nursing degree, with plans to eventually work in an emergency room or in a labor and delivery unit.
I advise my students to schedule free time in their calendars to allow for meaningful exploration. The biggest obstacle to freeing up time tends to be parent and student anxiety. Resist this anxiety and encourage your child to protect their time at all costs if they want to deeply devote themselves to impressive activities. However, they will help your child protect their time and develop a powerful extracurricular profile to stand out and get into the best schools. Reducing time spent on homework.
You can share the following strategies with your child to help them study smarter—in less time:. Work in isolation and in a quiet space, such as in a library or at a desk in your house that is away from the computer.
Avoid using the internet unless it is required. If the internet is required for a certain assignment, use website blockers to avoid spending time perusing social media. Otherwise, you may get caught up in email, social media, and text messages from friends. Eat well. Nutritious meals and snacks will help you be more efficient while completing school work.
Eliminating unnecessary courses and reducing workload. Many students think that taking the most difficult course load possible will guarantee them admission to the best universities. If your child is already enrolled in AP Biology and they are not terribly passionate about science, they probably should not add AP Physics or AP Chemistry to their schedule. It is perfectly acceptable—and recommended—to take fewer time-consuming courses, especially if it allows time to achieve at an incredibly high level with extracurriculars.
If your child is choosing between two different courses to satisfy a requirement that they are not excited about e.
Cutting unnecessary electives can also save time. If your child has enrolled in band, choir, art, or theater and has lost interest, it may be a good time for them to cut that class. By eliminating unnecessary electives and replacing overly difficult courses with more manageable options, your child can down on class time and gain time to study at school or even leave campus early.
More importantly, your child will eliminate hours of unnecessary homework, freeing themselves up to explore their own interests during their evenings and weekends. Striving for academic success, not perfection. What surprises many parents is that perfection is no longer the key to acceptance. This is not to say that students should ignore courses and test scores, but rather to convey that, at a certain point, good enough actually is good enough. Yet, they routinely reject many of these students in favor of applicants with slightly more modest stats but who have innovatively pursued extracurricular activities.
Earlier in this guide I discussed how your child should take incremental small steps in their area of interest so that they can reach the top of the proverbial mountain over time. Someimes when taking small steps, your child will create or be presented with an exciting opportunity that they are itching to pursue. When the rare, truly exciting opportunity presents itself, your child should go all in and fully devote their time, attention, and emotion. For example, if your child has been conducting biology research for two years at your local university and comes across a promising finding that he can write up for a first-author submission to a major journal, he should commit most, if not all, of his extracurricular time to doing so, even if it means taking a break from other activities.
Rare opportunities reflect months or years of hard work. Pursuing them effortfully will lead to outsized achievements and impressiveness when it comes to college applications. After spending some time exploring extracurricular activities and developing new skills, your child will have more clarity about their passions and be ready to take their activities to the next level.
While your child can go it alone, I strongly recommend they connect with a mentor. Mentors are like rocket fuel; they can help your child accelerate their extracurricular progress and achieve greater things during their high school career. Mentors come in all forms. If your child is interested in pursuing scientific research, a local university professor could be a great mentor. On the other hand, if your child is excited about leading a fundraising project for infants with fetal alcohol syndrome, a philanthropist or nonprofit organization president could be the right person to guide them.
Reaching out to new organizations and possible mentors can be a daunting task. A good place to start with finding a mentor is through a personal connection, whether teachers, school staff, parents, family members, or family friends.
If a personal contact through these networks does not pan out, your child should consider sending emails to possible mentors with whom they might want to work. Because so many professionals are inundated with emails, this process takes care and patience. I am a high school student at Lakes Community High School resume attached with a longstanding interest in bird evolution and migration patterns.
I came across your work on the Calliope Hummingbird about a year ago and have been fascinated by how their patterns differ from other birds in their genus.
What types of duties could I take on as an entry-level research assistant? Are there undergraduate or graduate students who might serve as mentors?
If you do not have space for a student, do you recommend any reading related to hummingbird evolution or know anyone else who might need a research assistant?
Please let me know if I can provide any additional information. I look forward to hearing from you. If a potential mentor does not respond, your child should wait a week or two before checking in. I hope this message finds you well. Some professionals are either super busy or skeptical of mentoring high school students, so your child should move on and find someone who is excited to guide them.
No matter what your child does, they should dive deeper into a specialized interest, rather than pursue multiple activities superficially. The former often culminates in a project, but it may also result in a series of different activities that constellate around a central interest.
Project-based approach: Exciting and impressive extracurricular accomplishments can take many forms. It might culminate in writing a book, maintaining a blog, creating a small business, starting an activist movement, or conducting and publishing original research, to name a few.
A project-based approach does not preclude your child from also pursuing other activities, but could consume substantial time. It may be true that your child is not, empirically speaking, the best at a certain activity, but that does not necessarily mean that they should give up that activity, especially if it continues to interest them. Fortunately, your child does not need to be the best at a given activity for it to be worthwhile from a college admissions standpoint.
Instead, your child can stand out by immersing themselves in other aspects of an activity. Think about pursuing multiple interests or activities in a narrow field of ideas. Succeeding in related activities will make your child look even more successful. A student with a longstanding interest in music performance might give private music lessons and start an organization that performs shows for low-income or elderly communities.
A baseball player might volunteer or work as a coach for a Little League team while writing articles for a local newspaper or a website about current events or affairs in baseball. The possibilities are endless. Both approaches—project-based or related accomplishments—require curiosity, dedication, and hard work, not special talents.
Forget about the idea that successful students are unparalleled geniuses. Initial successes are often slow and limited. They might come in the form of an unpaid internship or a volunteer position.
Oftentimes, these positions require grunt work. A student who serves as a research assistant for a biology project will probably find themselves spending a lot of time looking at bacteria culture or collecting data.
A small business might fail to generate profits. The first draft of a book may require substantial revisions before it is close to being publishable. The process of getting good at something involves significant practice.
Too many students quit activities right before they would have been promoted or otherwise leveled up in skill. Your child should be spending their time on an activity with the aim of improving. The rewards will come. The good news is that success attracts more success. After your child proves themselves in small ways, they will begin to attract the attention of mentors inside and outside their current organizations.
Your child will earn greater responsibilities, solicitations, and avenues for expansion with their developing reputation that they can leverage for more successes. Take Janet as an example. After Janet was selected to work in Dr. After proving herself by spending every Wednesday and Saturday conducting fieldwork, she began analyzing data under the supervision of an advanced graduate student.
After learning how to use computer programs to analyze data, Janet began to propose other avenues for further research, which she followed on her own accord with the help of the graduate student. The deeper your child goes into an activity area, the greater their achievement is likely to be—and harder to explain. A project that is harder to explain will stand out to admissions committees far more than an accomplishment that is simply hard to do.
How did they accomplish each step? Why did the student pursue this interest in the first place? Admissions committees are impressed by achievements that are tough to map out or initially understand because they signal that the student has not followed a conventional path.
Many students and parents are concerned about wasting their summer, so they often find themselves taking courses at an elite university, enrolling in summer programs, working part-time jobs, or volunteering at home or abroad. Families also mistakenly view summer as being discontinuous from the school year, like their kids must do something different during the months of June, July, and August.
Every year, admissions readers review applications from students who participated in Harvard summer programs or who went on a mission trip to work at an orphanage in Haiti. Some students even write trite college essays about these experiences in their Common Application or supplemental applications. Unfortunately, courses and trips like these can distract students from their ongoing projects. Summers indeed provide fantastic opportunities to impress admissions committees.
For instance, if your child has been working on a sustainability initiative with her local school district, she may pursue an internship with a sustainability consulting firm and apply her insights to further advance her project.
He could make a connection with another school district—one in the U. If your child is obsessed with physics but lives in a rural community with no advanced school coursework or local colleges, she could certainly enroll in a summer physics program at a well-known university so she can pursue her interest at a higher level.
Alternatively, she could look to obtain an internship at a company that could use her talents. Finally, if your child has spent countless volunteer hours designing educational programs for children with autism, working with a nonprofit in Tanzania that aims to eliminate the stigma associated with mental illness would dovetail beautifully with their longstanding commitment. Disconnected activities are far less impressive. Note: Expensive activities or trips do not equate to prestige.
Many students worry that working on a niche, idiosyncratic project will adversely affect their application because it can be difficult to fully explain in the Common App Activities Section. Fortunately, your child has the following several options to convey their accomplishments to admissions committees:. Letters of recommendation: Your child can share their project with teachers and guidance counselors who, in turn, can write about the projects in their recommendation letters.
Your child should explicitly ask their teachers and counselors to discuss appropriate activities.
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