“What are the activities that will help my teen get into “X” college?”
“How many activities does my teen need to get into a good college?”
“What is the number of volunteer hours my teen needs?”
Chances are, if you’re the parent of a teenager, you’ve asked these questions or wondered about the answers. And understandably so.
The extracurricular activities provide meaningful information for colleges above and beyond grades and test scores, which help create a more three-dimensional profile of the student and their interests.
This creates the pressure for parents and teens to feel that they have to choose the activities that best fit the profile of their college of interest.
But here’s the thing, the overall profile of what the college is looking for in their freshman class changes every single year. Colleges want to build a freshman class of interesting and diverse students that combined accomplish THEIR goals, some of which are:
a. Possess a wide-range of real-life usable skills
b. Will graduate in four years
c. Will contribute to the community while they are there
d. Will go on to be successful alumni that give back to the college
Remember, that’s a combined goal. Which means for the entire freshman class, not each individual student. So how in the world can you predict which activities are best suited to that description overall? And, even if you could, how would you know which ones are most important for any given year for any given college? And, how do you begin to predict which activities YOUR teen needs to have to complete that overall profile?
It’s simple - you can’t. That’s why the best thing to do when it comes to choosing extracurricular activities or ANY part of preparing for college, is to have your teen focus on figuring out the things that are most important to them. And when it comes to extracurriculars, one of the best ways to do that are to pick ones that are fun and help them discover new areas of interest.
Which makes the questions above completely irrelevant.
Instead, these are questions that are much more helpful for your teen to think about:
a. What are things I enjoy doing? How can I expand on that?
b. What are subjects or activities I’m interested in? What else can I do to learn more?
c. What are things I’ve heard about that I’d like to try?
That’s how a student joins the theatre department, hears about improv from other students in theatre, joins the improv club and becomes President senior year.
That’s how a student chooses to major in kinesiology because they took an elective junior year that sounded interesting and found a whole new major they never knew about.
That’s how a student who loves music and plays an instrument decides to raise money to fund music programs in public schools.
It’s taking the focus off of “what will look best” and putting it on “how can I do more of what’s fun”. It’s about being curious. Curiosity leads to finding out what inspires you, inspiration leads to finding out what you’re passionate about. And, when you’re passionate about something, you’re going to spend more time doing it and learning about it, because it’s FUN!
And, the cool thing, is that this makes it much easier for the colleges to learn about who you are, what’s important to you and why and HOW you will fit in to their overall community.
When it comes to choosing activities, it really is all about following these 3 little words:
YOU DO YOU!