Extracurriculars Reveal a College Applicant’s True Character, so What are You Revealing?
The most interesting part in working with students as a college admissions consultant is building their extracurricular profile. To me, the endeavor of doing so reveals more about a student than their grades and test scores.
Having helped and work with multiple students gain admission into Ivy League schools and equally competitive colleges (like Stanford, Duke, Johns Hopkins University), I can see why certain ones gain admission into such institutions and why others don’t.
And it’s not because of academics or test scores. While those metrics are important, there are ultimately more perfect GPAs and test scores than there are spots available at those schools. You’re going to need more than grades and test scores.
The Psychology of Achieving in Academics versus Extracurriculars
Achieving certain grades and test scores are more clearly defined with criteria and rubrics, correct and wrong answers. You know if you’re succeeding or failing, and can also predict if you will succeed or fail if you know what work to do and whether or not you’re doing it.
When it comes to consulting on college admissions, advising on academics and testing are usually the easiest parts. Specifically things like course selection (at a minimum, pick what will be relevant to a student’s future intended major) and choosing when to take the SAT or ACT and then making sure a student registers for it. They are decisions with very limited options and requires little more work, creativity, or courage than checking boxes, submitting a form, and then ultimately if tutoring or extra classes are needed, showing up and doing what you’re told.
But extracurriculars? They require constant self-awareness and personal discretion to determine what is right and what is wrong. When it comes to extracurriculars, what feels like the right action in the beginning ends up being the wrong action later. For example, you only need to research about a field or organization for so long before you’re ready to take action. When it comes to leadership in an organization, telling everyone what to do all the time might help up to a certain point, but when your organization reaches a size where you start to become the bottleneck, you’re going to need to entrust other leaders to operate autonomously. Not micromanaging is as emotional as it is technical.
But because there aren’t usually deadlines for most extracurricular pursuits that aren’t structured activities (like scheduled and mandatory practices to attend for sports teams), most execute poorly while pursuing and making something of opportunities. Examples include waiting a month to reply to someone offering an internship, or waiting until the last week before a competitive summer research program application is due to finally start working on it when they had more than three months to start.
Why most students don’t become more competitive in their extracurriculars is because there aren’t constant deadlines or limits. You can keep working on them for as long as you want and as fast as you want. There is no limit to your ambition, it just depends on the baseline of your discipline and your aggressiveness in learning, growing, and seeking out more noteworthy opportunities.
For extracurriculars, a student’s success depends more on their drive. It also depends on their willingness to fail and make mistakes (because the only real failure and mistake is not trying to do something). It also depends on their resilience and persistence, because failure might just be momentary. Failure can simply be “I haven’t figured out how to do this or make this work yet, but I’m determined to keep trying until I do.” Those character traits are the variables that determine extracurricular achievement. Not intelligence.
Lack of Extracurricular Achievement Stems from Fear and Clinging onto the Comfort of Short-Term Pleasure
When granted the opportunity to do something new, something they’ve never done before, something difficult that will require taking risks and leading people and stepping outside of their comfort zone, students choose not to take action. They might not have any appetite for failure in the real world. It’s why most are compliant when it comes to homework and exams and usually follow through on completing it.
Intelligent students are primarily good at remembering and applying information to paper, but when it comes to the real world they pause and move too slowly to achieve anything significant or challenging. These students who are bright but afraid and give in to distraction and avoid possible failure choose to cling onto the confines of what they’re familiar with, to what they’ve been trained and told to do. They choose to not create significant change in terms of how things are done or what can be done, and instead just maintain the same process and results. When the consequences are not immediate or fatal enough, they choose not to act on what would actually yield the most immense rewards.
The Bright, Driven, Determined, and Courageous — Also Your Competition
Then there are the students who are more than bright and brilliant on paper. They’re driven to get things done and determined to figure things out. They’ll have whatever conversation is needed, recruit essential team members, spend extra hours learning and or building new things and testing them out.
The students who are not only intelligent but are willing to constantly sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term rewards, who show up and follow through on the work, they’re the ones who achieve inside of school and outside of it. These are the students who gain admission into the competitive colleges.
To all the students who choose not to do anything and instead distract themselves, these driven, courageous, disciplined, and brilliant students are your competition. They manage and boss themselves around well. They may even end up being your boss in the future unless you take responsibility and control for your own process and results now.
Go do something.
Go figure it out.
Don’t just work hard. Work smart. Work on the right things, even if they require courage and sacrifice. You are more powerful than you think.
If I only looked at grades and test scores, I end up with an incomplete picture of a student. Grades and test scores hide the fear, the lack of genuine curiosity, the lack of unrelenting proactiveness. For me, they end up being a false signal. When a student and I work on extracurriculars together, that’s when a student’s true character is revealed.
