A couple weeks ago I invited Sharon Epstein, an award-winning essay writing and college interview coach, to talk about tips for awesome essays. If you didn’t get a chance to read the post, here it is. Read it. It’s really good!
This week, Sharon invited me to write about resumes for her blog, Applying to College.
Check it out and, and always, let me know what you think!
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
Let’s call that what it is: attention seeking. It’s the same reason the super-hot girl calls herself ugly or the buff guy calls himself fat: validation.
But you are not here seeking validation. You are here because you don’t know if your extracurricular activities are going to help you get into a great school. So, let’s figure this out, shall we?
It’s not what you do, but how you do it
Why do you think schools want you to take extracurricular activities? There are several reasons that all lead to one specific reason. First of all, do you think the school cares if you like swimming, polo, dancing, or theater? Not really. So asking if newspaper is better than theater is like asking if Lady Gaga is better than Natalie Portman.
Gaga makes music and Portman makes hearts melt (re: movies). They are not comparable. Likewise, picking extracurricular activities without a basis for comparison is insane.
Theater is better if you want to act; newspaper is better if you want to write. Right?
Second, schools really want to see if you are more than a number on a page. Grades prove that you have the intellectual ability to read and understand material, understand teachers and testing, and manage your time. The SAT does the same. Extracurricular activities prove who you are outside of academics. And that’s really what colleges should be about. Preparing you for the world outside of school.
The activities you do outside of school prove if you will be a future leader or follower. If you will sacrifice your free time for some greater good or if you care more about munchies and YouTube than the written word, sports, or poor people.
The problem is picking activities that you are good at, that you can become a leader in, and that look good on an application.
Passion Is The New Currency
Now look, If you are doing it for some ulterior motive (getting into a university), then you suck. Seriously. It’s like me learning to salsa just so I can pick up girls. I love salsa. And yes, it’s awesome for picking up girls. But that’s a nice bonus. Getting into a school because of your clubs is a great bonus, but if you are not interested in the club, that will show and just make you look like a sycophant.
The best extracurricular activity you can choose will:
– Be related to your big picture goals
– Be something you are really interested in
– Be something that you can rise to the top in
– Be something that you would be proud to tell people about
You want to succeed in life. You want to do really, really well in life. Seriously. But you also want to be happy.
Imagine this:
I am really interested in rock climbing. So, my extracurricular activity in high school was to rock climb. Now, that’s not a team sport, so how can I take what I love and make it awesomely application-worthy? I organize a rock climbing trip with kids from the inner city.
I do what I love, and I help people. And I can write a passionate essay about that. And, doing something like that might get picked up in the paper, so in my application I can refer to the time the newspaper wrote about me being an awesome human.
You need to join clubs that you will grow into. Schools need future leaders. That is a fact. “True story, bro.” So, pick something that you will succeed at. People tend to get passionate around success and uninterested in failure. So, succeed. You succeed, and everything else will fall into place.
Thanks, but where is the cake?
Let’s get some easy steps in place so you can really, thoroughly, legitimately, and awesomely find a great activity or activities to get involved in.
(1) What are you into? What is your thing?
This is open-ended. Just write down all the stuff that makes you smile, happy, laugh, get excited about. Most of you know what you are into. If you don’t know, then figure it out. What are you into? Movies, girls, boys, sports, helping people, TV, writing, poetry, food? Figure that out.
(2) Of those things that you are into, what can you probably be good at?
Helping people is easy, right? Just help. But let’s say you are really into basketball. But you are like 5 foot nothing, cannot sprint, and only know how to shoot granny style. Well, being a varsity captain is not in your future. But, you could do something auxiliary (cheerleading, mascot, film, reporting) that deals with your passion. Write it all down.
(3) Of those things that you could be capable of, which are offered in some capacity by your school?
Let’s say you are all into Christian stuff, but your school does not offer Christian stuff. Then Christian stuff needs to go into your “outside of school” pile.
If you want to be an actor, but your school does not have a film or theater department, don’t cross it out, but move it to “outside of school”.
(4) Of those things that are not listed in your school but you really love, hit up your counselor, your parents, and Google and figure out who does that stuff in your town.
Where could you go outside of school to get involved in knitting, or pet care, or magic? Do your research and write things down. If you want to write poetry but your school isn’t into that, find any poetry meet ups or poetry publishers in town. If you like water polo but your school doesn’t have a pool, find a club in town that has a team.
(5) Pick some on-campus activities and at least one off-campus activity.
Go out, ask to be on the team, apply, call the YMCA, call the local newspaper, intern, write, work, play for free. Just get yourself busy. If you join these things (pick 2-4 that you can totally dominate) or do these things, you will naturally move up the ranks, because you are into it. If you think about how cool it will be to finish school and write, workout, fight, climb, sing, or act, then you have found an extracurricular activity that you are passionate about. And that, my friends, is an extracurricular activity that matters. Because you will write about this activity, and you will tell people about it, and you will BE defined by it. So make sure you pick something that you are proud of.
NOTE: Please note that there are some exceptions to these rules. If you are really into sex, drugs, racism, or ultra-violence, you should definitely NOT get involved in those things as a way to get into college. Fight club all you want in your own time, but that’s not really the mark of a future leader. Also, don’t be a racist; racism sucks.
What are your current extracurricular activities? Will you become captain (or captain equivalent) anytime soon? If not, why not?
*Craig is an awesome dude who runs Craig Gonzales Tutoring. He has put together a pretty stellar SAT Tutorial Kit that he gives away for free. You should find him, like him, email him, and let him help you rock that SAT.
If you have any thoughts you would like to share on writing an extracurricular activities, please use the comment box below – I would love to hear from you! You can also email me at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com or Craig at craig@craiggonzalestutoring.com.
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
As far as figuring out what type of colleges to select, that’s something that comes with time, conversation and research. There are many factors that go into defining at which type of school your son or daughter will do well. For example, he or she should be thinking about attributes such as location, size of the student body, cost, private or public and reputation.
The honest answer here is that your son or daughter has to first understand what is most important to them. Once they have a good grasp on their values, interests, personality style and skills (what I refer to as their VIPS), then you have a starting point for identifying which schools are going to be the best matches for him or her. One of the services included in my Early Exploration Package is a profile review where I help a student identify these VIPS and then use them to begin their college search.
Q: What are the best things to look at in a college?
The best things to look at are the things that are most important to your student which takes me back to the previous two questions. Your first step is to help him or her identify their VIPS, get a good handle on what is most important to them in their search and then start visiting schools, attending college fairs, and doing online research. Of all these things, going on some college visits will end up being one of the more important things you can do. A few months ago I wrote a blog about tips for high school juniors. One of those tips was about campus visits – even if your son or daughter isn’t sure which schools they might be interested in yet, just visiting a school because it’s local can be so valuable in helping them identify what is and isn’t important.
If you have any thoughts you would like to share on “A Conversation About College,” please use the comment box below – I would love to hear from you! You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
This is a great question because while the essay can be very important, the topic isn’t necessarily what makes it important. What matters in an essay is how you tell your story. An essay really can be about any topic, big or small, but it’s how the student connects to the essay and what they are able to reveal about themselves that matters. A student who can show some depth, who can demonstrate a level of reflection and who can get me to see that what he is writing about truly matters to him is a student who has done a great job with their essay. The best way for a student to accomplish this is to really invest some time in their essay and make peace with the fact that they will write and rewrite several times before their essay is done. In fact, what their final essay looks like may not look anything like the original concept when they started.
Q: We are just starting the college search and our son is a sophomore – where do we start?
For freshmen and sophomores, the focus should be on helping them figure out what is important to them, what their strengths, skills and abilities are and introducing the idea of what college is about. If you go to my website, you will see that I offer a package called the “Early Exploration Package for Freshmen and Sophomores.” Basically, I help students at this stage work through a self-assessment while exploring some long range goals that tie into the college process.
Q: How do we go about figuring out our financial aid & scholarship options?
Again, this is time sensitive for the most part since you cannot apply for financial aid using the FAFSA until January 1st of the student’s senior year in high school. If he or she decides they are applying to any private schools, they may be required to also fill out the CSS Profile. The Profile, however, can be filed prior to January 1st. While you can’t do anything about filing just yet, what you can do is spend some time figuring out how much all of this is going to cost. There is some detail to this, but essentially you want to know what you will be expected to pay for school so that you have some time to plan. If you go on the College Board website, you can use their EFC Calculator to do just this. EFC stands for “Expected Family Contribution” and is a term you will get to know quite well as senior year approaches. Your EFC is what a college will expect you to pay and it is how they calculate what they will offer you in the form of aid, grants and loans. The higher your EFC, the more you will be expected to contribute and the less aid you will expect to receive. As of this past October, each college and university has been mandated to publish a net price calculator on their website. So, as your student identifies schools where he or she would like to apply, you can use their net price calculator to get a feel for how things might look financially. Here is a blog that I wrote about the EFC calculators.
Q: How to choose a career/major?
This is a great question and one that troubles many students as they work through this process. To be honest, I do some assessments with students to help flesh out their values, interests, personality style and skills – or what I like to call their VIPS. Once you have a good idea of what is important to a student, what they are interested in and what they are likely to do well at, it is a lot easier to present options for majors and to point them in the direction of some useful career exploration. If it turns out that their interests are all over the place, then you want to be looking at schools that offer a wide variety of majors and where a student can start off as an undeclared major and then take some time in first semester to continue their career exploration.
I wouldn’t worry about this issue too much as of right now, especially if your son or daughter is only a sophomore or junior. Over 50% of students end up changing their majors during their freshman year anyway.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the awesome moms out there! I hope you’re having a great day!
If you have any thoughts you would like to share on “A Conversation About College,” please use the comment box below – I would love to hear from you! You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
I’m writing you from upstate New York this weekend. My wife’s grandparents live in Rochester and we decided to take a long weekend to visit them. Following my own advice, I took some time out of our vacation weekend to visit two colleges. Since we were right in Rochester, I chose to take a tour of Rochester Institute of Technology on Saturday and then, on our way back home to Connecticut, we plan on stopping off at Ithaca College. My wife is alumna of Ithaca, so it will be nice to see it through her eyes.
While touring RIT on Saturday, I was reminded of an article I saw recently that talked about how it really doesn’t matter what you choose for a major. In most cases, unless you need pre-professional training to be a nurse, accountant, speech language pathologist or an engineer, this is true. Just look around you and talk to the people you know – I will bet that most of them don’t even hold a degree that is directly tied to the work they do. And this brings me to what I want to talk about today. Sometimes, your major really does matter and a recent article in the U.S. News offers several reasons why a degree in a technical field such as computer science, software programming, or engineering really can matter.
According to the article, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects over a million new technical positions will be created by 2020. As our world becomes increasingly more driven by technology, data and information sharing, the need for talented individuals who understand how to design, produce, manage and secure these technologies will also increase significantly. In this case, majors do matter. Programs like computer science, information technology, software engineering, computer engineering, and information security can help point you in the direction of an exciting and growing career path. Don’t get me wrong – a degree alone is not going to deliver you to the promise land where you dream job is just waiting for you – having experiences along the way that support your brand as an aspiring technology professional while also showcasing your skills and abilities is what’s going to help you attain the jobs that you want the most.
In other words, you need to get out of the classroom and into a professional environment. You need to be able to show what you can do, not just what you learned. In the world of college, this is called experiential learning and it includes options such as volunteering, research, internships and co-ops. In case you don’t already know, a co-op is a full-time, paid work experience that can offer a student the chance to develop their skills and abilities while making valuable industry contacts.
RIT is a great example of a school where experiential learning is at the core of everything they do, especially in their co-op program, where over 3500 students obtain placements each year. A lot of these students are enrolled in programs similar to the ones mentioned in the article. As early as sophomore year, they are going out into the real world and obtaining valuable work experience and industry contacts. Some of them will complete multiple co-ops and, coupled with a degree that relates to critical needs in the world, these students will find success in their professional lives.
If you have any thoughts you would like to share on experiential learning and how majors matter (or don’t matter), please use the comment box below. You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
