Many students ask us how important extracurricular activities are in the college admissions process. It is fairly clear that academics are an important part of admissions, but which parts of the extracurricular story are actually important and how do you determine that? Here at Synocate, we have spent the past 6 years understanding what colleges care about and helping thousands of students through the college admissions process. In this article, we will go over how to use data to help you determine how important extracurricular activities are.
The data tool can be accessed here - tools.synocate.com and going to the "Data" tab at the top.
What constitutes an extracurricular activity?
To us, extracurricular activities fall into three key buckets: general activities, volunteer work, and work experience. We have gathered data from the Top 50 US colleges who have ranked these three categories on a scale of 1-4, with 4 being the most important. We have analyzed and collected the data in the trailing 5 years.
General extracurricular activities
In this bucket, school clubs, out of school community organizations, and competitions fall. If we use tools.synocate.com and sort by this category from greatest to least, we find that schools like Princeton, University of Florida, and Case Western consider general extracurricular activities one of the most important characteristics of the college admissions process. You can also flip the sort to see which colleges care least about extracurricular activities. University of Notre Dame, Harvard, and Tulane are some schools that do not care as much about extracurricular activities.
Volunteer work
Using the same sort feature, we can select schools that care the most about volunteer work. Schools like Washington University in St. Louis, University of California Irvine, and College of William and Mary care the most about volunteer work.
Other schools like Yale, Princeton, and Stanford mark volunteer work as 2/4 (considered, but not important).
Of course, you have to look at these values with respect to the other 17 variables that we have on our site. For example, Harvard ranks most of these 17 variables as 2/4, so many variables are considered but not many are important. You can add more filters to the same tool at tools.synocate.com under "Data".
Work experience
Work experience is another area that many students ask us about in the college admissions process. Using our sort function at tools.synocate.com under "Data" we find that Washington University in St. Louis, University of Virginia, and Carnegie Mellon are three schools that consider work experience as important or very important.
On the other side, we can change the sorting function to find schools that do not look that closely at work experience. Dartmouth, Wake Forest, and Stanford are three schools that fit this category.
In this same tool, you can do multiple sorts to match your specific scenario. For example, if you want to find schools that really consider general extracurricular activities but do not really consider work experience, you can sort on this tool - tools.synocate.com under "Data".
You can sort across 18 variables on this site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. Please email us any time at admin@synocate.com with comments.