High school extracurricular activities

This page is about extracurricular activities for students in school, specifically high school. Extracurricular activities refers to activities that are not part of the academic curriculum of the educational institution.

The corresponding page about extracurricular activities at the college level is (where?).

Key takeaways

• There is a wide range of extracurricular activities that people may not think of as extracurricular activities, but that are good from a wide variety of perspectives: they enable long-term personal growth and learning, they can be used to signal quality to colleges, they can be fun, and they contribute value to the world.
• Participating in online communities may be one overlooked category in extracurricular activities, and you should seriously consider such participation if the type of activity you are interested in is amenable to that.
• Colleges are flexible when evaluating student involvement in extracurricular activities. Students who are unaware of this flexibility may mistakenly over-optimize their profile of extra-curricular activities for what they believe colleges are looking for, at the expense of personal growth, fun, and value contributed. Or, to put it bluntly, they may spend hours on activities that are boring, teach them nothing, and contribute no lasting value to society, but with no payoff in terms of college admissions.
• The key ingredient in using an extracurricular as a signal of quality to colleges is how convincingly you can demonstrate your passion for and achievement in the area. If recommendation letter-writers can vouch independently for your passion or skill in the area, that is even better.

What to look for in extracurriculars

Human capital: acquisition of long-term knowledge and skills

KEEP IN MIND: Before committing to an extracurricular activity, think hard about the question of whether you will acquire lasting skills from it. If you won't, then you should engage in it only if you really enjoy doing it.

Extracurriculars can be used to acquire valuable skills. These include:

• The specific skills being practiced in the extracurricular: For instance, playing the violin for your school orchestra makes you better at playing the violin, and that might be a skill that you can put to use for later orchestras, or it might help you appreciate music better, or you might be able to tutor others in the violin later in life.
• General skills related to hardwork, perseverance, concentration, and acquisition of mastery
• Skills related to dealing with people: Many extracurriculars involve activities that rely on teamwork. Some extracurriculars involve dealing with customers or potential customers. Some extracurriculars involve reading the minds of opponents (poker?).

Signaling quality to colleges

KEEP IN MIND: If there's an extracurricular activity you are engaging in only for the sake of college admissions, you should probably not be engaging in it.

Some students are under the impression that outside of their school work, they should participate in as many activities as possible. A common reason for this is that students believe that colleges are looking for students who participate in as many activities as possible. Our research has suggested that this is not the case. Rather:

• The student's ability to demonstrate passion and skill at the extracurricular activity in his or her personal statement is very important.
• If the student can get one of more recommendation letter writer to vouch for the student's passion and skill at the extracurricular activity, that would be helpful.

KEEP IN MIND: If you're participating in extracurricular activities where you have reached a relatively high level of skill or achievement, look for experts in the area who can vouch for your skill level. They could be potential writers of recommendation letters for you. Alternatively, they may vouch for your skill to the person (such as your school teacher) who does write your recommendation letter.

• If the student can point to external objective metrics that can be used to corroborate his/her skill level, that can be an asset. However, admissions officers may not have sufficient subject matter knowledge to know what metrics are objective.

For more, see our compilation of college statements about extracurricular activities.

Improved peer groups

Extracurriculars can be a way to hang out with people in your school or neighborhood or around the world who are more fun and useful to be around. For instance, if you are at a school where the typical student has little interest in having serious discussions, joining the Debate Club might help you interact more with the few people in your school who are interested in serious discussions. This improved peer group might be helpful in many ways:

• Friends and perhaps romantic partners of higher quality
• A more inspiring peer environment can push you to achieve more
• The peer group might provide you with high-quality information that can help you with your goals

KEEP IN MIND: With online activities, you have the opportunity to interact with the best people around the world, rather than being restricted to the best people in your school or neighborhood.

Consumption

One major draw of extracurricular activities is that they can be fun and engaging, and provide variety.

Value to society

KEEP IN MIND: At your age and stage in life, improving your skills for the long term is more likely to create value for society than activities that are typically classed as being socially useful.

Some activities create value for society directly, whereas others do not. In some cases, the value is lasting, whereas in other cases, it is not.

=Knowledge goods and audience size

KEEP IN MIND: For activities that involve producing knowledge goods, equivalent activities can produce vastly different levels of value to society depending on how big a market the knowledge goods reach.

Consider the following comparisons:

• Writing the Wikipedia page about a topic versus writing an equally good summary of the topic for a local discussion or debate club.
• Writing a Quora answer detailing your experience in a topic versus writing up the same experience in an article for your school's print magazine.
• Asking and answering questions about programming difficulties on Stack Exchange versus asking and answering questions in a mailing list for your school's computer club.

In all examples, the former activity reaches a much larger potential audience than the latter activity, even though the quality of the output may be the same. Keep in mind that this consideration applies largely to knowledge goods (too technical a term?).

Of course, audience size is not the only consideration -- it may be much easier and more personally valuable to you to help people in your school or neighboorhood or friend circle than to help strangers. But the value to society consideration argues in favor of larger audiences.

Social value and profit

KEEP IN MIND: Interning at a for-profit company (perhaps for free) may be a way of generating social value.

For-profit companies often create social value. In fact, if the company is making a profit through customers who voluntarily and without regret buy its goods, this is strong evidence in favor of the claim that the company is creating value. Interning at for-profits should be considered a potential alternative to doing volunteer work at non-profits in terms of social value generated (more later).

Suggestions for extracurricular activities

Because colleges don't appear to favor applicants who are involved in a large number of extracurricular activities, you should take advantage of the opportunity to base your choice of extracurricular activities in areas that will interest you, and/or extracurricular activities that are conducive to personal growth. Some extracurricular activities that we recommend are:

Creating something new

One of the best ways to learn about the world and about yourself is to create something new. Creating something new is also good for college admissions: it shows greater independence, initiative, and originality than participating in school clubs.

• If you're passionate about writing, this could be a book.
• If you're passionate about math, this could be a mathematical research paper.
• If you're passionate about programming, this could be a computer software.
• If you're passionate about education for underprivileged children, this could be an after school educational enrichment program for them.

Participating in online communities

One of the virtues of the internet is that it enables people to find others who share their interests. Because the population of people who use the internet is large, participating in online communities can give you access to some very knowledgable people who you can learn more from than the people who you know in person. Some ideas for online communities that you might participate in are:

• Quora — a question and answer website where you can ask and answer questions about any subject that interests you.
• LessWrong — A group blog where participants discuss psychology, philosophy, self-improvement, artificial intelligence, and the far future.
• StackOverflow — a computer programming question and answer website.

Internships

You can learn more about careers that interest you by doing internships at companies and nonprofits.

Earning to give

A lot of community service work and volunteer work isn't an efficient way of helping people. An alternative that you should consider is earning to give. If you get a job, or work a few extra hours at your job, you can save up money that you can donate to charity. Some charities are very impactful. For example, GiveDirectly gives 90% of donations to very poor Kenyans who have household incomes that are about ~$1000/year. If you donate ~$1000 to GiveDirectly, you can double a poor Kenyan family's income for a year, enabling the family to buy things like a metal roof to replace a leaky thatch roof.