Are Your College Applications Too Well Rounded?
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009Are you:
| Volunteering at a local food bank/homeless shelter/hospital? | |
| Working summers as a camp counselor? | |
| 2100+ on the SAT, top 10% of your class? | |
| Band/choir member, soccer player, and yearbook staff? |
If you answered “yes” to all four questions, then you may be on the path to snoozeville.
For the past decade or so, the buzzword in college applications has been “well-rounded.” Ambitious applicants eager to get into the nation’s top universities are encouraged to play sports AND an instrument, work part-time AND volunteer, write for the literary magazine AND compete in a national science fair. You’ve been told that you should try and do it all. But you may have been told wrong.
Colleges are growing tired of cookie-cutter applicants who just check-the-boxes for all the things they’re “supposed” to do. Without any passion guiding them, too many students are just going through the motions of making themselves look good. And colleges are catching on. They’re sick and tired of accepting all the same types of students. How many student-body presidents, track-team, violin-playing, merit-scholars does a college need?
It’s one thing if your interests and are diverse, but it’s quite another if your just picking things up to fill out your resume. You also run the risk of spreading yourself too thin-if you have a real passion and talent for writing but no time for it, you’ll never be able to really build your portfolio. Colleges want to see somebody with talent, leadership, and drive, not just somebody who knows how to sign up on school activities day.
So if you find yourself “checking the boxes” off of your resume, take a minute to think. What do all of these activities say about you as a person? Are you just another over-achieving applicant, or somebody with real drive? If you start to put yourself to sleep, maybe it’s time to start focusing more on what you love, and not what you think colleges love to see.
