Well-diggers and punk rockers wanted

One of my students spent last summer in Indonesia, and boy, is she going places. She’s already been admitted to some of her favorite colleges, and it’s only January.

She spent her summer digging wells for fresh water, delivering medical supplies, helping to hang mosquito nets and playing soccer with the local kids on the island. Closer to home, she’s very active in the Invisible Children chapter at her high school, organizing protests, raising funds to purchase school supplies and participating in powerful demonstrations to raise awareness and inspire her classmates to help make a change.

Another one of my students is a punk-rock-loving drummer without a band. Instead of waiting for the drummer-less version of the next Ramones to come and find him, he decided to get involved with other aspects of the music, and now he is managing a band and building connections within the punk scene. He’s headed to college in the fall hoping to take classes in business management and audio recording.

Neither of these kids did any of these things because I told them that doing so would look good on those college applications. I didn’t have to say it. Their interest and initiative meant they were going to do these things anyway, with or without my guidance. And those qualities, not the activities themselves, are exactly what colleges are looking for.

A lot of our students ask what they should be doing after school or during summers to impress their colleges. I never have a good answer for that question. We won’t tell every kid to spend a summer volunteering in Uganda, or slinging frozen yogurt at Golden Spoon. Two hundred extra hours of community service won’t mean as much to colleges if an admissions officer can’t tell that it meant something to the volunteer. Our role as counselors is to encourage our students to pursue the activities that they really enjoy, to find the areas where they can make their own impact.

When it comes to activities in college admissions, it’s less about what you do, and much more about how passionately you do it. Whether a student is saving the world, starting a band, or scooping yogurt, if that passion comes out in her application, the colleges will take notice.

And those students will be going places, too.