A musician with the screen name "mjsokes" uploaded dozens of videos to YouTube in which he taught note for note how to play songs by The Beatles on the guitar. He got over three million views and had nearly 7,000 subscribers eagerly waiting to see his next tutorial. When he unceremoniously deleted his videos and made his page private, thousands of his regular viewers were heartbroken, one going as far as to begin his own revival page to post the few mjsokes videos still lingering in cyberspace.
Before the Internet, how many people could mjsokes possibly have taught in the same time frame? There would have been no way he could have earned the riveted attention of 7,000 people who were just waiting to hear what he wanted to teach next (and done so with absolutely no marketing or advertising costs).
Everybody knows how to do something. Maybe you know how to throw a curveball, how to make perfect hummus, how to set up a home entertainment system, whatever. Share whatever you’ve got. Make YouTube videos. Start a blog. Write a short manual and let people download the PDF for free.
Now you’ve taken something that was just a hobby and used it to make other people’s lives more interesting. And that will get any college’s attention.
If mjsokes had been my student, those YouTube stats would have been prominently mentioned on his application.