4. High School Activities: What Matters Most, and What Strategy to Take for Success

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Admittedly Podcast. My name is Thomas Khalil. I'm the former director of MBA admissions and financial aid for Milen Mauer, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this podcast, I don't promise easy answers or quick fixes, but I will use my decades of experience to help you achieve your education goals. Now let's get started. I'm your host Thomas Khalil and today we're going to talk about activities. I'm always asked by students and parents, what is the best activity? Very stressful. Everybody's trying to game the system and I wish there was an algorithm. I wish that there was a formula that I could give you that if you did activity XY and Z, you were guaranteed admission to a certain university. But that's just not the case. If you haven't listened to my episode on courage yet, I strongly, strongly advise you to do so. Because when we're talking about activities, when we're talking about things outside of academics, courage matters. Courage also matters in academics. We'll talk about that in a separate episode. But what we really want to do is not just follow the herd, not just go along with what everybody else is doing and not in a way, a lot of people hear that, they hear courage, they hear don't follow the crowd and they think, "Oh, I just need to find something different." And if I just find something different, if I take a beekeeping, for example, then I'm totally guaranteed to get into Harvard. And that is, again, not the case necessarily. I'm sure there have been a few beekeepers that have been admitted to Harvard over the years, but it doesn't guarantee that that is going to be the eventual outcome. So when we think about what the best activities are and can be, we need to differentiate a few things, right? Because everybody has a different set of opportunities, privileges, and conditions that they find themselves in. And so we're going to differentiate here. There are some students that we work with who have to work. They don't have the luxury of being on student council and joining five or six clubs, they have to work. They have to work to help support the family. They have to work to help pay for their education, maybe pay for their car, all of those things. And that is okay. That's totally fine. Universities have gotten much more aware of this. In fact, this year there was, there are a set of questions that many schools are using about things that you do that are not listed in the activity section. Do you spend considerable amount of time helping your family, helping others in religious practice, cleaning up the house, things like that. They really want to see what your life is like outside of school and what that means to you as a human being and as an applicant. So we really want to differentiate there. If you are working, okay, if you're working and by working, I'm really looking at something where you're generating income, right? Maybe you're working at a McDonald's, maybe you're working retail. There are a lot of different opportunities, maybe your babysitting, nannying, whatever it is that you're doing to earn money. That is a very, very valuable part of who you are, quite frankly, and how you are growing and developing as a person and an applicant. So what I would say there is that there's no right answer and you'll hear this from me a lot. There is no one right answer. I would say, choose the employment that works best for you. What's convenient to your home? Where can you get the best financial reward for your time? Where can you go that gives you the flexibility as a student to adjust your hours to honor family commitments and other things that you might need to do. Because obviously, you know, school, family, these things come first and we need to balance that. We don't want to get lost in a cycle where you're working to be able to afford school, but work is keeping you from school. And then we have a lose, lose situation across the board. Now, what if you are interested in being pre law, you get an internship after school, you're working in a law firm or something like that. That's different, usually unpaid, and that's great. But that can be very, very valuable and very helpful for you. But what I want to say is that if you are in a situation where you do need to work and earn money, that's great. Lean into it, embrace it. I can remember just a wonderful, wonderful student I work with many years ago and they grew up in a lower middle class household were very, very interested in fashion really wanted to get in the fashion business. And they were quite distraught as we were pulling together their activities list because they said, well, you know, I actually had to work after school. And what I did was I worked in a small clothing retail boutique. We carried really great brands. It was very small. I knew the owner really well. They gave me a lot of responsibility. But it wasn't fancy or flashy. I know a lot of students are going to have going to have worked in big fashion houses and design houses and were worked and you know spent the summer in Europe working in fashion and I just can't compete with that. And so we had a long talk about what her work day looked like when she came in after school. What did she do? And you know, there was a lot there around inventory management. She had to deal with customers. She had to deal with unhappy customers with returns with cash management with all the things that go into running a small business, especially when it's a single owner business. And so a lot of that was falling on her. And we really were able to realize out of that that that this student had phenomenal experience. A way above where she was in life at that point in terms of running a business and her understanding of fashion and her ability to understand trends and understand that what was trendy might not sell well to the demographic that came to their store. And so in crafting that story, it ended up that she was admitted to Wharton undergrad did phenomenally well by her senior year. She wanted business plan competition for her fashion business plan and raised several million dollars to make it a reality before she graduated. These are things that can absolutely have an impact on you now apart from work, there are a lot of different activities there are volunteering opportunities there are research opportunities there are clubs there are sports. All of those are fantastic. Okay, all of those can be meaningful. The question I think that we need to ask though is are you a star how good are you at what you are doing and I'm not asking this to be critical or downplay your accomplishments in any sense of the word but I often get approached by parents and they'll say, oh, my my child is so fantastic and she's a two, you know, two sport captain, three sport varsity. Three sport varsity athlete and she's just great at that and I say, well, that's really wonderful. Is she good enough to be recruited and there's a little bit of Heming and Hying and the answer comes back well not really. And there's nothing wrong with that sports teach us so much about teamwork and leadership and winning and losing and coming back from adversity and that's all great but we want to understand and be very honest with ourselves is that if we're not good enough to continue that at a collegiate level and by collegiate level I mean a competitive level where you can always play club level sports in college and that's great and I think it's a great way to meet people and. And continue your love of a sport but if you're not going to be recruited if you're not going to play at that level and let's be honest most of us are not at that level then we need to think about other activities as well where we can stand out and differentiate ourselves because there will be tens of thousands of applicants who are very good at high school sports right and so that story does not necessarily differentiate you now if you're being recruited if you're recruited athlete or you're not going to be a star. And you're recruited athlete or you're being recruited as a musician or an artist or an actor that's a very different conversation to have and we will have that conversation on subsequent podcasts with some experts in that particular admissions track but for right now we're talking about the majority of students who are trying to figure out with a very limited amount of time how do they allocate that time. What we want to look for to is again going back to courage and opportunity to do something different okay so we want to work within first of all something that you are. passionate about something that you love to do. And so what we want to think about is, for example, let's say, and I'm from Southern California, so this example is obviously very, very, very local, but let's say that you love to surf. And that's what you love to do. You really want to spend all your time in the water. But you realize that in doing that, you're not really, you're not really advancing your portfolio of activities in terms of admissions. And yes, you're on the team, but your high school surf team, but you know you're not going to go pro. Well, there are things like the surf rider foundation, there are beach cleanups, there are fundraisers that you can do, and not just once or twice. You need to build an organization. You need to get other people involved. You need to bring other friends in. You need to do things consistently over time with increasing levels of responsibility so that when you talk about that in the application, your admissions officer can read that and say, oh, this is really interesting. He took something that he's really, really passionate about, which is surfing. And from surfing, he developed a love for marine life and for the ocean and for water quality and access to nature and clean water and clean air. And he did something about it. And this is what he did about it. These are the organizations he was involved with or founded or activities that he led. This is how he turned them over to the next generation because it's not enough for you to just lead an organization or found an organization. You have to create a system so that you can hand it off to your successors so that it continues to be successful in the future. Because otherwise, you haven't really created something lasting and meaningful. You've done something that was meaningful to you, but you haven't built something that is lasting. And a good example of that is a student I worked with a few years ago. And they were an athlete. They were very much into athletics and they came from a privileged background. Went to a very small privileged private school. And something that they noticed was that a lot of their friends had in their garage a lot of athletic equipment that was top of the line lightly used. Maybe they tried to sport. Maybe they played the sport a little bit and then out grew the equipment. And as he was cleaning out his own garage one day, he said, you know, I'll bet somebody could really use this. Somebody could really benefit from this equipment. And so he went out to his friends and he said, listen, drop all of your athletic equipment. You don't use any more off at my garage. You figure out something to do with this. They all thought that was a great idea. They came together. They went to their friends, word spread. And they gathered a lot, a lot, a lot of athletic equipment. They re-conditioned it. They got it back into good working order, cleaned it up and started reaching out to local high schools in under privileged areas, identified their needs and started dropping off these large, large boxes of athletic equipment and uniforms and clothing to students. And it really, really took off. He ended up building a large organization in his school, expanded it to several schools in the region, press coverage led to chapters across the country. And it was really something meaningful that grew under his tenure. He was able to hand it off to a much larger group of club officers when he graduated and went on to UC Berkeley's business school. And it was really something that was dear to his heart, was something that benefited other people and was really unique. Now, I'm not saying that you need to start something wholly new and wholly unique in order to get into a good school. But what I am saying is that if you can step back and think about what it is that motivates you and how do you want to spend your time, then all of a sudden you can start to see and create opportunities to differentiate yourself, opportunities to have courage and be unique in the process. Because the other thing that's very important is whatever you do needs to make sense in your overall strategy. So if you present yourself, for example, to a university as a journalism major, but you've spent all of your extracurricular time, let's say, yes, you write for the school paper, or maybe you're an editor at the school paper, but then you're also doing sports and you're involved in the homecoming dance and you're doing all of these other things. That makes you an interesting, involved person, absolutely, and a leader on campus. But how does it differentiate you in the applicant pool of journalists? How have you created opportunity for yourself to deepen and develop your voice as a journalist, to deepen your experience? And when you're looking at highly competitive admissions pools, that's what's going to set you apart. It's not breadth of activities. It's depth of activities. It's how are you engaging in a meaningful way with things that matter to you? Now, as a parent, I know I hear from a lot of other parents. Well, my child just has so many different activities and we can't really get them to settle in on one thing. We can't get them to focus on one thing. And honestly, I hear that. I feel that. I know that struggle personally from my own experience. And I think that if you take anything away from today's episode, it's that there is no one path. You don't have to shove them into a box and say, you like music, so you have to be in the school band or you have to do this specific school thing, right? Or band thing. If their passion is starting their own band, great. Help them do that. Help them reach out to other bands. Help them enter competitions, battle of the bands. Help them book gigs. Help them understand the business of music, right? Not just enough to get around and get together in your garage and play music. How are they writing songs? Have they talked to other songwriters? Can they intern at production companies or studios? How are they earning the money to get studio time? For example, these are all things that will help you not just develop your child as a as a meaningful human, but also as a very interesting and diverse candidate in the application pool. And I think that finally, as a lot of students will say to me, well, I'm just going to start a club. I don't find a club that is truly what I want. So I'm going to start a club. And that's great. But keep in mind too that in starting a club, it needs to make sense for what you want to do. And and the story that you're telling. So a good example of this is a student that I worked with several years ago. And the student wanted to be an astrophysicist. And so obviously they were in the math club. They were in the physics club. Pretty standard, right? So we're reviewing. We're going over their activities. And I'm talking to them. And I said, okay, this is great. But it really, there's nothing here that really stands out to be honest with you. You're very smart. You've done some really interesting, you know, some some really interesting work. You've gotten some good grades. But I'm not really seeing this passion for astrophysics from you. And we continue to talk and talk. And at one point, he slipped up and he said something about extraterrestrial life. And he turned bright red and tried to change the subject very quickly. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, go back to that. What did you mean by that? He said, Oh, it's nothing. It's just it's nothing. It's, it's just a club. And I said, okay, well, tell me about this club. He said, well, you're going to laugh. But I founded the extraterrestrial club. It's great. So how many hours a week do you spend on that? And he said, every minute I get, I said, okay, well, what does it do? He said, well, to be honest, the reason I want to go into astrophysics is that I want to be the person that proves definitively that there is extraterrestrial life. And don't laugh. I'm not talking about little green people, little green life forms in flying saucers. But really, I really want to use mathematics and astrophysics to prove that there is life out there, whether we look at, you know, new quantum physics, whether we get a new understanding of black holes, whatever it is. And he started referencing different professors in different universities that he was applying to and how they were looking at different elements of space and time and gravity and light and how they were integrating that learning. And it was this really, really interesting, passionate defense of there is life out there. I'm not sure what kind of life, but I know that I want to be the one that finds it. And that ended up being the core of his application and his essays, because it was something he was so passionate about. And something that he felt was a throw away, just something he did to indulge in something that was really meaningful to him, ended up getting into every top program that he applied to several IVs, in fact. And now is doing very high level research as a senior with those same professors, he was admiring back as a high school student. So really what I'm saying again is courage, right? There is no right path. The wrong path is simply doing activities because you think that that's what the schools want to see because somebody who graduated ahead of you did it and they got into the school you want to get into. Remember that you need to be your own person. You need to craft your own path so that as you are writing your application, as you are approaching these schools, you're able to say, I did this and this is why. And back to our courage episode as well, it's okay if you change activities. It's okay if by junior year you realize the activities you've been involved with are not, they're not fulfilling you the way that you thought they would, the way that you hope they would. Maybe you've changed your interest. Maybe you've changed direction. It's fine to then change, right? Because generally we don't want to add new activities junior senior year that tends to be very transparent to admissions officers. But if you're articulating your path, your journey, your growth in your essays, you're talking about why you made that change. You're talking about why you develop and grew into this different person over the course of your learning, doing different activities, then that all can make sense. I realize that I've raised far more questions than I've answered. Activities is something we will come back to time and time again as we move closer and closer to the application process. But for now, I'm going to leave it at that and look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to the Admittedly Podcast and download this episode. I welcome you to share your thoughts and questions with me. You can find us on social media at Admittedly Podcast. I look forward to continuing our journey together.