How Admission Officers Evaluate Your Application: Extra Curricular Activities

Extracurricular activities significantly boost your study abroad application. It shows your interest apart from regular academic activities such as leadership skills, and time management abilities. Universities seek students who contribute positively to their campus community. 

What is the role of extracurricular activities in university admission? The college/university admission authority assesses students's profiles thoroughly including extracurricular activities. There are a variety of ways to evaluate a student's interests apart from academics. There is no doubt that extracurricular activities add value to your application process. 

What is Extra Curricular Activity?

Technically, non-academic qualifications could be anything. These activities demonstrate your level of commitment. How involved were you with the activity? For example, if you volunteered only once for a few hours, that will not count as community service. However, if you have regularly volunteered, even if it was for different or multiple causes, that will be counted as an activity because you were committed to it. You invested your time and energy regularly for a long period on it. So, the definition of a non-academic activity is something you do regularly and are dedicated to.

When you consider the list of extra-curricular activities, you will see that these activities include involvement in the arts, athletics, community service, music, theatre, employment, and many more things you might have done. There are some non-academic activities which might be related to academics like being part of a science fair or winning an academic Olympiad. For these types of activities, you will have to consider, how you separate out-of-classroom academic activities from the in-class academics. Outside of the classroom, you need to demonstrate intellectual curiosity or a love of learning. So how are you demonstrating these skills through both these activities?

How University Admission Authority Takes Extracurricular Activities

The admission authorities have limited time to check every application. They are dedicated to adding valuable students to their university. Extracurricular activities report of a students gives an idea to the admission authority about the student's unique interests apart from study. This gives an advantage to such students at the time of admission.

Now you might think that India is not like foreign countries, where you have lots of options, including a range of extra-curricular activities or clubs to join. However, this statement is not true. You do not need to be a part of the formal, organized, and official clubs or organizations. Almost every student does something outside of the classroom. What you need to realize is that your activities need not have a name, you will have to break yourself out of that thinking. Unlike scores and grades, interests and activities can not be listed on a piece of paper. Therefore, activities are something that you will have to think about and then write them down.

Think broadly and include everything that you do in a list. For each thing you write on your list, find what role you had in that activity. Like, if you have played any sports, were you ever the captain of your team or you played any other different role? If you were involved with your college newspaper, were you the editor or the reporter?

This article is part of our How to Apply to Universities Abroad series.