How to Stand Out as a Good [Multi-Tasking] Student

By Path Mentor D.S., a recent graduate from Columbia University majored in Biomedical Engineering • Columbia Egleston Scholar (Originally Posted on November 5, 2019)

One of the hardest parts of high school is balancing everything that is happening. People often joke that you cannot “do it all”, and realistically, you cannot while still maintaining your health, friendships, and happiness. The way around this is learning how to combine things to kill two (or even more) birds with one stone and be opportunistic with your environment.

For example, back in high school, I found that I had a love for learning. I had also recently just had attended an MIT program called “MOSTEC” which stands for the “MIT Online Science Technology and Engineering Community”. This program had a learning component where we would opt into one of seven different subjects ranging from neuroscience to combinatorics to aerospace engineering. However, we were given access to every subject’s materials. I thought to myself, “I want to go through all this content, but I also have to do community service, work in my clubs and extracurriculars, and do everything else expected of me!”

That’s when the idea hit. Why don’t I just figure out a way to accomplish the goals of them all with one action? This lead to the idea of creating a service project under an extracurricular which would count as “my project” in that organization that also gave me community service hours for doing something that I had an interest in doing all along.

I evaluated all of my extracurriculars to see which one would be best to fit this “service project” that I was thinking of under, and I thought of how to propose it and ensure that it would be successful. I chose my National Honor Society (NHS) chapter (which in my opinion NHS is underutilized in many schools both as an established organization with funding and branding as well as a source of high quality students as members). After pitching it to the leadership and teacher supervisor, it was approved and I was able to start counting as community service the preparation time of presentations regarding the material (that I was given) as well as the actual presentation to my classmates that were interested in the material. It became an easy way to kill three birds with one stone.

With that story, I advise you as the reader to evaluate what you are doing and what you want to be doing, and I want you to then think about how those things fit together in creative ways that allow you to be successful in this day-and-age where you must be doing 48464 impressive things to get into college. Whether that be combining preparing for a test by leading study sessions so that you are able to get community service hours through a peer-tutoring organization, or doing an unpaid internship in a field that you can then coordinate extra activities that involve community service or additional learning opportunities, you have to see where the overlaps are in both current activities and future opportunities.

Here at Path Mentors, we as mentors would be happy to help evaluate your current landscape and see where we can both make your life easier and your applications more impressive.