Choosing the Right Extracurricular Activity in Early High School
By Path Mentor A.G, a graduate of Columbia University majored in Art History (Originally Posted on October 7, 2019)
My first year of high school, I joined the Service-Learning Team, a group that spent Tuesday afternoons at local elementary schools leading enrichment activities and spent Thursday afternoons discussing the socio-political components of our relationship with the students: underfunding of private schools, the cycle of poverty, and so on. I strongly believed in the mission of the group, but the work itself wasn’t for me—I wasn’t very good at arts and crafts or soccer, and I didn’t have a natural rapport with young children. So I made a decision that would ultimately come to occupy the majority of my free time in the next four years: I met with the director of the program, our school’s ethics teacher, and suggested we expand our outreach. In other words, I saw a missing piece, and I suggested how to fix it.
The next year, I started a section of the Service-Learning Team that met weekly with elderly citizens at a nearby retirement home. We tested various programs with them, but settled on one where students could bring drafts of their upcoming class presentations and practice in front of a kind, engaged audience. It immediately improved students’ public speaking skills, and the senior citizens were engaged and excited to learn something new, and attendance grew rapidly. For both the students and seniors, the conversations and discussions that followed these presentations were perspective-broadening and life-altering. Early exposure to unfamiliar demographics is proven to be productive in numerous ways for decades to come.
This extracurricular activity made me a better student in school, and a stronger college-applicant as well. I developed leadership skills like coordinating large groups of people, interacting with adults and high school students in a professional manner, and collaborating with my peers. But even if your school doesn’t have a framework for community service outreach, I believe similar projects can be recreated. To start, identify a target audience (children, the elderly, or other at-risk groups) and meet with school administration to suggest a program. From there, your mentor (like me!) can guide you through the steps necessary to make this a successful project and even the reflection necessary to turn this project into a thoughtful college essay.
