By: Anisha Korivi
At some stage during your high school education, the questions you ask may shift from, “What actually do I want to do?” to “What is this going to look like in my resume?”Some organizations start seeming more interesting due to them providing an opportunity to have a leadership title. Doing community service starts to gain importance on account of the hours that can be counted toward something worthwhile. Your summer doesn’t feel productive unless it’s packed with internships, programs, or other accomplishments. Even simple personal interests start getting scrutinized in terms of their potential.There is nothing bad in wanting to have a solid resume in the end. A person can learn agility with the help of numerous activities, projects, and leadership roles, and can benefit from them. Nevertheless, the issue arises when a resume stops being merely a record of accomplishments and becomes a purpose for a person’s actions.While it is certainly good advice for high school students to develop their skills by carrying out extracurricular pursuits, quite often getting involved in something turns into a gathering activity.Nevertheless, the need for achievements continues. Partially, this is due to the fact that students are not sure what is going to be important in life, which is why a new activity may seem better than nothing at all.
Participating in a new club is not limited to just spending an hour in a club meeting. For instance, it may also mean missing an hour of learning a skill, doing something meaningful, spending time with family,or simply having some rest.Studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between extracurricular activity and personal development, but it has also been proven that very intensive participation may be harmful because it leads to scheduling problems. The point is that rather than participating in fewer activities it is necessary to be more cautious in the selection of extra activities.For instance, take two students. One student gets involved in eight organizations, has two leadership awards, and can boast many accomplishments on his resume. The second student sees that local community suffers from a particular problem. He researches it, talks to those affected, develops a solution, discovers that it does not work, changes his approach and brings a useful innovation for the community.The second student may have fewer awards, but he knows how to identify a problem, collect necessary information, communicate with other people, manage limited resources, and adjust his actions when his first idea fails. Those are entrepreneurial abilities, regardless of the fact that the student never calls himself an entrepreneur.Through experiences that are often dismissed as failures come lessons that cannot be derived through other pursuits. Failures yield insights. Failures compel people to change their mindsets, alter their approaches, and attempt new solutions. It is not possible to learn such lessons from a task that appears attractive but yields only superficial benefits.
There is no need to disengage from college, career, and accomplishments altogether since they matter. It is possible to change how students approach their choices instead. Students can begin by thinking about what they want to do instead of what is a good candidate for a good application. For instance, a student who finds problems relating to the environment interesting might decide to run a clothing drive, become a researcher in the area of textile waste, collaborate with an NGO, or create a sustainability-related project. These activities are connected through genuine interest and experience.As a result, they acquire more than ordinary activities—become part of a story. The story can be used to describe students with special insights and experience. People who care about the problem are likely to pursue their activities even after they encounter difficulties, ask questions, and learn from mistakes.
One helpful approach to evaluating an experience is to focus on what it gave outside of the resume. Be mindful of what you learned, what you contributed, what problem you attempted to solve, and what changed thanks to your involvement. More importantly, take into consideration if you would have done it anyway even if no one else had known about it. The resume has its value. It informs those who do not know you about your experiences. However, it was never meant to serve as a scoreboard of teenage years.One of the advantages that young entrepreneurs have is the possibility of conducting experiments. Start something small. Try an idea that may fail. Ask questions. Change the course of action. Create something simply because you would like to know whether you can do it.The best resume may not be the one with the largest number of lines in it. It may be the one that has all lines that actually mean something to you.
Sources
● https://college.harvard.edu/guides/application-tips?
● https://apply.jhu.edu/college-planning-guide/preparing-for-college/?
● https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/for-parents/planning-for-college/extracurricular-activities?