A Brief Summary of Extracurriculars

Extracurricular activities. They are activities that you do extracurricularly--that is, in addition to your normal curricular (scholarly) activities. Common examples of extracurricular activities include participation in student government, community service, sports teams (school or club), dance and music (solo or in groups). I think that we can pretty much lump all extracurricular activities into four major categories: arts, athletics, activism and academics.

First of all, the value colleges put on extracurricular activity is overhyped. You can totally get into a good school without doing being excessively active outside of school. Yes, most of the people I meet were active in their high school communities, and yes, many of them are active in the student community now. However, a lot of them are (and were) only participating very superficially. Many people participate in extracurriculars only because they think that the colleges will like them better if they do, and not because they are truly interested in the activity. Colleges then start looking for people with more and better extracurriculars because there are so many people with extracurriculars, then the students start doing more and more extracurriculars, then the colleges raise their standards and it creates this vicious cycle. I'm not complaining because I'm already in college, but I still think it's stupid.

So back to my summary. We have four categories of extracurriculars, all of which conveniently start with the same sound and make for some nice alliteration (or whatever the proper term is). 

By the way, this being totally off topic, but I learned somewhere that when you have multiple things to list off, it sounds better when you put the shorter words (in terms of syllables) first. If I wrote "activism, academics, athletics and arts," it totally wouldn't sound as good (in your head, because you read out loud in your head most of the time). It also explains why people say, "Ladies and gentlemen" instead of "Gentlemen and ladies," which would go along with the traditional societal views of men before women. But I digress.

Once again, the four categories of extracurriculars (in order of increasing syllable length) are arts, athletics, activism and academics. If you think of all the extracurriculars you did (or are doing), you can probably lump them into one of these categories. Anything leadership-related goes into activism, since they're pretty much politics. Community service also belongs in activism, since you're advocating social change, one bowl of soup at a time. Charity and church stuff is also activism, for similar reasons. 

Athletics is super obvious. I mean, it's pretty well defined as is, and if you don't know if something qualifies as athletics or not, you've got serious problems. Of course, there are more esoteric activities like backpacking and car racing, but for simplicity's sake, these are also athletic activities. Chess players are still not athletes, no matter how much their brains are exercised. Neither are mathletes.

If you're a dancer, then you don't count as athletics. Dance goes into the art category. Yes, it may be difficult and all, but not all athletics are physically stressful either (think golf). Other arts are like music (a very noble pursuit), painting, sculpture, drawing, acting, writing, etc. Writing goes to arts (rather than academics) because I think that most people who write stuff extracurricularly are writing creatively, rather than deep philosophical discourses and meditations. If they do happen to be writing such academic material, then it should be lumped into academics.

Anybody who is participating in academic extracurriculars is dumb. Actually they're probably pretty smart, but I just think that the fact that they're doing it is dumb.

So anyway, my philosophy with extracurriculars is not to do everything you possibly can, but to chose one or two things that you actually like and be really involved in them. They don't have to be related, and they don't have to be different, but they should be interesting. It also helps if they look good on a college (or job) application.

So my message is this: Go be a productive part of society, but only if it pleases you to do so. Otherwise you can go crawl in a corner and die, and stop wasting the world's rapidly diminishing resources.