Once the winter holiday season ends, the self-improvement season begins. At the beginning of each new year, we make resolutions about what bad habits we will shed and what noble pursuits we will embrace. But, there are a lot of ways to spend your time in high school, so how do you choose which activities to pursue? Believe it or not, a quick look at the information collected on a college application may help. Not because you should be fashioning your life around what you think colleges want from you, but because colleges have designed the application to get to the core of who you are, inside and outside of the classroom.

If you are in high school, you are first and foremost a student. That’s why the first thing colleges consider is your high school transcript and grades. So taking challenging classes and doing your best in them should be Priority No. 1. But your life involves more than going to class and studying. Colleges know that, which is why there’s another section on most college applications called “Activities”.

What are activities, as defined by college applications? Simply put, your activities are the things you do when you aren’t in class (or doing homework) that tell a college about your skills, accomplishments, passions and character. High schools, themselves, offer many activities for students to partake in: sports, fine arts, student government, academic competitions, community service organizations and honor societies, to name just a few. Outside of school, there are opportunities to work a part-time job, get involved in faith-based organizations, participate in club sports or volunteer with community groups.

In addition to participating in organized activities, many students have hobbies they engage in on their own. Colleges love to know about the unique interests of their applicants. However, whether or not a hobby should be entered into the Activities section of the college application depends. Obviously, if your greatest hobby is binging on Netflix, you won’t want to enter it. But take a more productive hobby, like baking.  If you enjoy baking and spend time here and there experimenting with recipes, you may find a way to mention it in your college essay to add color to who you are, but it’s not likely to fall under the Activities category unless you have taken your hobby to another level, perhaps by entering baking contests, selling your goods, or regularly donating your confections to a cause.

The Three I’s

The best description I have seen of what colleges are looking for in the Activities section of the application comes from Rick Clark, admissions director at Georgia Tech. He says that colleges want to see the three I’s: Involvement, Influence and Impact:

Involvement — Do you demonstrate a deep level of commitment to an activity?

Influence — Have you had the opportunity to influence others through your activity, in a leadership role or otherwise?

Impact — Can anyone say they were impacted by your involvement in an activity? How so?

Notice that Clark’s criteria do not include the number of activities in which you have participated — a criterion to which many high school students erroneously give too much weight — nor does it hint at particular types of activities colleges prefer. Colleges know that it’s impossible for you to be deeply involved in 10 activities (though they might look for at least two or three), and they are interested in enrolling a diverse group of students, so they value the flute player as much as the football kicker (unless they happen to need a football kicker more than a flute player that year).

As Clark puts it in a recent blog post, “Admission officers are looking for applicants who have been good students inside and outside the classroom in high school. Simply put they want to admit and enroll people who will be deeply missed by their school and community when they graduate.” Why does that matter to colleges? Because they know that being part of a team of any kind builds skills and character that will contribute to your success at their university and beyond and because they want to enroll students who will continue to make a positive impact on others and the world at large while in college and once they graduate.

So what are you all about? What is your community? How are you involving yourself in it? Are you exerting influence? And are you making an impact? Whether you’re applying to college or not, these are good  questions to ask as you ponder how to spend your time in 2021.