College Admissions Mistake

Answered

Honestly, it's hard to tell because those additional entries are not significant ECs on their own but rather more data points that round our your schedule. Being a member of a club in itself is not an outstanding achievement or impressive endeavor unless you have some leadership position or have documented something extraordinary you did as being part of the group. E.G. you raised $20,000 for your World Culture Club to donate to indigenous peoples for a clean water well or your Ukulele club went to Nationals and won the grand prize. While some of these things are interesting in themselves, colleges will not view these skills extraordinary. They would not be in the position to give you bonus points for researching your family history on Ancestry.com because that's a really low bar to qualify for intellectual vitality or curiosity. Maybe if you wrote a research paper on your family history which you dated back to Mayflower and then went back another 200 years in England and published this in an academic journal, you might get points for the rigor of your research and ability to construct this impressive timeline on your own.

The last point, it that schools like NYU and Columbia which have more a pluralistic bent to them, probably don't give extra credit to piously religious applicants. I can see LMU, Pepperdine not minding your strong Christian faith as much.

I think you just have to wait it out. If you get waitlisted at some of these schools, there is always an opportunity to give them an update on anything that has changed in your academic narrative, test scores, or perhaps promotions in your leadership areas.