I'm currently a sophomore, and I'm looking at my chances of getting into schools, and I see that I have very low extracurricular activities. I'm doing Track as a JV athlete, volunteering, building websites/apps for the people I work with, play the piano. I'm kinda lost on what else I should be doing. Can I get some advice on what I could do?
Hi!
I'm not sure if you are asking what colleges are good for computer science or what extracurriculars you could do, so I will answer both.
(This is a very basic list, but here are some amazing computer science colleges)
CMU, Columbia, University of Washington - Seattle, Harvard, Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology, UCLA, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Yale, Rice, University of Michigan - Ann Harbor, University of Oxford (UK), Harvey Mudd, Northwestern and so on... (this you could look up - there are so many amazing CS schools, these are just some off the top of my head!)
Extracurriculars (please know that this is not a set list and that these are just ideas off the top of my head. I don't know your other interests or how much work you want to put in. Also, remember that we have no idea what colleges are truly looking for - just do what you love, trust me!!)
1. Turn building websites/apps into a real business (this would look absolutely incredible... maybe you could even code your own website for your business - mention that in a college application!)
2. Join or start a coding club
3. Start a fundraiser in your school and/or district to raise money for computers for underprivileged kids.
4. Teach coding lessons at a hackathon or start a free coding summer program.
5. Interested in activism? Start a page on your school's newspaper and talk about the gap between the rich and poor in terms of technology access and how this results in more/less success in school and in a career (this would be really cool)
6. Are you interested in health sciences? send cold emails to researchers to try and get a neuroscience shadowing (since some aspects of neuroscience involve code)
I hope this helped! Good luck.
CollegeVine has a list of the best colleges for computer science that can help you. I would also recommend participating in a few computer science summer programs. Hope this helps!
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WOW! Thanks a lot for that! I got a bunch of ideas!