Will not having much to do outside of school be disadvantageous to me?Answered
I have quite a few extracurriculars but almost all of them are clubs or leadership at school. The only thing I do outside of school is volunteer at a local non-profit thrift shop every 2 weeks. Should I focus more on things outside of school? Or maybe increase the frequency of when I volunteer?
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2 answers
Whenever you are applying to colleges, they are always looking for what you do outside the classroom, whether it's after school or not. It's great that you are involved in clubs that display leadership qualities as well as being able to volunteer in your community (these are all great things to incorporate in your college resume). Honestly, continue doing what you are doing! It all comes down to the activities you do, and how they show off who you are.
This depends on what universities you're applying to. If you aspire to become a competitive HYPSM or even T20 applicant, this is pretty problematic. There's a pretty immediate limit to how much merit, initiative and leadership you can communicate through school-based activities, because school-based activities are generally fairly easy to run compared to doing something out in the real world. And that limit is far below what T20s expect your extracurricular portfolio to be.
Okay, first of all I don't think that doing more stuff outside of school will inherently solve your problem, but taking more initiative will. I would avoid activities whereby you have little responsibility to figure things out for yourself. This would include any "standard" activities: running a club, volunteering at some large-scale existing non-profit, etc. I would rather focus on stuff like research, engineering projects, running an organization yourself, anything whereby you're really the person in charge at the end of the day, whereby you actually create something novel and interesting, as opposed to just being a pawn in somebody else's org chart.
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