A post-pandemic approach to choosing the right extracurriculars

When building a college profile, it’s important for students to have well-chosen extracurricular activities. Besides being a good student, college admissions officers care about what students are doing in their free time and outside of the classroom, which shows where their real interests lie. But this year, student athletes, dancers and performers are just some of the groups that were all hit hard during the pandemic when everything was suddenly cancelled.

Now that the world seems to be opening up again, students and parents feel a strong need to make up for lost time and to sign up for everything they couldn’t do before. But the pandemic has forced us to reconsider the role of extracurriculars in a student’s life.

According to a recent New York Times article by Shalini Shankar, students should be wary of returning to their pre-pandemic packed schedules. Why? Because we can’t deny the real toll that the pandemic has taken on mental health, and kids just may need to re-evaluate their values. Here are some important questions to consider when re-building an extracurricular schedule.

Summer is here, but the impacts of the pandemic are here to stay

Most high school students start planning for college very early on, and even as early as their first year of high school. However, the pandemic has clearly gotten in the way for many. With tests cancelled or postponed, budgets reduced, and fear of being far from home on the rise, students are being forced to be flexible and adapt their college plans. Here are several ways that students are changing their college plans and how we can teach them that flexibility will help them to achieve in spite of the circumstances.

Summer is here, but the impacts of the pandemic are here to stay

School is out, and that well-deserved summer vacation is finally upon us. This year has been nothing short of exceptional, and students, parents and teachers should all be proud of how they’ve coped and adapted to the unique challenges of the pandemic. As we head into the summer season, it’s important to reflect on the lessons the pandemic has taught us and predict some of the short and long-term impacts. Here are some of our thoughts.

Teachers

Teaching through a pandemic has met with various levels of success. But overall, the shift to online learning proved to be a big and often unrewarding challenge. One of the strongest impacts of the pandemic on teachers is that more and more of them may leave, retire, or adapt their methods. K-12 Teachers who first struggled with the Common Core, and later with the online learning modes that were forced on them, will leave in greater numbers. The pressure of following a curriculum and learning entirely new teaching methods proved to be too much for certain teachers. Similarly, college professors who were caught off-guard by online learning and obtained negative reviews from students will re-evaluate their future and either retire or learn from the experience. It seems that very few found online learning fruitful, and there will be a negative connotation towards online learning unless there is a modification to gauge involvement and engagement from individual students.

Students

Due to the flaws in online learning and little time to test trial and error, high school and some college students will discover serious academic gaps. With unequal connections to the Internet and difficulty following classes that are less and less hands-on and engaging, the difference in academic success is measurable. As a result, both high schools and colleges will discard online learning motions that failed and invest in online learning that can still be used post-pandemic to complement courses and overall curriculum.

Standardized test scores have long been a staple of the college application. Students generally start studying for the SAT or ACT well in advance and schedule multiple test dates to submit the highest scores possible. This type of testing was deemed useful to colleges and universities because it was supposed to be indicative of student performance: a direct, concrete way to evaluate academic skills. However, the reality is not exactly that.

Standardized testing has undergone quite a bit of criticism as well, bringing to light biases against race and socio-economic status, and little prediction of future academic performance. So COVID-19 has been the straw that broke the camel’s back in a struggle of universal acceptance.

It’s clear that the pandemic has changed the old ways of applying to college. With many colleges and universities giving students a break this year and adopting temporary or permanent test-optional policies, there is a whole new game to master.

According to a recent article, the test optional application has required admissions officers to take a new stance when evaluating prospective students. Whereas before, testing was a relatively simple way to classify students into ranks, without it, other factors such as GPA, essays and recommendations are gaining more weight and importance.

From an admissions standpoint, the shift away from testing shouldn’t mean that it will be more difficult and time-consuming to evaluate applications, but that applications will be approached from a different perspective. One such approach is polling, used by admissions officers to rate candidates based on their transcripts. This technique is used now at Cornell.

As we all know, the college application can be a long and complicated endeavor. We can think of the college application as a portfolio of student performance across a wide variety of metrics that allows admissions officers to judge the quality and potential of the students they’ll accept. The most important elements have long been known to be GPA, test scores, recommendations and last but not least, the college essay.

However, we’ve been seeing a noteworthy shift away from the quantitative towards more abstract ways of evaluating a student.