Extracurriculars under Corona - What universities want you to be doing during the lockdown and how you can do it
Extracurriculars under Corona
The Coronavirus has meant that a lot of classic extracurricular activities are no longer possible to pursue. To guide students through this, we invited awesome Ella Cox and Amir Hamza to do a webinar about extracurriculars under the Lockdown. You can see the webinar here or read the top tips Amir would give in this post:
First and foremost, it’s incredibly important to remember that your physical and mental wellbeing is number 1 priority. A lot of universities realise that recent events have never been seen before and will entirely be understanding of your personal situation. In fact, if you are a young carer or others depend on your help, that can count towards stellar extracurriculars (especially as it shows a lot of time management as well as great leadership experience).
Before delving straight into a variety of possible activities, it may be useful to consider what you as an individual care about and how you should spend your time based upon that. It could be useful to make a shortlist of 10 activities you love, try out 3 of them with a friend and finally pick one of those to stick with together. Practising with a friend can be incredible – they can keep you going when it gets tough as well as be great to discuss topics with.
1. Learn a language. Perhaps consider using Duolingo or a similar app
2. Lean something new: Coursera and edX has loads of options from intro psychology to neuroscience to data science to history
3. Extra reading: JSTOR has made a lot of its publications free. Perhaps download an eBook or start a reading club with some friends
4. Programming: Try to bake “small wins” into their projects (goals they can tick off to show their progress). It’s highly recommended to take what you learn and create a mini-project to put into practise your learnings. You can link this to your interests - for example, plugins for Minecraft (Bukkit)
5. Volunteering: See what your local community is doing to tackle Covid-19 related challenges; some community schemes are looking for volunteers who can help from their laptops with logistics or do online fundraisers. Can you arrange to call your neighbours who might be lonely or a local care home? Set up free tutoring for students via Skype/Zoom
6. Make a website: It’s quite easy and free to do these days with sites such as Wix, Squarespace or even Printify. You can use this for personal purpose or to document a journey or even to raise money for a good cause
7. Start-ups / entrepreneurship: If you’ve always had an idea, this could be the perfect time to try to bring it into reality! After all, a lot of the big start-ups today (e.g., Uber) were created during the 2008 downturn.
8. Podcast / Blog: Perhaps consider talking about your favourite topics to an audience.
9. Can you move any of your current clubs online? For example, a lot of Debate, MUN, Quizzing and Improv classes are already moving onto Zoom.
Finally, if you’re looking to apply to a US university, remember that they’re looking to see that you have made the most of the resources you have (i.e. if you’re a disadvantaged student, they’re not going to penalize you for not having founded a charity or won a national award in whatever you’re interested as they realise that that is incredibly difficult if you don’t come from a wealthy household or go to an elite school).
Specifically, they’ll want to see that you show leadership, dedication, problem-solving and an ability to improve from your failings. Within this, definitely show that you are community-minded, which maybe difficult during the pandemic, although babysitting/any jobs you work outside school/helping out your family count as extracurriculars.
Remember to stay safe and prioritise your mental health!