Chemistry is a classic science major, and a cornerstone of STEM, but high school students are often stumped as to how to stand out as chemistry-focused college applicants. There aren’t, often, chemistry clubs in the same where that there are robotics clubs. You can’t build an app like with coding, and it can be hard to stand out beyond having strong grades and matching test scores. At the same time, standing out is critically important. Relying solely on your grades and scores isn’t a good strategy.
We work with our students to construct exceptional personal extracurricular and activity strategies, and having that kind of hands-on help is often critical. In this post, we’ll give you a behind the scenes look into how we think about structuring an activities strategy to optimize for growth, fun, and college application outcomes.
Starting early is critical when working on college applications. There’s never a better time than now to get going.
What you do outside of the classroom as a sophomore can be broken into a few big buckets, or types, of activities. Below we’ve taken each of these buckets and explored what you as a sophomore can do to capitalize on the opportunities you have, find new ones, and create opportunities where they don’t already exist.
CLUBS & TEAMS
If you aren’t in at least one club related to chemistry as a sophomore, like Science Bowl or Science Olympiad, join one. You still have time to rise to a leadership position by senior year, which is fun, fulfilling, and deeply impactful for your college applications.
If your school doesn’t have a club related to chemistry, recruit a teacher as a faculty advisor and start one.
Starting a club can feel intimidating, but it’s often much easier than you’d expect. There are probably some requirements and paperwork, and you definitely need to have a teacher on your team. This means building strong relationships with your science and math teachers, which will be valuable far beyond simply starting a club.
INTERNSHIPS & EMPLOYMENT
As a sophomore, it can be difficult to get an internship. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, though. To make it happen, start by looking at your community. That means exploring the opportunities that you may be able to access through your family, your parent’s friends, your teachers and their network, or any other personal relationship that also intersects with your interest in chemistry. An ideal chemistry-related internship is in a lab, or working in support of a professor or graduate student’s research. This doesn’t mean these are the only options, though. Consider finding a place to intern that is at the intersection of chemistry and another passion.
We also encourage all of our students to have at least one paying job, before applying to college. The majority of sophomores are old enough to work, and there are a multitude of options that don’t interfere with your classwork or other extracurricular commitments. For example, there are summer jobs. For another example, there are part-time after school jobs. Now, we don’t expect a job as a sophomore to be related to chemistry directly, but we do advise finding areas of overlap. This can require some creativity, but that is a feature — not a flaw — of the process.
A summer job as a lifeguard may mostly be comprised of blowing whistles at non-compliant tweens, but there are also aspects of the job, like weighing many variables concurrently to determine what most needs your focus, that connect to the type of mental state required of a chemist.
RESEARCH
Speaking of mental state, a huge part of top undergraduate chemistry programs is participating in and contributing to research. This requires you to have your head in the game, especially if you hope to grow into conducting your own original research. But you don’t need to wait until college to get started. We advise our students to come up with original research questions and pursue compelling long-term projects with the goal of presentation at sciences fairs ranging from school and district-wide opportunities to some of the biggest science competitions in the world, like the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. Now, you don’t need to get a big prize on the world stage to get into a top college. Truly, simply chasing that goal of a big prize is deeply valuable and illustrates to colleges that you are hungry, passionate, driven, and enthusiastic about working hard.
In addition to pursuing your own research projects, we highly recommend aiming for a research position at a local lab. Often, sophomores are too young to be considered for these roles. Your goal shouldn’t necessarily be to change these rules. Instead, use this time to build up the type of resume that the lab you aspire to work at would struggle to refuse come junior or senior year. One of the ways to build these skills is through summer programs.
SUMMER PROGRAMS
Summer programs, whether paid or free, a week-long intensive or more than a month, close to home or far away, in-person or online, can either be a massive waste of time or one of the most impactful aspects of your college applications and a formative piece of who you are as a student.
“But does it look bad to pay for a summer program?” We get asked that question every year, and we always have the same answer: Not if it’s the right summer program for you. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most prestigious one, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it is simply one associate with your dream school. The right summer program for you is one that checks these boxes:
The program is focused on your deepest academic interest, in this case Chemistry.
The program goes into uncharted territory for you that you can’t access through the courses offered at your school alone.
If a program that has been recommended to you, or that you have been considering, does not match your interests and/or does not offer you new things to explore then it is not the right program for you, then you should not do it. That time would be better spent working to build character even if you aren’t expanding your knowledge of chemistry.
When you are planning your ideal activity strategy as a sophomore, you don’t need to do everything that we’ve listed above, but you do need to pick more than one. Going all-in on one activity is not only a self-limiting approach, but also a dangerous one. Imagine if you put all your attention into one club, and then aren’t picked to be the leader. Or, what if you work on a science project for a big competition every night and every weekend for years, and then don’t perform well when judges come around? That would not only be frustrating, but also tragic. Instead, spread your focus around a little but keep chemistry as the central focus connecting the most important pursuits you invest time and energy into.
As you go, you’ll learn more about yourself and what you love. This will inform what you are doing now, and help direct what you’ll do next — and that learning process will lead you towards standout success.
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