When admissions committees look at your student resume, they are not necessarily impressed with well-rounded students.
What does this mean?
It means that admissions committees don’t want students who excel in three million different activities. That is not what they are looking for on your resume.
Rather, these days, admissions committees tend to be more impressed with applicants who specialize in one or two extracurricular activities. You should work to highlight those activities on your resume.
In particular, admissions committees want to see a significant level of commitment to your activities. Think narrow and deep as opposed to wide and shallow.
The Formula of a Perfect Resume
Some students seem to think that there is a special formula for the student resume that admissions committees are looking for. In fact, there has been a trend of high school students spending their summers in far-off lands to be able to brag about their unique work or travel or experience.
If you are truly interested in these activities and you can afford to spend your summer devoted to them, that is fine.
On the other hand, if you are trying to game the admissions committees into believing that you are the next Mother Teresa to pad your resume, you are in for a rude surprise.
Admissions committees can see right through an activity list that highlights an extracurricular activity that a student is not actually passionate about.
Even worse, while a student was fabricating a unique interest, they weren’t spending time finding out what they were really interested in pursuing. While students are gallivanting around some distant land, they are not gaining work experience, learning about their true interests, or following their actual passions.