Hospital volunteering. HOSA. DECA. FBLA. National Honor Society. Peer tutoring. A little shadowing with a doctor, lawyer, or family friend in finance sprinkled on top.
It is the admissions version of a sad Sweetgreen bowl: technically full of good ingredients, but somehow completely lifeless.
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Kale. Quinoa. Chicken. Dressing on the side. No flavor. No risk. No soul.
Parents see this list and think: Great. My kid looks serious. My kid looks ambitious. My kid looks like a future doctor/lawyer/CEO.
I see it and think: I have read this application 47 times.
Everyone is ordering from the same menu.
These activities won't get your kid rejected. Some of them are perfectly fine ingredients. The problem is that families keep tossing the same ones together.
I have seen dozens upon dozens of students with these exact activities, and they rarely make me sit up straighter. They rarely become the essay. They rarely reveal the weird, specific, electric thing that makes a student impossible to replace.
I get why we like these activities. They are easy to understand. They are fun and responsible!
But a college application is not a salad bar. You do not win because you picked all the “classic toppings.”
However, I would second-guess investing a lot of time and energy in these activities, as they won’t make you stand out in an admissions pile.
Parents love it because it feels mature and serious. There is a badge. There are sick people nearby. There is possibly a clipboard. It gives everyone the comforting illusion that the child is basically one white coat away from Johns Hopkins.
But most hospital volunteering is not that deep. Often, the student is not doing medicine. They are not doing research. They are not making decisions. They are not solving a problem. They are standing near medicine.
I have seen dozens upon dozens of students with hospital volunteering on their résumé. Very rarely do I look at it and think, That’s the essay. That’s the angle. That’s the thing that makes this student come alive.
Usually, it is just there. It checks a box. It says, “I am pre-med,” in the same way wearing a Yankees hat says you are from New York. It is the grilled chicken of the pre-med résumé: everyone adds it because they think they are supposed to.
That actually works against you because you’re not applying to be a pre-med; you’re applying to a very specific major in science that you’re not cultivating in the oncology wing. If anything, I encourage my students to look more like scientists than doctors.
I would group these together as the pre-professional alphabet soup. Different acronyms, same problem.
They are the activities students join when someone tells them, “You want medicine? Join the medicine-sounding club.” Or, “You want business? Join the business-sounding club.”
And yes, these organizations can have competitions where students can win awards. I am not saying they are fake or useless. But they are often wildly overestimated.
For most students, these clubs reveal little beyond the student’s interest in a career category. That is not enough.
Peer tutoring is the honey mustard dressing of service activities. Pleasant. Inoffensive. Everywhere. It sounds beautiful until you have read the essay 900 times.
I helped a student who was struggling.
At first, they lacked confidence.
Then I learned everyone learns differently.
Then they smiled.
Then I realized teaching is about patience!
I am not saying this is fake or meaningless! I am saying it is common.
I have seen dozens upon dozens of students with peer tutoring. Many do it because their National Honor Society requires tutoring hours.
And again, it is nice. It is useful. It helps someone!
However, peer tutoring usually does not show unusually high competency unless the student does something beyond the existing structure.
Not: “I tutor students.”
But: “I noticed freshmen at my school could not write thesis statements, so I built a four-week writing bootcamp and tracked their before-and-after essays.”
Speaking of, National Honor Society is the beige certificate of extracurricular life.
I almost never have students list the National Honor Society as one of their awards unless they are very high up in leadership and actually did something meaningful with their chapter. Otherwise, I am totally comfortable leaving it off.
Do service hours that are meaningful, and we can write about that in more detail. Have a good GPA, and they’ll see it on your transcript.
Shadowing is maybe the worst offender because it sounds impressive while being almost completely passive.
Shadowing almost always comes from a family connection, not from any merit. We know it, and so do colleges. The big result? A student follows around a doctor, lawyer, entrepreneur, engineer, or accountant for a day.
Watching someone else work is not the same as doing work.
Shadowing can be personally useful. It can help a student decide whether they are interested in a field. I really support students doing it for clarity, but not to make them more competitive for college.
I build custom activities around the actual kid. That involves understanding the why behind what they want to do.
What specific part of medicine makes you furious, curious, or unable to shut up? Is it dental anxiety? Sports injuries? Medical misinformation? The way girls’ pain gets dismissed? The fact that kids in your community do not know basic nutrition, first aid, or mental health vocabulary?
Then we build something real.
A project. A publication. A workshop. A research angle. A community program. A local partnership. A portfolio. A weird little intellectual empire that makes sense for that student and no one else.
The goal is not to show you have all the right ingredients, but to show you can cook up something that no one else has tasted before.
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