Ridiculous

You know, in high school I knew a lot of kids who would join every possible club and plays lots of different sports. It wasn't necessarily because they actually enjoyed all these different activities, but they felt the need to create this persona to impress the colleges they were applying to. It really rubbed me the wrong way and seemed like an exercise in deception. Perhaps it was an example of me hating the player instead of the game. Indeed, it's silly that colleges promote this game and actually delude themselves that these applicants are everything they're dressed up to be.

Anyway, according to the Wall Street Journal it seems that kids these days are taking things to a whole new level.

As soon as classes are over for the year at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., 16-year-old Jamie Cohen is off to Senegal where she'll work with AIDS victims for four weeks. Armed with her research, she'll then head to Yale University to present an AIDS "plan of action" to other teens, as part of a program put on by a travel company. When she applies to colleges 18 months from now, Ms. Cohen says the experience "will definitely help. I'll do an essay around it."

Amanda Baratz, 14, will head from Kehillah Jewish High School in San Jose, Calif., to Georgetown University this summer for a five-week course on medical careers, during which she hopes to watch open-heart surgery. She'll take an admissions-exam prep course, too, even though she won't take the SAT test for another year. That way, "I won't be pressured when the time comes," she says.

...This summer, Putney Student Travel in Putney, Vt., is offering new, month-long "global awareness" trips to El Salvador, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Senegal. For prices ranging from $5,090 to $6,290, students will study such issues as sustainable development, bio-diversity and the cultural survival of indigenous groups.

A Boulder, Colo., company called Where There Be Dragons LLC is offering a $6,700 six-week trip to Vietnam where teens will teach English, build houses and help volunteer doctors -- in addition to kayaking in Halong Bay and snorkeling in the South China Sea. Community service is "the buzz word" among teens signing up for such trips, says Julie Carey, who heads the company's programs in Peru, Bolivia and Central America. "It's what people are asking about."

For $5,799, New York-based Musiker Discovery Programs Inc. sells summer courses on medical and law careers, aimed at high-school students. "We passed around a human heart," says Sam Pawliger, a junior at Miami's Palmetto High School who watched an autopsy during the medical course last year.

Personally I don't see these things as any big accomplishment, but rather just a sign that your family has a lot of extra cash. I think that spending your summer working fast food will teach you more life lessons than bicycling in Europe or digging a well in some third world country. (By the way, how much sense does it make to pay thousands of dollars for the privelege of travelling
to a developing country to help build a soccer field or some such activity? If you really had the interests of those people at hand wouldn't you just take the money and donate it to them so that they can performing those tasks themselves?)

Thankfully it appears some college admissions officers are wise to this game:

Admissions officers say exotic summer programs don't give youngsters a leg-up in admissions. A fancy trip "is going to be looked at as an opportunity anyone with $7,000 can get," says Pomona president David Oxtoby. He worries such pricey programs -- just like prep courses that can boost SAT scores -- will further tilt admissions in favor of privileged teens. His school, he adds, is "going to give an edge to kids who have overcome obstacles."

...University of Chicago admissions director Theodore O'Neill says he would look kindly on an applicant who spent the summer "reading 50 books under a tree." IvyWise's Ms. Cohen urges students to take a two-week vacation and make time for reflection. Either that, or "take a power nap," she says. "I'm all for power naps."