3.95 GPA, 2080 SAT’s, built houses in Guatemala over the summer, French tutor, food bank volunteer, Physics Club founder and president, Spanish Club founder and president, youth soccer referee, varsity cross-country, Post-84 staff, built computer lab in Africa with GTA, chess club member, Messenger staff, DECA vice-president, 2000 hours community service.

Who is that person? Me? Certainly not. You? Doubtful. A good college applicant? Yea, probably. A person who’s passionate about French, Spanish, physics, Post, soccer, cross-country, Africa, Guatemala, DECA and community service? Highly unlikely.

In this day and age where horror stories of 4.0 students with perfect SAT’s getting rejected from all their top schools pass through the grapevine faster than the latest news on Jessica Simpson, kids are doing whatever it takes to buff up their applications.

When conversations with friends turn to college, as they often tend to do these days, the topic most often discussed is extra curriculars. Before asking you about your GPA or your SAT’s, they’ll ask you about all the clubs you’re in or the community service you’ve done.

To many students it’s not about the authenticity of their extra curricular activities, it’s all about the quantity. It doesn’t matter that they have no interests in pursuing a career in business, DECA is supposed to look good on a college application. They join a club, feign interest long enough to maybe get elected vice president or treasurer or something cool, sugar coat it and stick it in bold letters on their application.

I had always been rather displeased by the application whoring that so many students partake in, but it never made me genuinely mad until last year in math class.

Last year I was in B.C. Calculus and it was a mix of some of the brightest juniors and seniors at Garfield. Come second semester the seniors in the class had been accepted to a variety of the nation’s elite colleges and one of the girls felt it was her obligation to enlighten all the juniors on what exactly she had done to get into an Ivy League school. She substantiated everything she said by prefacing them with either “my college counselor said” or “this college admissions officer told me.” She told people how her counselor had helped her choose which activities to partake in and which ones to avoid in order to best help her application. Then when April rolled around and she had selected her college she bragged about all the free time she had now that she had quit all the clubs she had been a part of.

I managed to keep my opinions of her to myself and the rest of the class with out ever letting her know how I felt, but she honestly made me sick.

She had no passions that she pursued, her goal was to get into the highest ranked school she could by whatever means necessary. Maybe, hopefully, she will find something in college she is passionate about and pursue that but she already wasted her four years at Garfield.

Where we as students are fortunate is that Garfield provides us with such an abundance of clubs and activities. There is at least one club out there that you can find an interests or a passion in. I recently rejoined the chess club I left in fifth grade, and I’ll be honest, I’ve had an incredible time spending my Wednesdays remembering how to play.

Instead of joining all the clubs you can with only a passing interest, pick one, two or even three that you find fun or interesting and pursue them. Make a commitment and see where it takes you. It might be something like last year’s short-lived dodgeball club that’s just for fun, or something like DECA that could lead to a career: just find something to do and really do it. And if you get rejected from a college for having one passion instead of ten passing interests that college probably wasn’t the best place for you to pursue you passion anyways.