27 March, 2023 | | 0 Comments
Learning outside classroom provides real hands-on opportunities to face challenging, and exciting experiences to learn. These experiences are rooted in the simple principle that “experience is the best teacher.”
Colleges abroad, particularly in the USA, look for the candidate as a whole while going through their application. They want to see you beyond your academics. Their focus is on the qualities that cannot be seen solely through transcripts and scores. Demonstrating talents like empathy, communication, team player or leadership skills through extracurricular activities and external (outside classroom) projects is important. Most popular ways to gain experience and show-case your talents are through one or more of these activities and programs: 1.Extracurricular Activities 2.Community Services and 3. Academic Programs
Extracurricular Activities can be an extension of areas of interests - passion, hobbies, sports you play or issues you care about. One of the ways to demonstrate leadership is holding positions within school organisations and clubs, like office bearer of student council, activity clubs, MUN organising committee, captain of various sports teams and such others. Even if not in a leadership position, active participation in these activities shows your commitment, passion, and dedication that does train you to become future leader.
Community projects have multiple benefits. It prepares you to make meaningful contributions to society as engaged citizens and leaders in a complex world. Getting introduced to grassroots level, participating understanding their problems and attempting to mitigate them is also a way to give it back to the society. Working outside of the sheltered learning environment of schools changes perspectives, reveals ground level realities. Students become aware of pressing social issues and get trained to handle complex problems, take risks and make decisions. There are NGOs addressing various issues, such as racial justice, law and social movements, gender equity or LGBT rights. It is prudent to search for an NGO where you may volunteer in your area of interest. Who knows, you may find your calling in social entrepreneurship through this kind of grounding.
Summer school/Leadership programs are offered by universities are challenging academic programs that help build important life skills that can make future college experience a success. Depending on the designing of the program, it may be rigorous academic focused or a mix of structured co-curricular activities, seminars, workshops, social events and even short local tours. Some programs are a mix of academics within different career domains like social entrepreneurship, health care and medicine, media, science and technology. While there are others which are purely academic focused, the Duke Precollege Program for example, provides middle and high school students with ‘experiential learning and academic experiences in a university setting’ in variety of fields like maths, humanities, social science etc. Lumiere Education is a foundation that works with students to do independent research projects. Students with high academic excellence and drive, would find this exciting. If research is your calling, you may also do it independently under a professor or research mentor in case such summer programs are unaffordable. A dedicated student may end up writing a paper that might get published! The University of Toronto’s Summer Mentorship Program is an “employment, mentorship, and pathway to post-secondary education program” in Landscape Architecture, Ecological Science, and Indigenous Studies. Oxford Summer Courses are designed to give a glimpse of college life by combining academics with fun. Students undergo enquiry based learning from top notch professors as well as take part in non-academic activities like ‘hunting’! Some pre-college programs also give the scope to earn credits, that are generally transferable. But above all the opportunity to make friends from all walks of life is the most valuable takeaway!
If a student is unclear about one’s choice or lacks confidence to make a future plan, an exposure to such self-directed practical experiences, help gain clarity about innate strengths and enables to decide what he or she wishes (or does not wish) to study.
At Krafting Careers we assist students with community projects and academic research projects. We help to identify, secure and complete activities that match with their natural strengths, turning them into their signature projects.
To enable our students to work on various community projects, we partner with a wide range of NGOs working at grassroot levels.
We connect our students with academics and industry professionals cutting across disciplines, who mentor and advise them on independent research projects.
Recent Posts
Copyright © 2020. All Right Reserved.