Entry 31: How to Impress

In your last journal entry you wrote about your extracurricular activities. Some of them might be impressive to university admissions officers. Some might not. Remember that some of the values that admissions officers are looking for in candidates are: ability to learn from mistakes, accountability, concern for others, creativity, defined goals, dignity, discipline, ethics, goal-orientation, honesty, humility, introspection, leadership, lucidity, maturity, positivity, self-awareness, team-orientation, uniqueness, and vision. Qualities that they aren’t looking for are: anger, arrogance, bad writing, blind ambition, ego, entitlement, immaturity, mediocrity, perfectionism, poor judgment, prejudice against race/gender, and vanity. Pick a few of the activities you wrote about before and write about which desirable values they might demonstrate. Are there any undesirable values associated with your activities?

• Basketball: Writing about basketball helps convey to others about my ability to work with others, as well as leadership when playing the game together. Both of these are necessary for a team to be able to play a game without having any negative feelings. It also teaches the important lesson of how important cooperation is. One can also learn from his or her mistakes when playing basketball. For example, when you lose the ball to the other team, you think back and try to find out why you lost the ball, and then you devise new strategies to fix that problem. Playing basketball also helps with one's discipline because of the necessary large amount of constant practice to maintain one's level of skills. Basketball, however, can show one's poor judgment when one is making a move. This may cause the team to loose the ball to the other team, and eventually even lead to the loss of games.
• Dancing: Dancing is an activity that helps to discipline oneself because to be able to dance well enough to perform, there must be a lot of effort dedicated to practice. It also shows that one has a defined goal, as well as show the uniqueness of a person because each person has his or her own unique dance style. Dancing, however, may show one's tendency to perfect everything, which is sometimes a bad quality.
• Community service: Community service helps one define his or her goals and discipline oneself. It also shows others that one is dedicated to society and is contributing one way or the other. The bad thing is that community service is sometimes done just for entitlement in order to show colleges that you actually did it.
• Model United Nations: MUN allows one to practice his or her creativity and discipline. It also helps one to define his or her goals as well as help him or her learn from the mistakes made. MUN, however, sometimes results in being too egoistic and too arrogant because of overconfidence.