Extracurriculars - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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Extracurriculars

One activity with a long through-line that develops all four Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT) dimensions beats a long list of activities that only develop one.

Extracurriculars are an area where there is much confusion in the public concerning what employers and college admissions staff are looking for, and it has left many students, parents and even some educators with the misconception that their application or resume must show as many activities as possible in order to secure an offer of employment or admissions. Having screened thousands of resumes, I can answer definitively that quality always beats quantity with regards to extracurriculars, and in a very real sense listing low-quality activities can be an interview trap.

What the resume screener is looking for

The topic of resumes is discussed in Resumes, which for this page distills down to assessing at a glance if the applicant has demonstrated capability in all four LBIT performance dimensions.

Technical: What you did
Business: Why it mattered and the value you delivered
Interpersonal: Who you worked with — who you built it with or trained.
Leadership: How did you own the initiative — What you did to overcome challenges and drive to completion

For application screening purposes, the "you" refers specifically to your contributions in each dimension, as opposed to what the team or organization as a whole did. Acknowledging your team is good form, and you should do it; however, interviewers are trained to zoom in on what you did, because you are the one being considered for the job, not the group. If your answers keep coming back to "we did this" or "the team did that," expect the interviewer to redirect you: "What did you specifically do?"

You do not need to explicitly list all four dimensions on every item that you put on the application or resume, however, you should provide enough on a few items that they can tell you are more than just a toolbag of technical skills.

Example 1 - Sports

Taekwondo Black Belt at Hong Kong Kim's Black Belt Academy
- Weak, only partially answers "what" you did and that you performed the skill at a significant level of expertise (Technical)
Black Belt and Assistant Instructor at Hong Kong Kim's Black Belt Academy leading youth classes to teach technique, improve health, build confidence, resilience, and teamwork.
- Strong - the "what" (Technical), the "with who" (students, Interpersonal), plus the "why" (develop them on multiple dimensions, Business dimension). Teaching others across all three of those dimensions is itself a demonstration of Leadership.

This example is real and I was a Taekwondo student in my college years, and leading those classes may explain why I can project my voice with energy to the back of an auditorium without need of a microphone. The tenets Grandmaster Kim lists on his own website touch all four LBIT dimensions, Tenets of Taekwondo, so the concepts I am teaching in this wiki now, I was being taught then by one of many mentors across my life.

Example 2 - The Arts

Moeller Marching Band, Trumpet Section Leader
- Weak. Only touched functional skill (the "what"). Possibly implies leadership but does not illustrate it in any way - title could just mean I was the best trumpet player in the bunch and did not have any leadership element.
Moeller Marching Band, Trumpet Section Leader, instructing freshman class on marching and projecting. Leading group ensemble and choreography practice through delivering successful performance at the end of 3 weeks.
- Strong - the "what" is followed by the "who"(freshman class and team) and the "why"(build their technical expertise and perform on schedule in 3 weeks)

The Low-Quality Activity Trap

Every item you put on your application or resume is fair game for an interviewer to probe deeper to assess your performance in the LBIT dimensions. They will not have time to test every item; however, you do not know which items they will pick that for whatever reason piqued that particular interviewer's interest. The item becomes a trap when the interviewer asks those probing questions and there is no supporting story behind it to illustrate those dimensions. The most acute exposure is on items where your title implies a leadership role in which you did not actually do any leading — it comes off as a false claim demonstrating lack of integrity and that you did not take being an officer seriously. If the item says you were an officer in a club, you absolutely must be able to articulate in LBIT terms what you led. In college applications, the trap can also be the essay question that is essentially probing for those same dimensions and being in the situation that you were not involved in any activities that hit anything beyond the technical skill. This is why it is so important that you have one strong activity that has a through-line long enough to have demonstrated a pattern of developing and using skills across all four LBIT dimensions. Before submitting an application or resume, pick each item and ask yourself for a two-minute story touching at least two LBIT dimensions. If you can't tell one, cut the item or reword it.

Cultivate growth in your current activities

Setting and Accomplishing Development Goals is covered at length on its own page. The short version for this page is that you should write down one or two things you will do in the next year (or quarter, or semester) to develop each of the four LBIT dimensions. This will ensure you are developing as a well rounded individual as well as positioning you to easily write a strong admissions form or resume entry or essay. Keep your old plans with notes on what you ended up doing — done over a few years in a single activity, those plans and implementation notes will provide more than enough material to write an essay as some applications require.

Scouting has broad recognition

Scouting America and Girl Scouts of the USA are among the most recognized club activities for developing well rounded students with leadership capability. The merit badge system focuses largely on technical skill, but most of the required badges for the Eagle Scout and Gold Award also develop Leadership, Business, and Interpersonal skills. The patrol leader/senior patrol leader ranks establish formal leadership positions for the senior scouts themselves, and they broadly run the boots on the ground activities with the adult leaders providing oversight to ensure the overall goals of the program are met and that the patrol leaders have clear objectives that they must leverage their teams to accomplish.

Having taken the Girl Scouts' adult leader training, one of the key messages was that if something was a development opportunity for a scout, then the scout should be the one doing it, and that leaders should tie their own thumbs together if they keep doing things for the scouts that the scouts are capable of doing.

One of the keys with Scouting is that the through-line builds toward the Eagle and Gold Awards, and those achievements are generally needed to make Scouting leverageable on an application or resume. Permanent tenderfoot won't cut it. Patrol Leader and Senior Patrol Leader roles are real leadership experience and can go on a resume. But they don't carry the punch of the Eagle or Gold Award, and any interviewer who sees Scouting will ask whether you earned it. Stopping just short invites a story about not finishing what you started.

One of my regrets is that when I entered high school, I quit Scouting just short of reaching Eagle in favor of taking up other clubs. Looking back, I should have dug deeper and spent the couple of months it would have taken to earn the Eagle. Without that, I felt I could not effectively use my Scouting experience on applications. That being said, I learned an important lesson about not quitting, though it was not until much later that the lesson finally sank in.

Scouting is also not the only answer

Many activities and clubs can support a development through-line as rich as that of Scouting. Sports, band, and theater, if structured well, can more than do it. My experiences in Taekwondo and band are examples requiring students on the field or stage to operate together at a distance from adult sponsors, although those alone didn't keep me from becoming a lone wolf (see Teammates or Competitors?). With mentoring exercising all four dimensions simultaneously, organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters provide excellent opportunity and demonstrate taking ownership of meeting society's needs. It is more difficult to list a club where such development is not possible; students and adult sponsors will need to be more proactive to identify and pursue those development opportunities in clubs where no formal structure is built in.

What about a part-time job?

Part-time jobs for students are usually not a substitute for a group activity, and they are not an excuse to skip one. I worked part-time from age 16 through college (in fact to pay for the first year of college until co-op jobs started in second year). For most students there are enough hours for school, a job, and one quality activity; the key enablers are goal-setting and disciplined time management. There are real exceptions, such as a student who is the family's main breadwinner or who works a family farm where the work never ends. If that's you, your job is your extracurricular: apply the same LBIT lens to it. There are 24 hours in a day. Sleep 8, spend 8 on school or work, and you still have 8 left. For most students, "not enough time" is a time-management problem, not a time problem. Arnold Schwarzenegger makes this case in Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life; for the motivational version, see The speech that broke the internet (compilation of his talks; mild language).

Helicopter Parenting Undermines Quality

To develop on all four LBIT dimensions, a certain level of independence in activities must exist. The student can't develop leadership skills if a parent or coach always steps in to make every decision, or worse, micromanages activities to the point where the student is just a pair of hands implementing the adult's orders. It is a recipe for building only the technical skills of the activity and robbing the student of the opportunity to build leadership, interpersonal, and business competency. As a member of Generation X, sometimes known as the "Feral Generation", I can assure you students are more capable of leading than many of us give them credit for.

In the 1970s at the age of 5, I would meet up outside with my friends and would not see my parents until I got hungry or it started to get dark. I was on a "construction crew" of 5–8-year-olds led by a 9-year-old foreman building 2-3 level forts from discarded plywood scraps and 2x4 offcuts, a coffee-can full of slightly bent nails, and several hand-me-down hammers. We organized ourselves around a shared goal and worked as a group to make it happen.

The reality is we were just a typical random group of neighborhood kids. Any group of kids could have done what we did, and many in that era did. Today, there is much more that is interesting to do for kids at home than there was in the 70s - there were no video games, no internet or social media, and almost no kids programming on the 3-4 television channels. With so much interesting to do at home that is of no developmental quality, what parents do need to do is ensure their kids get involved in a group activity that has a developmental through-line that touches all four dimensions.

That does not mean elimination of downtime

The preceding section is not meant to imply there should be no alone time, but that it must be in balance with development. I have played video games and used social media recreationally ever since they were invented, and I still do. Play and downtime are necessary to re-energize and maintain peak performance as discussed in Stress Management & Resilience. Introverts who are consistently denied alone time will burn out. Play and downtime are not something to be eliminated, but critical contributors to effective development; they just need to be in balance!

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.