Broadending Your Horizons When Attending College

Thinking back, I remember filling out college applications and listing all the various clubs, volunteer pushes and other extracurricular activities with which I'd been involved. I also vaguely remember a supplemental form which asked something along the lines of In which activities have you been involved in high school? In what ways will these enrich your experience at _ University? In what ways will the help you enrich the _ University community? Of course I did what any good college applicant does and wrote something between a very heartfelt and total bullcrap response about how I'd join a political action group and start an open mic night or something along those lines.

Of course this didn't happen once I got to school. Like most colleges and universities, mine had a big exposition of all the campus clubs and group in the first week of class. For me, it was like being a kid in a candy shop. My college is relatively quite small but there were groups from the Ceramics Clubs to Radical Catholic Feminists to the Physics Club to Lunadisc Ultimate Frisbee to Engineers for a Sustainable World to the Yiddish Club. Inevitably, I did the freshman thing to do and signed up for something like 10 of them and eventually ended up as a member of about 4.

In high school I'd been involved in the French Club, Open Mic Night, loosely writing for the school paper, some antiwar political stuff, and Student Union, which was our student government. The only one of these that carried over was that I got involved in student government, which was a really great experience, but I'd have to say that it was super valuable to step outside my comfort zone and really sample something new. In college I got involved with the college Democrat group, Vox (a prochoice group), and the student global AIDS campaign. That was my freshmen year and I'm still with all of them now as a junior.

Even though I'm sure I would've had rich experience if I'd stuck with the same groups with which I was involved in high school, expanding my boundaries and trying something new was extremely valuable for me. I found that I met new people and new kinds of people interested in different things. This, in turn, obviously helped me grow as a person (so cliche, I know, but really!) and kind of suss out who I was and what I cared about. In sum, when you get to school don't just run to the same activities in which you've always participated. Spread out a bit and you'll probably find something great.