Speaker 1: Hey guys. Are you stuck at home and wondering how you can fill your time because you're going to school online and have been told or mandated by your government not to leave? Or maybe you're just an introvert and you'd rather never leave the house but you still want some extracurricular activities to put on your college application. Well, if so, in this video I'm going to talk about 10 different extracurricular activities you can do without leaving the confines of your home. If you're wondering who I am, my name is Brooke. I've been teaching and tutoring the SAT and the ACT for over a decade and a half. I also am an independent college consultant and I help students shape their stories for college admissions so that they put their most awesome selves on paper. If you are also prepping for the SAT or the ACT, we also have a complete online course that you can do also without leaving your home and that's at supertutortv.com. We've had students score perfectly on the ACT using course and near perfectly on the SAT. 99th percentile score is there, so definitely check that out. We also have a couple of books on the ACT, the best ACT math books ever. You can check those out at Amazon. Totally for free if you don't want to spend any money, our newsletter, supertutortv.com. Subscribe, sign up, we'll send you deals, we'll send you our latest videos. We don't email you too much, I promise. And we also are on social media so find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Follow us and subscribe to our channel. Most importantly on YouTube here. All you have to do is click subscribe. It's really easy. You're already on YouTube. Total easy peasy. Cool. Okay, let's get into this list. First a disclaimer, don't stress out. Colleges know you can't pursue everything you love right now. They are going to be forgiving if your activities aren't as amazing as they always were when you're in quarantine. So even the most elite colleges are going to be understanding of you cutting back on activities when you're stuck at home. Please take this whole video with a grain of salt. We don't expect you to be masterminds and geniuses with every moment that you have stuck at home when you can't do all the things that you usually do. That being said, some of you might be bored. So we made this video. Number one, creative writing. There's lots of ways you can do creative writing. You can write novels, you can write plays, you can write short stories, even screenplays, and you can submit it online to places. You can try to enter it into contests, you can try to win awards with it. I've had students get short stories published in anthologies, in school literary magazines, or in other kinds of literary magazines that accept submissions from teenagers. There's lots of different places to get your creative writing published. So if you're really into fiction, if you really like to be creative, creative writing is an activity you don't have to go anywhere to do. Cool. Number two, blogging and article writing. So this is like journalistic writing. You can write like a journalist from the confines of your home. Again, this is actually like a wow factor potential activity for a lot of students, especially if you're interested in journalism, and you can get published in a local paper. One way to start that I really like is to write op-eds, which are basically articles that somebody in the community wrote, and you can submit them to papers unsolicited. Start with your local paper. That's probably the easiest one. You can also look for programs that support teen reporters. Some newspapers have columns where they support teen reporters, and they solicit entries from people who are in your age group. So that's also something you can check into. Other things that you can write, you can continue if you have a school newspaper at your school. You can totally write articles from home. You don't have to do it from the newspaper room. And finally, the other kind of journalistic writing that you can do is blogging. You can start a blog on any topic that you want and write blogs about it. I will say that like as an independent college consultant, blogging is definitely not at the top of my list of impressive activities. It's probably one of the least impressive activities because a lot of people have blogs and no one reads them. So if you're writing a bunch of articles and no one's reading your articles, it's a much less impressive activity. It doesn't mean you still can't do it, and I know a lot of my students just really enjoy writing, and so they enjoy blogging because it's fun for them. It's kind of like keeping a diary. So if you're looking for something to do, I totally encourage it. I just, again, with blogging, I do use a caveat that if you're not cementing a pretty big audience with your blog, it's not necessarily going to be the most impressive thing in the world. Number three, related but slightly different, vlogging. You can make little videos if you are at home, and you don't have to go anywhere to do it. What I would encourage you to do is not a lot of people are necessarily just interested in you talking about nothing, but you might try to see is there some sort of niche you can fill, right, with your vlogging or with creating videos of some sort. Is there an idea that you can pursue? Can you make videos about something in particular? Can you make a tutorial series of videos that have a particular purpose or that help someone or that do something? You want to think about your audience, like how can you create value in the world? What kind of information could you share with people that would be helpful or useful? And when you start a vlog that's helpful or useful or interesting, that's the kind of thing that people are going to gravitate toward, and you're more likely to get more traction, and it's more likely to be interesting. Number four, composing music. If you're a musician, write some songs. That can be impressive and kind of cool, and I definitely have worked with students before in the past who have some interesting stories around their journey trying to compose music and how that went, and being in communities on the internet of composers and stuff like that. So, interesting idea. Number five, on the art train. You guys who aren't creative are like, Brooke, do you have anything for me? Stay tuned. I do. Number five, art. You can make art, and art can be anything like physical art. It could be painting. It could be drawing. It could also be digital art. If you're interested in graphic design, you could teach yourself graphic design, or you could try to teach yourself a software that helps you draw or paint or whatever it is, and get into digital art or get into graphics of some sort. You could also maybe create graphics that then you could do for a local charity or a local business. You could use your art in ways that help other people, or think about people who could use art, and then team with them, and then that could be another meaningful way you could do art at home. Number six, scientific experiments. Aha, finally something that's not all creative, though this is still creative. Science experiments are something that have been a really cool wow factor on some of the students that I work with applications, and what kind of science experiments can you do? Well, anything that you would bring to the school science fair is up for grabs, but just to give you a few examples, Josh who was an intern at our company a year or two ago, did a cool scientific kind of robot experiment that he describes, and is how I got into Stanford video, so you can go watch his video to see what he did. I've also had students build robots that like fry eggs, and do other random tasks around the house, and those have made for kind of fun, interesting topics. I have students who've built rockets to try to go into, you know, deeper in the Earth's atmosphere, and take pictures of the whole thing, which has been like kind of fascinating and interesting. I also had a student a while back who did some chemistry research that was really interesting, that was trying to solve some particular questions with global warming, and she was able to like buy chemistry lab kit stuff on the Internet to try to answer these questions, and run experiments, and she could do that at home. There's all sorts of fun things that you guys can do, science experiment wise, and if you're stuck at home, and all you've got is you in your backyard, and online shopping, this could be something that you could turn into a really cool essay when you apply to college, or just that would fill your time, and that would be fun to do. That's also totally legit, like all these, yes, you can put them on your college application, but it's also something interesting to do when all you have in front of you is online virtual school, and you're not allowed to hang out with your friends. Number seven, remote volunteer work. So I know infamously in activities colleges don't care about, I say volunteer work is one of those, but I do put a huge caveat with it, which is the idea that like half of you guys are doing volunteer work, so it's not a standout activity, because most of you are doing it, and the only way to make it a standout activity is to do it in a standout way. That being said, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do volunteer work, and volunteer work is cool, but you can do remote volunteer work, and actually that might make for a more interesting essay than real volunteer work, because how do you volunteer when you can't go anywhere in person? Tutoring, I know I tutor online all the time, I don't see why you guys couldn't remote tutor, so if you knew students in need, or you wanted to coordinate a new program, or you could even start a program at your high school, because you've got all these people who are probably home, and who can't go anywhere on both ends of the spectrum, both students who could use tutoring, and you guys, could you create a tutoring network? That could be interesting. You could work for a project like the Gutenberg Project, which needs lots of people to like proofread OCR scanned texts. You could also work with like a nonprofit, and be their social media person, and probably do that remotely, especially because a lot of companies are closed right now, depending on when you watch this video, but there you go, remote volunteer work, or even work, you can even get a remote job. Number eight, coding. So coding can take a lot of different forms, that could be app development, it could be learning coding, it could be website development, it could also be like data crunching. I had a student a while back who did a really interesting like epidemiology study, and she was crunching data from a publicly available database, and just trying to see if she could track certain trends with illness, and she ended up getting into a top-ten school, using that as part of the fodder for her essays, and things like that, and I thought it was fascinating, and really interesting, the kind of research that she was doing. So you can use coding to do interesting stuff. A lot of people are doing coding, so to stand out in that field, you really have to do something original, but you've got to start somewhere, and if you don't really know how to code, the first step is to learn how to code, and that can be a way that you fill your time. Number nine, online learning. Now caveat with the online learning, if you are online learning in a way, and you want to impress colleges with it, I generally recommend that you try to do something accredited, but if you don't really care about impressing colleges, and you just want to fill your time, and you want to do something valuable for yourself, you can use MOOCs. There's so many cool online courses, and a lot of it's free, you can even take classes from like Stanford, and Harvard, and all this stuff, and you can learn online, and it's just a great way to spend your time, and to enhance what you already know. Again, a lot of students will put MOOCs as like activities that they do on their college application. It's generally not a good cornerstone activity, because it's not something that I can like follow up on. I can't like verify that you did everything the class asked you to do. Most of the time you don't get a grade for like a MOOC, so it's it's not as verifiable. It doesn't mean don't put it down if you did it, but it's kind of icing on the cake, sprinkles on the cupcake kind of activity, but still can be really valuable for you and your brain, and you can explore ideas that interest you, and that's where I would say it's still potentially very valuable. Number 10 would be making things. What do I mean by making things? Well, the sky's the limit, and if you're creative, you can figure out something to make. Making things could be building something. I have some students who've written about how they've done construction work, or built things. It could be making a product. I have some students who are like entrepreneurs, and who made an invention, and they like created the prototype of the invention, cobbling things together in their house. Heck, you can even make food. That's something you can make. I do have a student once who got into an Ivy League school, and she was super passionate about cooking, and that's what she made. She would make these really elaborate dishes, and she wrote a whole essay on it, and it was really a fun, funny essay about all the elaborate foods that she cooked. So whatever inspires you, if you are a maker, make something that excites you, and sometimes those can be really wow-factor things, because it's so creative, and it's so unique. Again, if you're trying to stand out, like doing something different from everyone else is the way to stand out, and so think about how you can do that if that's your goal, and if you just want to fill your time, think about what you care about, you know, and find ways to explore the world, and explore your own curiosity. I hope you guys like this video. If so, please give it a thumbs up. If you have other ideas that you think I left out, put them in the comments below. I know I'm severely lacking in sports, and I'm sorry I don't have any athletic ideas for you, but maybe some of you guys do. Thanks for joining us. I will see you guys next time. Ciao for now.