Extracurricular Activities for Top Universities Abroad: Build Your Ideal Profile 2026

Imagine two candidate profiles for Stanford. Both have identical scores – 1560 on the SAT, an average GPA of 5.8 on a 6-point Polish scale, and advanced English proficiency. The first lists twelve activities in their application: student government membership, volunteering with WOŚP (Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity), a school sports club, a math club, a school band, library assistance, Erasmus+, occasional tutoring for younger students, and a few “just in case” entries. The second lists five. But one of them is an original research project in machine learning applied to air quality analysis in Krakow, which he presented at an international scientific conference for high school students in Zurich. Another is two years of leading an educational foundation that trained 200 students from smaller towns in programming.

Which one will be admitted? At Stanford, Harvard, MIT, or Oxford, the answer is unequivocal, and it’s not the candidate with the longer list.

In the Polish education system, we’ve grown accustomed to a simple equation: good grades + a strong Matura exam result = a good university placement. At top Anglo-Saxon universities, this logic doesn’t apply. Grades and test scores are merely an entry threshold – a pass that allows the admissions committee to even open your application. But the admission decision is made based on who you are outside the classroom. What do you do when no one tells you to? What problems do you notice in the world around you; and what do you do about them? How many times has someone told you “it can’t be done,” and how many times have you proven them wrong?

Extracurricular activities are not a checklist to tick off. They are a portrait of your character, ambition, and impact on your surroundings – and that’s why top universities treat them as the most important factor distinguishing one excellent candidate from another. In this guide, I’ll show you how to build a profile that will make admissions officers remember your name. It’s not about collecting certificates; it’s about building an authentic story that resonates.

If you’re not yet familiar with the full US university application process, start with our complete guide to the application process. And if you’re aiming for specific universities, read our guides: how to get into Harvard or the complete Stanford 2026 guide.

USA vs UK vs Continental Europe – How Different Systems Value Extracurricular Activities

Before you start planning, you need to understand a fundamental difference: American, British, and Continental European universities view extracurricular activities completely differently. A strategy that gives you an advantage in the USA might be irrelevant in the UK – and vice versa.

In the USA, extracurricular activities are the core of the application. Ivy League admissions committees have repeatedly confirmed that among the “accepted pool,” differences in grades and test scores between candidates are minimal. What decides is the extracurricular profile, essays, and recommendations. That’s why the Common App gives you up to 10 entries for activities and requires you to describe them, rank them by importance, and provide specific hours of involvement.

In the UK – don’t expect that volunteering at an animal shelter will help you get into Oxford. The British system is single-subject focused: you apply for one specific program and must demonstrate a deep interest in that subject. The UCAS Personal Statement (4,000 characters) should be 80% about your intellectual engagement with the subject; what you’ve read beyond the curriculum, which online courses you’ve completed, what research questions fascinate you. “Super-curricular” activities (deepening subject-specific knowledge) are key here. If you plan to apply through UCAS, read our guide to the UCAS application and the guide to studying at Oxford.

In Continental Europe – the situation is changing dynamically. Universities like Sciences Po, Bocconi, and IE University are increasingly moving closer to the American model. But at most universities in the Netherlands, Germany, or Scandinavia, Matura exam results and meeting formal criteria still decide. Activities matter mainly in the motivation letter, and more as an addition than a foundation.

Strategic Conclusion: If you’re aiming for the USA, build a broad and deep profile with a clear “spike.” If for the UK – focus on one area and show intellectual depth. If for both, you need a strategy that combines both approaches. And this is precisely what our mentors at College Council specialize in – we help design a profile that works simultaneously for the Common App and UCAS.

The “Spike” Philosophy – Why Depth Beats Breadth

Admissions committees at top US universities use the informal term “spike” to describe a candidate who has one area in which they are exceptionally good; not just interested, not just active, but outstanding. A spike is not a hobby. It’s an obsession that has translated into real impact.

MIT doesn’t look for “well-rounded students.” It looks for a “well-rounded class” – a class composed of individuals, each of whom is outstanding in something different. One is a phenomenal biologist who published an article on CRISPR. Another is the author of a mobile application used by 10,000 people. Still another is the Polish national champion in Oxford-style debate. Together, they form a group where everyone brings something unique.

For you as a Polish high school student, this means one thing: stop collecting and start building. Instead of adding another entry to your CV, ask yourself: “What am I best at; and how can I be even better at it?” Then invest 80% of your extracurricular time in that. Allocate the remaining 20% to 2-3 complementary activities that demonstrate your values and character.

This doesn’t mean you should only do one thing. It means that one thing should dominate – and be at such a level that the admissions committee says: “We must admit this candidate because their contribution to our campus will be unique.”

The Tier System – A Pyramid of Activity Value

Not all extracurricular activities are created equal. Admissions officers informally classify them into a four-tier system (levels). The higher on the pyramid, the greater the impact on your application; but also, the harder they are to achieve.

What does this mean? An ideal profile for a top US university includes 1-2 activities from Tier 1 or 2 (your “spike”), 2-3 from Tier 2-3 (complementary and context), and 1-2 from Tier 3 (showing that you are a normal person, not just an achievement machine). Tier 4 activities are not even worth listing – they take up space that could be better utilized.

At College Council, we help students move up the pyramid. It’s not about suddenly inventing a Tier 1 activity; it’s about developing existing interests to an impressive level. Our mentor works with you 1-on-1, analyzes your strengths, and designs a path that elevates your activities by a tier within 12-18 months. Book a consultation →

Categories of Activities That Distinguish Candidates

There isn’t one “right” category of activity. But there are types that consistently impress admissions committees – and types that impress no one. Here’s an overview.

Scientific Research and Research

You don’t have to be a doctor to conduct research as a high school student. Polish universities; especially the science faculties of the University of Warsaw (UW), Jagiellonian University (UJ), AGH University of Science and Technology, or Warsaw University of Technology (Politechnika Warszawska) – are increasingly accepting high school students for short-term research projects. Write an email to a professor whose work interests you with a concrete proposal: “I read your article on X. I would like to investigate whether Y also exhibits this dependency. May I work in your lab during the summer?” 90% of professors won’t reply. But the 1 in 10 who does respond could change your application.

The results of research can take various forms: a poster at a scientific conference, an article published in a student or scientific journal, an abstract at a symposium. Even an unfinished project that you describe in an essay with reflections on methodology and conclusions is more valuable than a list of twenty completed online courses.

Passion Projects and Capstone Projects

This is a category where College Council truly shines. A passion project is an original project that solves a real problem or creates something new. A capstone project is a more structured, multi-month project that culminates a certain stage of learning, combining research, creation, and presentation.

Examples from our mentors’ experience:

• A student from Krakow created a mobile application for learning Polish Sign Language – 3,000 people downloaded it, and the project won a regional innovation competition.
• A student from Gdansk conducted a year-long study of water quality in the Bay of Gdansk in collaboration with the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and presented the results at the Baltic Sea Science Congress.
• A student from Warsaw launched a podcast about Polish scientists unknown abroad; 50 episodes, 15,000 listens, collaboration with the Copernicus Science Centre.

Each of these projects is original, measurable, and related to the field of study. And each of them was created with the support of a mentor who helped transform a vague idea into a concrete plan with milestones. If you have a project idea but don’t know how to execute it – contact us. Designing passion and capstone projects is one of our key services, both as part of US preparation and UK preparation.

Competitions and Academic Olympiads

Polish academic olympiads are an undervalued treasure in the context of international applications. A finalist of the national round of the Polish Mathematical, Physical, Computer Science, or Biological Olympiad is a Tier 1 achievement; comparable to a national final in other countries. The problem? American admissions committees may not be aware of their prestige. That’s why it’s crucial to properly describe the achievement: not “participant in the Chemistry Olympiad,” but “Advanced to the national round of the Polish Chemistry Olympiad, a multi-stage academic competition selecting the top 30 students from an initial pool of 5,000+ participants nationwide.”

Beyond olympiads, consider: Model United Nations (MUN), Oxford-style debates, hackathons (e.g., HackYeah), Science Olympiad, the Kangaroo math competition for older students, essay competitions (e.g., John Locke Essay Competition, Concord Review), as well as international programs like Research Science Institute (RSI) or CERN Beamline for Schools.

Volunteering – But Real Volunteering

A one-time collection during WOŚP (Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity) is not volunteering in the sense understood by admissions committees. Volunteering that makes an impression is long-term, regular, and measurable. Are you tutoring math to children from an orphanage for two years, three hours every week? That’s Tier 2. Did you establish a mentoring program that expanded to three schools and involved 80 students? That’s Tier 1. Did you collect money once for WOŚP? Tier 4 – not worth listing.

Entrepreneurship

Admissions committees love entrepreneurship because it demonstrates initiative, problem-solving skills, and a willingness to take risks. You don’t have to earn millions; it’s enough that you’ve created something real. An Etsy shop with handmade jewelry that generates revenue? A YouTube channel about quantum physics with 10,000 subscribers? An app used by your school? All of this shows an “entrepreneurial mindset” – and fits the narrative of a “doer, not just a thinker.”

How to Present Activities in the Common App – 150 Characters That Decide Everything

The Common Application gives you 150 characters to describe each activity. That’s less than a tweet. In those 150 characters, you must include: what you did, what your role was, and what the outcome was. Sounds like an impossible mission? Yes, if you don’t know how to do it.

Rules for a good 150-character description:

1. Start with an active verb: Founded, Led, Designed, Built, Researched, Organized
2. Quantify everything: number of people, hours, money, results
3. Provide context for the achievement: “top 50 out of 6,000” is much stronger than “finalist”
4. Use abbreviations: “w/” instead of “with”, “yrs” instead of “years”, “avg.” instead of “average”
5. Avoid adjectives: “amazing”, “passionate”, “life-changing” – discard them. Numbers speak for themselves.

You can find more about filling out the Common App in our Common App step-by-step guide.

How to Present Activities in the UCAS Personal Statement

The UCAS Personal Statement operates under different rules. You have 4,000 characters (approx. 600 words) for one text that goes to all five universities. At Oxford or Cambridge, 80% of your text should be about your interest in the subject, and not a general interest, but a specific, deep, and documented one.

Key difference: in the Common App, you list activities separately in a dedicated section. In the UCAS Personal Statement, you weave them into your narrative. You don’t write: “I was the president of the chemistry club.” You write: “While leading the chemistry club, I designed an experiment investigating the kinetics of H₂O₂ decomposition in the presence of MnO₂, which deepened my understanding of catalysis and prompted the question of whether the same principles could optimize industrial processes – a topic I wish to explore in my studies.”

What works in UCAS:

• Super-curricular readings (named books, named papers, named professors)
• Online courses (Coursera, edX, MIT OpenCourseWare) related to the subject
• Independent research projects and experiments
• Reflection; not what you did, but what you learned and what questions it opened up

What does NOT work:

• A list of activities unrelated to the subject
• Generic statements like “I’ve been fascinated by science since childhood”
• Listing awards without reflection
• Copying the Common App format to UCAS

Detailed guide: How to Apply Through UCAS – A Guide for Poles

Activities Tailored to Your Major – What to Choose if You Want to Study STEM, Humanities, Business, or Medicine

Your extracurricular profile should support your application narrative. If you want to study Computer Science, but your main activities are volunteering at an animal shelter and student government, something doesn’t add up. The admissions committee looks for consistency between what you want to study and what you are already doing.

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics):

• Olympiads: mathematical, physical, computer science, chemical, biological
• Research: university collaboration, independent projects using Python/R/MATLAB
• Competitions: hackathons, Science Olympiad, Google Science Fair, ISEF
• Projects: app, robot, open-source project on GitHub, scientific blog
• Courses: MIT OCW, Coursera (Stanford Machine Learning, Harvard CS50)
• Test preparation: prepclass.io offers SAT Math and AP courses

Humanities and Social Sciences:

• Debates: Model United Nations, Oxford-style debates, Debate Society
• Writing: essay competitions (John Locke, Concord Review), blog, school newspaper, poetry
• Research: local history, political analysis, anthropological project
• Languages: learning a third/fourth language, certifications (DELF, Goethe)
• Volunteering: educational, cultural, work with immigrants, NGO
• Super-curricular readings: documented and reflected upon in essays

Business and Economics:

• Entrepreneurship: own company, e-commerce, social project with a budget
• Competitions: economic olympiad, Young Enterprise, DECA
• Internships: fintech, consulting, marketing – even in Polish companies
• Investing: educational portfolio, market analysis, finance blog
• Leadership: event organization, fundraising, team management

Medicine (pre-med and UK medicine):

• Clinical volunteering: hospital, hospice, health center, minimum 6 months
• Research: molecular biology, epidemiology, public health
• Shadowing: observing doctors at work (more difficult in Poland, but possible)
• Biology or Chemistry Olympiad
• Medical ethics: readings, debates, essays
• UK: UCAT/BMAT prep, work experience description in Personal Statement

Timeline – How to Build Your Profile from Grade 9 to Grade 12 (High School)

An extracurricular profile is built over years, not weeks. The biggest mistake Polish high school students make? Starting to build their profile in Grade 11 or 12, when application deadlines are just around the corner. Here’s a realistic timeline.

The earlier you start, the stronger your profile will be. If you are in Grade 9 or 10 – you have a huge advantage. Our mentors at College Council work with students from Grade 9 (high school), helping to design a 3-4 year strategy that organically builds a consistent, authentic profile. We don’t “pad” CVs with artificial entries; we help you find what truly drives you and turn it into something exceptional.

What NOT to Do – Most Common Mistakes by Polish Candidates

After seven years of working with Polish high school students applying abroad, we see the same mistakes repeated time and again. Here is a list of cardinal sins:

1. Quantity over Quality

Listing 10 activities on the Common App is not mandatory. It’s better to have 6 strong entries than 10 diluted ones. The committee sees the difference between someone who does 3 things intensively and someone who “collects” certificates.

2. “Last Minute” Activities

Starting a charitable foundation in August before the application year is a red flag. Committees see start and end dates. A 3-month project that was clearly created “for the application” is worse than not having that project at all.

3. Lack of a Coherent Narrative

Your activities should tell a single story. If you want to study Computer Science, but your top activities are volunteering at an animal shelter, a dance team, and a cooking class, the narrative doesn’t exist. This doesn’t mean you can’t have hobbies; but your spike must be clear.

4. Copying Templates from the Internet

Reddit, College Confidential, and Polish forums are full of “example profiles” that got into Harvard. Copying someone else’s strategy is a path to rejection. Admissions officers have read tens of thousands of applications – they recognize a template immediately.

5. Ignoring the Polish Context

Polish candidates have unique strengths: academic olympiads, the extended Matura exam system, multilingualism, experience in a different education system. Instead of pretending to be American, leverage your perspective. Admissions committees seek diversity, and your Polish context is an asset, not an obstacle.

6. Working Alone Without Feedback

Building a profile in isolation is like practicing a sport without a coach – you might be good, but you won’t know what to improve. Our mentors at College Council regularly review candidate profiles, provide concrete feedback, and help correct their course before it’s too late.

Passion Projects and Capstone Projects – A Creation Guide

Passion projects and capstone projects are concepts that practically don’t exist in the Polish education system, but in the American and British admissions landscape, they can be decisive for admission. Here’s how to understand and build them.

A passion project is an independent initiative stemming from your genuine interests. It’s not assigned by the school, nor is it part of any program; it arises because you want to solve a problem, create something new, or investigate a question that keeps you up at night.

A capstone project is a more structured, multi-month project that combines research, creation, and presentation. In Anglo-Saxon countries, it’s often required as part of the IB program (Extended Essay) or AP Capstone. But nothing prevents you from creating your own capstone outside a formal program.

How to design a passion/capstone project in 5 steps:

1. Identify a problem or question – What bothers you? What would you like to change? What scientific question keeps you up at night? The more personal, the better.

2. Research what already exists; Someone has probably tried to solve this problem. Read what they did. Your project doesn’t have to be revolutionary – it just needs to be yours and better in one specific aspect.

3. Design a plan with milestones; Break down the project into 3-6 months. Set weekly goals. Here, a mentor’s help is invaluable – at College Council, we help students transform a vague idea into a realistic plan with concrete deliverables.

4. Execute and document; Keep a project journal. Take photos, screenshots, record results. This documentation will help you not only with your application but also with your essay and potential interview.

5. Present and measure impact – Publish your results: blog, article, conference presentation, poster, app in the app store, website. The more public and measurable the outcome, the stronger the impact on your application.

Example passion projects we helped create at College Council:

• “AirQ Krakow”; a dashboard visualizing air quality data in Krakow from GIOŚ (Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection) sensors, with a predictive model (Python + ML). MIT applicant.
• “Matura Without Barriers” – a platform with free materials for the extended Matura exam in mathematics, with a YouTube channel (12,000 subscribers). Yale applicant.
• “In Copernicus’ Footsteps”; a documentary podcast about historical and contemporary Polish scientists, with interviews with professors from Jagiellonian University (UJ) and the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Oxford (History & Philosophy of Science) applicant.
• “Protein Folding Notebook” – an open-source Jupyter notebook exploring protein folding algorithms, published on GitHub with 300+ stars. Stanford CS applicant.

Notice the pattern: each of these projects is personal (stems from genuine interest), measurable (has concrete numbers), and public (someone other than the candidate uses it).

If you have a project idea but don’t know where to start, that’s literally what we do. Book a free strategic consultation with a College Council mentor → We’ll help you design a project from scratch to presentation.

College Council – How We Help Build Profiles That Open Doors

At College Council, we believe that every student has something unique within them – but not everyone knows how to find and present it. Our role is not to “pad” CVs with artificial entries. It’s foundational work: discovering your authentic strengths and designing a strategy that will transform them into a profile that admissions committees won’t be able to look away from.

Our Approach: Authenticity, Not “Padding”

The “college consulting” market is full of companies that promise “magic” strategies; they instruct students to establish charitable foundations, enter competitions they would never otherwise enter, or “buy” internships at prestigious companies. This is a dead end. Admissions committees at top universities have years of experience in recognizing artificial profiles. One inconsistent element in an application, one question during an interview that you can’t answer with passion – and the whole structure crumbles.

College Council’s approach is different. We start with a deep understanding of the student: who you are, what drives you, what you fear, what you dream of. Then we look for a thread in all of this that is both authentic and appealing to admissions. And on that thread, we build; not artificially, not from scratch, but organically, utilizing what you already have and helping you develop it to an impressive level.

The result? Our students go through interviews with confidence because they talk about what they are truly passionate about. Their essays are a pleasure to read because they tell real stories. And their extracurricular profiles are consistent and credible – because that’s simply what they are.

Book a free strategic consultation → We’ll tell you what your plan would look like.

FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions About Extracurricular Activities

Read Also

If this guide was helpful to you, here are the next steps – read articles that will deepen your knowledge of the application process:

• The US University Application Process, a Complete Step-by-Step Guide – everything you need to know about documents, deadlines, and application platforms
• How to Get into Harvard, a Guide for Poles – detailed requirements, statistics, and application strategy
• Stanford 2026, a Complete Guide – what makes Stanford unique and how to apply there from Poland
• Common App Step-by-Step, a Guide – how to fill out each section of the application platform
• How to Apply Through UCAS, a Guide for Poles – everything about the British admissions system
• Studying at Oxford University, a Guide – admissions, interviews, colleges, and student life at the oldest English-speaking university

Article updated in February 2026. Recruitment process data compiled based on official Common Application 2025/2026, UCAS 2025/2026 guidelines, and the experience of College Council mentors.