Comment by brianchu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianchu | Hacker News Reader

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I currently attend UC Berkeley and graduated from a fairly affluent top US high school a few years ago. Meaning: everyone was very concerned (I won't say obsessed) about college admissions.

This focus on leadership in admissions is very well known, and manifests itself conspicuously in competitive high schools. There's a considerable amount of unspoken pressure to get "leadership" positions in school clubs, do "leadership" activities in community service, do varsity sports or other leadership in sports, and participate in ranked competitions. The list goes on and on. This breeds a lot of cynicism about people's motivations, especially as people try to game the system (with empty leadership positions). What starts to happen is that when people hear about a high schooler who goes off and founds a non-profit and does work in Africa (or something like that), people start to wonder whether that person did it just to improve their admissions chances. The sad part is that this person could very well be genuine.

EDIT (reply to below): Sometimes those people are college admissions officers. I'm in college now, so I don't worry much about that stuff anymore. I just recognize that the system is screwed up.

I won an award for the highest SAT score in my graduating class. They gave out the award at a combined ceremony for every school in the county, and it wasn't until the first student started talking that I realized I had to make a speech.

While I was scribbling notes on a napkin about maybe wanting to go to law school, the other recipients talked about charity trips to Africa, food drives, and saving the planet--I was pretty intimidated.

I ended up just winging it, and after it was over I got business cards from several people who told me that mine was the only speech that didn't bore them to tears.

Later on, nearly the exact same thing happened in a group interview for a scholarship I was applying for. The other kids were parroting what they thought the interviewers wanted to hear, and every time they were asked a question they'd try to bring the subject back to something wonderful they'd done. It sounded like they'd spent their entire time at school ticking off boxes on some leadership actives checklist. I didn't have any of those activities to fall back on, so I just treated the whole thing like a casual chat. I ended up winning the scholarship.

Apparently it's pretty clear when high school kids are just padding their resume with "leadership" activities.

I found this very frustrating in High School. It ruined clubs because people weren't interested in the club, just the resume.

...It's such great leadership to get yourself elected leader of the club that doesn't do anything because you're too busy being a "leader." No doubt said "leadership" provided some compelling anecdote for an entrance essay...

The whole approach to 'leadership' taken these days where it's almost a subject itself is so frustrating and at odds with the whole idea.

I saw exactly this situation in high school. I went to a prep school, so there was definitely explicit pressure to do things that look good for college.

Two of my classmates put together the "Dollars for Darfur" program, which became a relatively big deal. They spoke in front of congress, appeared on some morning shows, etc.

Sometimes it was honestly hard to have a conversation about the program that didn't involve some cynical "and this'll look really good on their college application" type of stuff. Which is true, it's an impressive project and I'm sure it boosted their changes, but it was always sad to me that people questioned their motives. Definitely a combination of jealousy and cynicism.

People have multiple motivations for doing good things. There are the public ones, which they tell others about, and the private ones, which they tell only to their closest associates if at all. People are complicated.

But since the good things get done, does it really matter if the motives weren't 100% pure?

And plenty of evil is done in this world by people with the best of intentions. (My father once said he'd rather have a crook as President than an idealist. The crook would do a lot less damage.)

Very interesting observation. It's very similar to work resumes in that it's very difficult to tell which positions a candidate had which meant anything.

yeah that kid doesn't really give much of a damn whether you thought his experience was genuine:)

That's basically what happened in my religious youth group in high school. I ended up "Executive Vice President", which basically amounted to being "One of the three people who actually shows up to every single meeting and goes to the retreats", because when we actually held elections, suddenly another four people show up and vote themselves the leadership positions.

And they were never seen again.

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