Ask HN: What are worthwhile extracurricular activities in college?
For an aspiring entrepreneur, what EC activities should be pursued in college?
Fifteen years ago, I was my dorm's food service council representative. No, I'm not kidding! Every month, I went to a meeting where representatives of the firm who contracted with the university to provide food for $800/semester tried to pretend to care what a bunch of kids said about their over-cooked burgers. Actually, they seemed to legitimately care, and I learned a lot from the experience. What I learned was how helpless those managers were when it came to changing the behaviors of their minimum-wage staff. Once, a student said that his dorm-mates wanted more kinds of cereal at breakfast time. Immediately, it was promised that the number of cereal bins would be doubled! Then, when another student wanted the grill to actually be staffed during lunchtime (often, employees would take long breaks whenever they felt like it), management said vaguely that they would consider their options. That they would spend hundreds on frivolity but wouldn't attempt to control their employees left a strong impression on me and has influenced how I consider the behaviors of other managers I encounter in life.
Did being on the food service committee help me out in any direct way, like getting a good job? Nope. I would have been better off finding something more real to do where the outcome of my work meant something. Start an on-campus computer repair company, whatever.... I learned more from doing IT work for a small commercial roofing company during a couple summers than I did in any on-campus activities with official, paid advisers.
In a nutshell, the contrivances of college life might provide benefit, but the hours spent are less fruitful than those filled with "real" stuff. YMMV if one wants to impress a law school admissions officer or similar.
Edit: I didn't really address the "for an entrepreneur" part, but I think my comments still apply.
First off, athletics, which serve a valuable part of the college experience. What's funny is I hated athletics till I went to school that had none and realized just what purpose they were playing at the first college I attended. Sports programs attract certain types of people with certain interests. Kind of like how we intellectual sorts have writers/programmers/artists/scientists, each with their own personalities and interests, athletes too have very similar characteristics between sports. It's not a completely brainwashing clique, but if you like a sport then there's a good chance people who like that sport too will get along with you in more ways than one.
Most extracurricular activities are solely for the purpose of entertainment. Student Atheist Club, Board Game Club, all the frats, exist so that you can find whatever sort of entertainment you're looking for. If you like debating religion, there's a club for that. You do it for fun, not as part of an ongoing business agenda. It's for being nonserious and whimsical.
As for your own experience: You seem to think that just because you worked in a shitty program, all college programs have to be shitty. That's not how it works. Some of them are very polished and tightly-run, just as some companies are shitty and some are great.
But they all have that social college element, and that's what counts. When you do work on your own, you miss out on the people around you, you miss the chance to be with dozens of people. Now, I've heard the "misanthrope" defense, where you don't like 99% of people and so don't mind missing out on them, and my response to that is that if you're in a college where you hate everybody, you're in a bad college. Transfer to a place where everybody is incredible by your standards. They exist, because somebody like you at some point decided to make a place like that and it worked. This is why you want to research your college opportunities before you go to a mindbogglingly shitty place.
Now, my college is the sort of college where in your class you work on actively making the college a better place and where a part of graduation is interning with a company and securing a potential job offer after graduation, so perhaps I'm spoiled by my "nonreal" college stuff, but all the people complaining about how bad college was seem to be people who just ended up at shitty colleges.
Might sounds a bit cliche, but still, I think that spending all of your college life focusing on your future career is a bit of a waste (thats my opinion anyway).
If you want public speaking skills, you will get them at debate. When I started, I could hardly keep my sentences going the whole time. Very recently I got into the finals of a tournament where we were judged primarily on speaking style.
If you want to be able to structure arguments, as you will probably have to do when pitching a startup. There is hardly a better way than trying a billion times, and at the same time seeing how the best in the club do it.
Thinking on your feet? You often only have the 7 minutes of your opponent's speech to come up with arguments and your own 7 minutes of refutation. At first you are terrible, but eventually you get to the point where you are never at a loss for something to say.
Coming to university with a minimal of social skills and an overload of technical skills, I have ended up getting a lot more out of debate in my first 2 terms than out of the courseload.
Another thing I learned was that I strongly prefer working with software to hardware. I am pretty good at connecting components together, but I wouldn't want to design these chips. I ended up switching my specialization, and it's good that I did this then rather than after graduating.
My marks suffered, but overall it was worthwhile. I'd still say do something you like rather than what you think will impress a committee. But I don't (yet?) have any incredible success stories to share to back up this opinion.
With any luck, you'll be able to meet potential business partners with skill sets that complement yours.