In high school, there is a fine line between keeping busy and having so many extracurriculars that your performance in all of them begins to suffer. It’s no fun to be so busy that you never have enough time to get anything done. Your grades will suffer if you are up until 2:30 a.m. every day trying to get all your homework done since you had practice, then work and didn’t get home until 9:30 p.m. Tell your boss you can’t work as much; one to two days a week on a school night should be your limit.

In order to get the full high school experience, you need to drop some of the stress-causing things in your life and just let yourself go out and have a good time every once and a while. Go to the Friday night football games instead of going home and doing homework. Hang out with friends on Saturday night, leave your homework until Sunday morning. You’ll just be beating yourself down and end up miserable if you never have free time to do the fun stuff.

For all those people who pile up the activities just to make themselves look well-rounded on college apps, it doesn’t work that way. It’s great to have a few choice activities that you love and are doing for the right reasons, but set a reasonable limit.

Colleges want to see that you are a well rounded student who is dedicated to all of their activities. So a student who does one sport all year round and is also the president of a club would look just as good as someone who does seven different clubs and three sports just to say that they did them.

There’s no point to doing activities if you don’t like them. It’s a waste of the advisor’s and your own time. That time could be better spent doing homework or studying to try to get your grades up. Good grades along with dedication is what colleges are really looking for when they consider your application.

Even though it may seem like it at times, it’s not a competition to see who can do the most extracurriculars and still be able to get some sleep and function. It’s about being a well-rounded student who can handle everything they do, love it all, and still have time for family and friends.