Do you have an amazing academic background but still feel that something is missing in your resume? Yes, I am talking about extracurricular activities.
Education That Goes Beyond The Classroom
Most Indian schools and colleges place little emphasis on offering a decent exposure to extracurricular activities and consider academic rigor as the only key to success. In today’s times, education goes beyond the four walls of a classroom.
The school curriculum should be designed to incorporate and give emphasis to extracurricular activities to ensure holistic development. Schools should encourage students to select from a plethora of unique activities during after-school sessions
The Indian Government has introduced various reforms to shift the impetus on skill-building to develop the creative potential of each individual under the New Education Policy (NEP).
Why extracurricular activities?
The key purpose is to provide exposure to various activities and experiences from an early age. This gives children an opportunity to try any activity that intrigues them, and if it really works and they think they are passionate about it, they may go further and pursue it to get in-depth training.
Five New Age Skills
Extracurricular activities are a great example of “Learning by Doing”. Such activities are experiential, hands-on, action-oriented, and based on experience. Action can be exposed in three parts: the act of doing, the experience received in the doing process, and the learning accumulated from the experience. Few of the 21st century extracurricular skills for students are:
Internships
In simple terms an Internship or Apprenticeship is known as – “A period of time during which a student, a newly qualified professional or a recent graduate gets practical experience in a job”. Internships offers you an amazing opportunity to develop domain knowledge or expertise in your area of interest and strengthen your resume. There is a plethora of options for both offline and online internships available for students to add more feathers to their caps.
Art and Design
Are you that kid who always loves comics and superheroes and always wanted to make your own characters? Then it’s time for you to get your hands dirty with some art and design. You can join any Digital Arts club to learn digital skills like animation, video game designing, film making, and much more. There is a huge demand for digital-savvy people who are competent with using various tools like Adobe Spark, After Effects, PowToon, Prezi to name a few in colleges as well as in the corporate world.
Suggested Read: Animation and Career Prospects
Entrepreneurship Club
Are you a creator, innovator, or visionary? Then this club is the right place for you. Entrepreneurship Club in schools and Colleges gives an opportunity to the students to learn from failures. This will create an environment of continuous learning and challenging the status quo with new ideas and innovations. Various scientific studies prove that a young teenager’s mind is comparatively more active and creative than an average adult. Thus, guiding and counselling students during this phase of their lives can build great future leaders. Some of the reasons why you should be a part of this club are:
- It promotes learning about real-world entrepreneurship: Students in entrepreneurship clubs can create and launch mock (or actual) businesses and experiment with and experience product launch, marketing, expanding, and other stepping-stones encountered by startup founders.
- Create a business network: Students in entrepreneurship clubs often leave school with a solidly constructed business network, which can be priceless to a future business founder.
- Learn how to work through failure in a low-stakes environment: Most of the world’s most successful CEOs attribute their current success to lessons they learned from past failures. It’s far easier to have a mock organization fail and learn from that failure than to weather the failure and financial challenge of a real-world business going under.
Suggested Read: Top Colleges for Business Studies in India
Robotics
Our fascination with robots and artificial intelligence is not new. From Hollywood to the real-world, we love robots. If you’ve dreamed of building these machines, then this field is for you. Robotics will provide you with the opportunity to grow your technical acumen and develop an edge in your profile.
Check your profile here!
Robotics is one of the fastest-growing fields of study across the world and more and more jobs are now focusing on Robotics and Automation. A knowledge and interest in Robotics will definitely make you stand out of the crowd and it will help you foster:
- Problem Solving Skills
- Strengthen your STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) skills
- Learn teamwork and hone your decision-making skills
Suggested Read: Career guidance in Robotics and Automation
Community Service
Serving others is the greatest act of mankind, Even the Bible preaches that serving others is similar to serving God.
Every school and college encourages its students to engage in some community welfare activity or extracurricular activity where you put the needs of others above yourself and more importantly understand the current issues facing our world, empathize with other people, and develop a strong sense of doing the right thing!
Here are some activities you could get involved in:
- Hospital volunteering
- Church volunteering
- Tutoring in school or at a local organization
- Amnesty International
- Humane Society
- Uday Foundation
- Action Aid
- Reforestation programs, animal rescue programs, etc.
These are some of the new-age skills that can boost your profile and give you the edge you deserve in all the selection processes. But these are not the only skills that you should try to acquire, every individual is unique and possesses unique capabilities which can be identified and explored before acquiring other skills. For example, you can be really good at chess or a national level swimmer, so first focus on those abilities and then look for other interest areas.
Suggested Read: Decoding the science of choosing the right extracurricular activity
Satyam Sharma
A firm believer of "Words can change the World", Satyam is a Marketing and Analytics enthusiast. He believes that cardio and exercise make your body energetic and cools down your head. A passionate rope skipper, who loves sketching and writing.
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Satyam Sharmahttps://www.univariety.com/blog/author/satyam-sharma/
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Satyam Sharmahttps://www.univariety.com/blog/author/satyam-sharma/
