You study hard and get good grades. You’re an honor roll student with a collection of letters of recommendation from professors. So you’re a shoo-in for your grad school of choice and the automatic selection for employers, right? Wrong. Here’s the truth: if you want to be a strong candidate, you must be involved on campus and in the community.

Being smart might’ve been enough to outshine your peers in high school and helped you get into college, but that’s where the advantage ended. Getting into coveted schools and jobs requires more than a stellar grade point average. 

It’s true that grades are a component for consideration. Grad schools have minimum GPAs for acceptance. But that doesn’t mean higher GPAs receive an instant welcome mat. A strong GPA only gives you a spot in line; it doesn’t advance you to the front.

Every year, grad schools and employers receive a myriad of applications for a limited number of available slots, and they all have stellar GPAs. Unlike youth sports, not everybody gets a trophy. The trophy, in this instance, is the acceptance letter or job offer.

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So how do you stand out from the crowd? Involvement. Through involvement, you demonstrate that you cared about more than yourself. You show leadership and initiative; qualities employers love and many of your peers lack.

Nobody wants to hire an individual that has little potential to advance, and grad schools don’t want to send such students into the workforce. An involved student with leadership experience and demonstrated leadership lets them see that you are the right kind of person to represent a school and hire.

The good news is that opportunities for involvement are essentially everywhere. One has to look no further than OrgSync to see a long list of clubs and organizations.

Without even investing that much effort, an individual can see many chances at involvement by doing nothing more than an everyday activity: using the restroom. The Stall Street Journal regularly has club and organization events advertised.

Reading the journal while doing your business can help you identify something that speaks to your interests. Show up to the event and make connections. Pretty much every club and organization welcomes new members with open arms. 

At the risk of shameless promotion, The Criterion always wants new members to lend their voices to our organization. See? You didn’t even have to reach the end of the article before an opportunity for involvement was presented to you.

The point is that involvement opportunities are relatively easy to come by. So why aren’t more students taking advantage of such opportunities? Probably the biggest reason is time.

Time is a precious commodity. It’s fleeting and nobody gets any more time than anybody else. College students live busy lives and many may feel like they already don’t have enough time in the day.

There’s a lot to the argument that an individual is too busy to seek involvement. However, an individual will always make time available for the things they consider most important. Hand-in-hand with that, there’s almost always free time we’re not even aware of.

Count up how many minutes a day are spent doing nothing. That may be while watching television or staring off into space, which can actually happen a lot during the course of study or homework. A lot of time is also taken up through idle chat. Probably a great amount of time is spent scrolling through social media.

When added up, all those minutes create hours of free time each week that could be used more productively. So it really becomes a matter of priority. If there’s time to watch puppy videos, there’s time to get involved on campus.

Investing time in involvement now will pay the dividends of acceptance into grad school and employment later. Students ‘too busy’ to be involved may find a lot of free time in the future. There’s plenty of time to watch television when unemployed, after all.

Don’t allow academic achievement to be the only thing that defines you, because these days, it’s just not enough. Get involved, develop leadership qualities and set yourself up for success. Or watch puppy videos on Facebook. They’re really cute.