Students or recent graduates applying for entry-level positions or internships are often asked about their extracurricular activities. They are often asked follow-up questions about why they liked those activities or what they learned from them. Employers ask these questions because they want to know a bit about your personality to see if you will fit in with the company culture, if you are a well-rounded person with interests outside of work, and what skills and abilities you have that relate to the job.
What Are Extracurricular Activities?
Extracurriculars are any activities or interests you have outside of required classes. Traditional examples of extracurriculars are clubs or sports such as student government, debate, hockey, and many more. Involvement with societies may also be considered as extracurricular activities. These include fraternities and sororities, as well as national honors societies and other membership organizations. Another example of an extracurricular activity is volunteer work. For instance, perhaps you work at a food pantry or help run the ticket booth at an annual fundraiser. However, there are informal extracurriculars as well. Perhaps you love guitar and play with friends once or twice a month. Maybe you are training for a marathon, or you love gardening. These less official interests can count as extracurriculars, especially if you are not in any clubs or societies.
Handling Questions About Extracurricular Activities
When going into an interview, be prepared to talk about your extracurricular activities and how they have helped you to grow as a person and how they have helped you develop valuable professional skills. Follow these tips:
Be Honest
First and foremost, don’t lie or exaggerate your role. If you say you were the captain of your school’s baseball team when you weren’t, employers have ways of finding out the truth. When they do, don’t expect a job offer. Employers also might remember your extracurriculars and ask you about them in the future. If employers later discover you lied during the hiring process, that gives them legitimate cause to terminate your employment or rescind a job offer.
Explain Your Role
Don’t give brief answers such as, “I play the flute.” Instead, explain your role within a club or society, or explain how you practice your skill or hobby. For example, you might say. “I enjoy playing the flute and am the second chair in my college’s symphony orchestra. We rehearse once a week and have two concerts every semester.” This information helps employers understand whether your activity involves leadership or teamwork, and how much time you devote to it.
Explain What You Learned or How You Developed
After explaining your role in your extracurriculars, give a brief statement about some of the skills or abilities you developed through the activities. For example, explain that being a copy editor for your school newspaper taught you how to pay attention to details and how to notice and address even the smallest errors and inconsistencies.
Connect It to the Job
When you think about the skills you have learned or improved upon through your extracurriculars, focus on those that are related to the job you are seeking. The connection does not have to be perfect, but if it has even a general relationship to a required skill or experience, it’s worth addressing. For example, if you are applying for a job that involves teamwork, you might mention that you play soccer or another team sport. If you are applying for a teaching job, you might mention that you volunteer at a local tutoring center for elementary school children.
Sample Answers About Extracurricular Activities
It’s important to tailor your answers to your own specific experiences, but when preparing for an interview, it’s sometimes helpful to have an example of how questions about extracurriculars can be addressed. Use these sample answers as starting points for how you can structure your own answers to questions about how extracurricular activities make you a better job candidate.
