Pro Extracurricular Activities By Annalicia Trammell

Extracurricular activities are an excellent way to keep students busy outside just the regular classes during the school day. There are so many activities to choose from to reach out to different students. Extracurricular activities open a lot of opportunities for students in school.

Extracurricular activities are very important to a school. It’s a great way to meet new people who have the same interests as you, and there are so many different extracurricular activities that can appeal to others who have different interests. Some organizations allow students to go out into the community, experience real-world scenarios, and get practice in that field. Good examples of those organizations are FCCLA for humanities and consumer sciences and HOSA for health sciences. These experiences can help prepare students for the field they are interested in pursuing.

Participating in extracurricular activities can also look when applying to colleges. Being involved makes students look better suited for the university they are applying to. Being involved can also come with benefits like receiving senior cords, letterman jackets and getting scholarships.

While extracurriculars are time-consuming, students can use them to practice their time management skills. A student will become busy with regular classes and extracurricular activities, but if you time manage or create a schedule on when to do things then extracurricular activities shouldn’t get in the way.

Extracurricular activities are a wonderful opportunity for students to get more involved and to be able to earn things like scholarships. In the long run, extracurricular activities can be fun and beneficial for the future.

Anti Extracurricular Activities By Nova Wang

Many students busy themselves outside of school with extracurricular activities ranging from theatre to sports and UIL academic teams. While having many benefits, extracurriculars can create a hindrance to different aspects of a student’s personal and school life. Some examples include a decline in student health, conflicting time restraints and lowering grades.

While extracurriculars can be seen as very important for a student’s future they can also heavily impact a student’s mental and physical health. Students may have little time to rest and recuperate as a result of extracurriculars and school work, and the student’s mental health will slowly decline over time. This can heavily affect students’ physical health as they slowly may not have the will to take care of themselves resulting from the immense stress that may occur, leading to possible side effects such as headaches and stomachaches.

Extracurriculars are time-consuming, especially if you are in an extracurricular that has a heavy workload. For all extracurriculars, they have a time slot where they come work together through a sport, planning, etc. Depending on the time slots there will be conflicting times that cannot be changed, which creates conflicts with students’ time to do homework, study and decompress, which can lead to students falling behind on school work and becoming heavily stressed.

While colleges do view extracurriculars as a significant factor in seeing where students want to head for their careers, and if the student is a suitable fit for that college, a different factor that many colleges focus on more compared to extracurriculars is grades. While extracurriculars can motivate students to work harder in their classes, thanks to grade requirements, a different issue that is created as a minor result of extracurriculars is absences. As many extracurriculars are held in various areas across the state, many absences occur from one to many days in a row, which can lead students to fall behind in their classes. This pushes them to fall behind more, creating more stress and continuing into an ongoing cycle.

Extracurriculars overall have many benefits but have side effects that outweigh them from the deterioration of student health to vast conflicting time constraints. Overall, extracurriculars deteriorate the well-being of students and lower the academic potential of many.