In high school I did more extracurricular stuff than was healthy for me. I was so damn busy all the time.
Primarily, I was a band geek. I played the oboe. In addition to the regular band that mostly just practiced during school hours, I did a bunch of after-school band stuff: jazz band (where I played the sax – easy transition from oboe), “Christmas crew” (group of us that played Christmas songs at nursing homes during the holiday season), “trash can band” (literally drumming on trash cans – played at home sports events), pep band (played at home sports events). I also had a private oboe lesson once a week at my teacher’s house. All of this took up an insane amount of my time, but it was also my primary social group, so it was nice. In hindsight it was stupid though because between this and homework I had no down time and stress made my health worse.
I was an extra in one school play before deciding that was a bigger time commitment than it was worth. I was also briefly in the pit band for a school musical, but they didn’t have oboe music and expected me to be able to transpose from Bb clarinet music in my head, which I couldn’t do, so I dropped out.
I was in the technology club in high school. The big thing we did was go to an expo at a local community college once a year where we participated in competitions. Some of them required a lot of preparation, such as the catapult competition where you’re trying to build a catapult that can shoot farther than anyone else’s catapult, and we had to do the building ahead of time. Others were done entirely on the day of, such as junkyard wars where we had to build a machine to complete a certain task (e.g. cut through styrofoam using wind power) using only the shit you could find in a pile of garbage they’d put in the middle of the room. That should have been more fun than it was, but my fellow students in the club were a bunch of sexist dudes so. I stuck with it though.
I dropped out of track after trying it for about a month in middle school. I couldn’t deal with being in pain all the time and being expected to run on shin splints. I did no other sports. I am not an athletic person. Except ski club a couple years. That was just where they’d bus us up to the local skiing place and let us have at it. I’ve skied since I was a kid so that was a good time.
In college I decided I was not going to spread myself so thin and instead find one or two things and really commit to them. That was a good decision. I joined a comedy group and tutored differential equations. I made most of my friends through comedy and was a very good tutor. My senior year I also picked up mentoring through the office of disability services. They paired me up with a freshman with a disability and I met with him weekly to help him out with anything he was concerned about. That was great too.