One of the most important things you do in high school is compile a list of meaningless bullshit to fill up your time so college's think you don't do drugs. Of these fine activities, it's extremely important that you specifically spell out for the 23 year-old half-stoned admissions officer who reads your application what makes you different from the 5,000 other assholes who worked on the school paper. Here's how:

1. Re-title your activities: As I always said, being an editor-in-chief is really more like being a dictator-in-chief. With that analogy in mind, try re-writing your description of your extra-curriculars to be proportional to what you feel your hard-work was really accomplishing. Try calling your school paper "a small, impoverished African nation" or better yet, "the NGO that I founded with money from my AIDS research", and feel free to liberally describe your actions as the chief executive. If you managed a staff, you are entitled to call it, "a cabinet". Alumni advisor? More like "shareholders", to me! And don't forget to describe your actions as being pro-active! For instance, "raised advertising revenue over 75% during six-month span" is okay, but "quelled rebel insurgency using non-lethal sonic weapons that I personally developed" is much more professional sounding.

2. Show Altruism: For some stupid reason, colleges really like it when kids save lives. To do this, simply invent charity events that no one can disprove. For instance, you can pay somewhere around $750 to get certified, rent an hour in a community center in a shitty neighborhood, and then say "Taught free-first aid clinic in impoverished community". Or better yet, claim you simply initiated a "help the homeless" drive, where you and your friends would simply drive around an inner-city, and drop off homeless people at the shelter. You can easily fake this by paying winos (in gin, of course) to ride with you while they get drunk and then kick their drunk asses out in front of the shelter.

3. Illustrate commitment, and leadership: Colleges also value commitment, because they think that people who quit losing battles aren't going to hang in there when the going gets tough. This is, of course, obviously false, and you can easily fake such tenacity by structuring your extra-curriculars as if you were the only member left of a club that went defunct during your junior year. Then, during your senior year, simply say you re-formed it, all of your own accord, and managed to get all the members to teach a free first aid clinic in the ghetto. That's commitment through bad times. Also, it shows leadership, since you took credit for it, which is what leaders do.

4. Show how your activities illustrate a larger, generic character trait: Like managing a staff of people? You're a born manager. Like doing layout? You're a born CSE nerd. Like theatre tech? You're a born virgin! You should probably focus on the first one, though, and how whatever it is that you do somehow gives way to something larger. For instance, if I taught a free first-aid clinic, I'd talk a lot abou healthcare issues and med-school. If I was a three-varsity athlete, I'd talk about how athletics really helped you focus during your last year of school and bring up your academics. If you were an ultimate Frisbee player, I'd buy a flushing kid and pray they didn't smell your dreadlocks too closely.

5. Wrestle Grizzly Bears: If you don't have anything else to go on, this gets at least 14 kids into Yale a year. Of course, if you can defeat a Grizzly, chances are you don't want go to Yale, since 7 out of 10 women are beautiful, and the other 3 live in Connecticut.

originally featured on www.TheDoppleGang.com