Is Shadowing a Good Extracurricular?
No.
At least, not if you're a sophomore, junior, or senior with serious ambitions for a top-20 university. If shadowing is sitting anywhere on your activity list or resume at that stage, it needs to go, not because admissions officers will penalize you for it outright, but because the opportunity cost is staggering and the signal it sends is exactly the wrong one.
Let's be direct about what shadowing actually is: you follow a professional around, watch them do their job, and go home. The clue is right there in the word itself. You are a shadow. You are not doing anything. You are not creating anything. You are not solving anything. You are observing someone else do their work while your most precious application-building years tick away.
If you want to learn what you can do right now to optimize your application for either NYU or USC, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.
What T20 Admissions Officers Actually Want to See
The admissions offices at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and their peers are not impressed by proximity to excellence. They want evidence that you are the one generating it.
The students who earn admission to these schools are not defined by what they have witnessed, they are defined by what they have done. They have conducted research that produced a genuine finding. They have entered competitions and placed. They have identified a real problem in their community or their field and built something, written something, or organized something that made a measurable difference in people's lives. The key phrase in every compelling application narrative is demonstrable impact. Shadowing, by its very nature, produces none.
T20 admissions officers are trained to evaluate agency. When they read your activity list, they are asking: does this student drive outcomes, or do they drift alongside them? A student who spent three summers shadowing physicians answers that question in a way they almost certainly did not intend.
The One Context Where Shadowing Makes Sense
There is a narrow window where shadowing is a legitimate and even useful activity: freshman year and the first semester of sophomore year.
At that stage, you may not yet know what field genuinely excites you. Shadowing a cardiologist, a materials scientist, a public defender, or a software engineer can be a valuable lens for figuring out where your curiosity actually lives. That is a perfectly reasonable use of the experience, not because colleges view it favorably (they don't), but because it helps you answer a more important question: what should I actually pursue? When it comes time to apply to college, you don’t need to include your shadowing experience.
The moment you have that answer, shadowing has done its job and should be retired. What comes next is the work that will actually matter on your application.
What to Do Instead
Once you have identified a field that genuinely interests you, the goal is to engage with it substantively, not to observe it from the periphery. Here is what that looks like in practice:
Research. Reach out to university professors, labs, or research programs in your area of interest. Genuine research experience, even at a junior level, signals intellectual initiative and the ability to contribute to a field rather than simply admire it.
Competitions. Depending on your discipline, there are rigorous competitions that carry real weight: the USA(J)MO, Science Olympiad, the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the John Locke Essay Competition, USABO, and many others. Placing in a nationally or internationally recognized competition is a concrete signal of excellence that no amount of shadowing can replicate.
Tackling Real Problems. The most compelling activity profiles at the T20 level often belong to students who identified a problem at the intersection of their interests and the real world and did something about it. A student who noticed a gap in STEM resources at their school and built a program that served 200 students has a story to tell. A student who built a tool that helps elderly patients manage medication schedules has a story to tell. These projects demonstrate the thing admissions offices prize above almost everything else: that you see a problem and you act.
Shadowing is not inherently a waste of time, but it is almost always a waste of application space. For a student aiming at a T20 school, every hour matters, and an hour spent watching someone else work is an hour not spent building something of your own. Use early high school to explore. Then commit, go deep, and create impact that can speak for itself.
If you need help trimming the fat of your current extracurriculars so you can use your time better to distinguish yourself, need help selecting which activities to participate in, or have any other questions related to the college admissions process, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.
