If your GPA and SATs are strong, you write a good essay and your recommendations are good, then you might do fairly well without any extracurriculars. Realize, though, that the top schools are swamped with applications from top students. If you have taken your academics beyond the classroom and have participated in Academic Decathlon, or other types of academic pursuits that take time beyond the required curriculum, you would be fine. If you can subtly make it clear that your family needs you to work in every spare moment to help them out, then they won’t expect a lot of extracurriculars (I once had a young woman in class who apologetically asked to switch from one section to another because it was her job to chop the vegetables every day for her sister’s food cart – and her sister had just bought a second cart, so now she had twice as many vegetables to chop and wasn’t able to make it to class on time!). If, however, your lack of activities indicates a lack of initiative and motivation, it will hurt you.

i guess if you were president of NHS and led the school (ASB) for like 4 years, then i guess so.

id say it depends on what exactly the extracurriculars were…

you also need good teacher recs, a good personal statement, good SAT score, good GPa and things..

id say. start taking up sports and stuff then. things that interest you.

well, it depends on your dedication to those two activites. i read somewhere that schools would rather see a students fully dedicated to a FEW activites than spread thin to a bunch