Most high schools don't offer the extracurriculars you need to get into business school

The best extracurriculars for business majors, built backward from where graduates at top schools end up.

Wharton’s Class of 2025 sent 59.5% of its employed graduates into financial services while another 19.9% went into consulting. Both of those career tracks require students with expertise in financial modeling and data analysis.

Now open up the average high school business project. A pitch deck. A market opportunity described with florid adjectives. A revenue slide claiming “projected: $2M by year three,” with nothing backing it up.

Empowerly counselors who coach students through business competitions and internship placements see this gap all too often: students build the deck and skip the rigorous math and analysis. High school business projects with qualitative “data” from the first to last slide, shipped to a college whose graduates spend their twenties buried in spreadsheets.

A quick diagnostic on extracurriculars for business majors:

• Have you built anything that required a spreadsheet with real numbers?
• Can you name a specific industry you’ve spent more than a semester on?
• Do you hold a business award from outside your own school district?
• Has an adult in a professional setting given you a task and a deadline?

Four nos is common. It’s also the mark of an applicant who lands in the “thanks, but no thanks” pile.

Where graduates go tells you what to build

The Wharton Undergraduate Class of 2025 Career Plans Report surveyed 617 graduates and asked about their next move. Among the 423 who reported a job function, 244 went into finance and 86 into consulting.

Break it down, and the skill requirements bubble to the surface. Within financial services, 65% of graduates went into investment banking or brokerage, 12% into private equity, and 10% into investment management. Within consulting, 89% graduated into management or strategy work. These positions demand rigorous analysis and math.

Wharton tilts more toward finance than most of its competitors, so read these specific percentages as the results of a single program. The underlying point survives the caveat: the roles business schools, especially the most competitive, prepare you for are quantitative, and the students who arrive able to do that work have a head start over their peers.

Employers also price these skills differently. Students who receive a Wharton degree alone average a $107,186 starting salary, while students in the Wharton/Engineering dual degree program average $168,500, with a median salary of $141,000 and a top-of-range figure of $425,000. A $61,314 spread in average starting pay — same school, same graduating class.

Undergraduate business clubs at schools like Wharton operate as feeders to top firms — McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Bain. The selective consulting and investment groups on campuses are the pipeline. These clubs screen first-year students for prior experience with financial modeling and data analytics. A student who’s never touched a spreadsheet is competing for a spot against students who run circles around a pivot table.

What a project with numbers in it looks like

Financial projections build on stated assumptions, where a reader can follow the logic from input to output. A market sizing with a methodology and source for every figure. A dataset pulled and cleaned in SQL or R, producing a chart that answers the question the student posed.

Empowerly counselors point students toward these tools and the material they’re already sitting on. Economics, statistics, and math coursework from school or summer program all supply methods that many students forget to carry into their projects. The AP Statistics unit on regression and the business plan sit in the same brain and never meet.

The fix is small and specific. Take a project that exists and layer on some quantitative reasoning. A unit economics table. A three-year P&L. A survey with enough responses to say something meaningful.

Pick a niche, and consider taking it international

Beyond flexing your quantitative muscles, our counselors’ second piece of advice to any business-track student concerns duration and specificity. Impactful activities run long and help a student find a niche, rather than merely demonstrating general enthusiasm for commerce. Geographic interest is another area where our counselors see students earn points on their applications.

For students drawn to international work, foreign language skills and history coursework operate as differentiators. We’ve worked with students who used language skills as an entry point to projects on international trade and diplomacy, as most business schools have international campuses and recruit for this perspective. Language requirements most students treat as a box to check can easily turn into international business projects that set their file apart.

DECA and FBLA are the floor

Tens of thousands of applicants list DECA and FBLA on their activities list every year. Our read: high school business clubs aren't distinctive on their own, and awards count more at the national level. Competitive students have both DECA and FBLA awards as well as external ones.

Our guide to the best high school clubs for future business majors is a jumping-off point, not a destination.

An award from a competition unconnected to an applicant’s school system does something a district placement can’t. It removes the artificial ceiling and perception of “local competition,” dropping students into a global pool. In 2026, for instance, the Blue Ocean Entrepreneurship Competition drew more than 23,000 students from 173 countries and 9,000 schools. These are the types of competitions prospective business majors should be entering — solving real problems and potentially receiving international acclaim.

Build one project. Enter it several times.

Nearly every entrepreneurship competition asks for the same thing: a venture concept and pitch deck, sometimes with a recorded presentation, structured as though students are pitching a potential investor. Some offer individual and group tracks, though many are group-only. Our advice is to create one strong project and reuse the same deck across multiple submissions, which turns a long competition calendar into a single body of work.

Even if you don’t win, just entering these competitions counts for something. The collaboration and communication these projects demand. The perseverance they require. It’s all baked into the value regardless of where a team places.

Venture and pitch competitions (in addition to Blue Ocean)

• Diamond Challenge: Horn Entrepreneurship at the University of Delaware. Ages 14–18, teams of 2–4, and a $100,000 prize pool with $12,000 for first place in each of the business and social innovation tracks.
• The Conrad Challenge: Ages 13–18, with teams of 2–5, plus an adult coach, in four stages, running from August through April. Finals take place at the Space Center in Houston.
• SAGE Global: Ages 13–19, with teams of three or more, and active in over 30 countries. SAGE wants an operating venture with measured social impact, making it the hardest entry here and rewarding a multi-year commitment.
• Harvard Crimson Business Competition: Preliminary cycles in the winter and summer, with a championship round on Harvard’s campus.

Quantitative competitions, which solve any “can’t-do-the-numbers” perceptions

• Wharton Global High School Investment Competition: Free to enter. Teams of 4–6 compete with a teacher advisor. For ten weeks, groups trade a $500,000 simulated portfolio for a real Wharton alumni/ae client. Judges weigh strategy against the client’s stated goals, which is why teams chasing raw returns lose. Over 6,300 teams registered for the 2025–2026 cycle. The top 50 advance to virtual semifinals, and the top 10 present in Philadelphia.
• Wharton High School Data Science Competition: Free to enter. Teams of 3–5 compete. Algebra 1 is the only prerequisite, and it puts a real modeling exercise on a tenth grader’s resume.

Essay contests, which we flag as valuable for would-be business majors. Our reasoning is that essay contests force students to explore a topic in depth and read the underlying research and theories. A pitch deck doesn’t. Some contests have economics, business, or industry-specific themes such as:

• John Locke Institute Essay Competition: Includes an economics category judged on argument.
• Henry George Essay Competition: Economics focused on various topics from AI and the Labor Market to monopolies.

Explore a business function through an internship, and always ask for more

We find internships and passion projects for students for reasons that have less to do with a line item on the activities list — although it helps there, too. A student who has worked inside marketing, finance, or operations knows what they want to pursue in college. A student who hasn’t is guessing.

Marketing is the most common business function companies will hand a sixteen-year-old, and it’s a legitimate place to start. But make it our doorway into something more. We advise students to ask: "Can I shadow the finance team for a week?" Can I see your investor slide deck? Getting exposure to an investor presentation is an opportunity because it gives students insight into actual business consulting.

Wharton’s data shows the importance of internships. Among graduates who described their job search, 81% said a summer internship or previous employer helped — it was the highest-rated factor by a wide margin, ahead of Penn networking contacts at 57% and Handshake at 37%. Getting started in high school gives you a leg up in college admissions and, potentially, even in your first job after graduation.

When no program exists, create the opportunity yourself

Formal internships for high schoolers might be scarce outside of major metros, which is where Empowerly can step in and lend a hand. But if you’re not using a college counselor, you can still create your own opportunities.

The first is remote coursework in a subject your target school teaches — corporate finance, accounting, econometrics. The second is independent consulting for a local business. For instance, one of our students built a social media marketing plan for a local donut shop. These kinds of pursuits look great on an activities list precisely because no one assigned them.

Add in a quantitative component, and your hustle becomes something an admissions reader will evaluate. Baseline traffic. Campaign spend. Conversion metrics. The measurement is what separates a project from an anecdote. And local businesses say yes far more than families expect. A restaurant owner or a regional distributor with three trucks needs someone to help them grow their business, and they often don’t have the means to hire an extra head.

Don’t neglect the humanities

We’re going to sound like we’re talking out of both sides of our mouths. Earlier we emphasized the importance of leading with numbers and honing your quantitative skills. But business-track students sometimes over-leverage on math and let everything else coast. Top programs, like NYU Stern, build their curricula on the reading, writing, and critical thinking students develop through the humanities. Their case method assumes you can read fifteen pages and identify the actual problem.

Admissions readers look for evidence of it on the transcript. AP English and History carry more weight for a business applicant than most families know, and top universities want independent thinkers who can contribute to campus life beyond a single subject. Wharton’s own class includes 28 respondents with a dual degree from Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences. Case competitions can feel like writing exercises disguised as math problems. Judges reward the team that identifies the right problem and states it clearly.

Your four-year plan

Ninth grade is exploratory. Enter one competition to learn the format. Take a humanities-heavy course load with a language.

Tenth grade is where your niche gets chosen — a region, an industry, a language, and a trade lane that goes with it. You need to pursue something specific enough that a student can name three real companies and understand how each makes money. Sophomore year is also a great time to do an internship and start to build a project.

During junior year, you’ll want a flagship project, entering it into several competitions. Remember the quantitative layer that survives scrutiny. You might also think about entering one essay contest. If you haven’t done an internship yet, junior year is your last chance.

Twelfth grade is for national-level placement and independent projects that show a student can operate without a program telling them what to do.

The applicant this produces has picked an industry to study, built something with numbers in it, been given direction by an adult in a professional setting, and written well enough about a sector or business problem. On the Common App, that reads as a continuous line rather than a list of memberships in school clubs.

Start with the internship

The hardest part of this plan is the one families struggle to solve on their own. Competitions have open registration, and more coursework can be bought. But an internship at a company willing to let a fifteen-year-old near a financial model requires a warm handshake.

Empowerly’s Startup Internship Program places high school students in remote roles with startup founders and CEOs across finance, tech, and marketing — with fall, spring, and summer cycles available. Students receive one-on-one resume and interview preparation first, followed by placement with a company that isn’t publicly advertising the role.

Want to get started? Book a free consultation and bring us the four diagnostic questions from the top of the page. Let’s start the conversation.