Do academic talks and conferences count as extracurriculars?

SSelective colleges, the Stanford office we learned from among them, look for students who are already part of the conversation a university exists to hold. One description of a university, borrowed from a theologian and quoted in that office, calls it a rigorous and sustained conversation among the best partners you can find, carried on in lecture halls and office hours, in debates and late-night arguments in the dorm, and in quiet reading of long-dead authors.

Most high school students see no obvious way into that conversation, and their activities pages show it: clubs and classes, all inside the school walls. The doors are more open than they look, and a student can walk through them at more than one level.