Written by Kaashvi, Dartmouth College

Welcome back to The College Countdown! For those of you who are stopping by our blog for the first time, hey, I am Kaashvi, your friendly neighborhood college admissions enthusiast and your guide through this series. Whether you’re a returning reader or a newcomer, I’m super excited to have you join us for this wild ride. We are dedicating this week’s episode to working our way through the extracurricular activities section on the Common App and writing standout descriptions to make your application memorable.

But why exactly does the activity section carry so much weight? Like every part of your application, this section is just another way for colleges to learn more about you. They already know about the classes you take in school, your ability to perform on standardized tests, your talent in writing and your relationship with your teachers by reading through the different components submitted by you, but apart from that, they are also curious to know how you like to spend your time outside of class. That could be anything including school clubs, athletics, community service, family responsibilities, paid work, internships, research, independent projects, foreign exchange programs and religious commitments. Since these activities aren’t compulsory, it shows that you’re involved in them only because you want to be. Your activities restate the core values that you’ve talked about elsewhere in your application and highlight what you’re willing to do in your free time.

Reading about your extracurricular involvement also helps colleges picture what kind of a student you’ll be on campus. They are looking for students who are working to better both themselves and their community on their own time because that indicates they’ll likely continue to do the same on campus.

Lastly, the activities section hints towards what you might be able to achieve in the future. It helps colleges see the impact of your work, your initiative and your hard work, which is the best measurement they have of your future potential. Every school wants to produce graduates who will make a difference in the world, and it really isn’t a leap to assume that the drive you exhibit through your extracurriculars are key indicators of the positive impact you will make in the future.

All that to say, your activities and awards can be incredibly valuable to show who you are and what you bring to the table. But here’s the catch: just listing anything and everything you’ve participated in leaves a lot of room for your application to blend in with the crowd. So, how do you make the most of the limited space given to you and make sure that your descriptions do justice to the years of effort you’ve put in? It’s all about conciseness and revision. Here are the exact steps I used while filling out my activities list.

Step One:

List all the activities that come to your mind on a Google Doc. When I say list it all, I really mean it. Whether it is the orchestra ensemble you’ve been the lead tuba player for since you were ten or the occasional volunteer shifts you take up at the local food bank, jot down

everything, no matter how big or small. Don’t worry at all about limiting the list to ten activities if you have more, but at the same time, if you have less than ten, that’s absolutely okay too.

Now that you’ve written down it all down in one place, you have to sort the activities into the following categories:

School clubs and organizations: Are you the President of the Robotics Club at your high school? Maybe you’re a Member of the Sustainability Club? Or you’re the Editor-in-Chief of the school’s yearbook. You could also be a post holder in the school’s student council. This is where you put all of your organized school-related activities.
Independent clubs and organizations: If you’re a member of organizations like Boy Scouts of America or the Interact Rotary Club, this is the place to note that down. You can also add religious organizations and hobbyist groups here.
Athletics: Do you run track? Or maybe you’re a guard on the football varsity team? This space is for listing all team sports you’re involved in. Other than that, you can also add sports that you do recreationally here. Do you spend ten hours weight training each week? Or do you like going for swims on the weekends? Both of those are notable leisure activities that take up your time and therefore belong here.
Family responsibilities: How do you help around your house? Washing the dishes? Doing the laundry? Taking care of siblings or grandparents? Helping with meals? They can take up a large chunk of your time and should be accounted for.
Community service: Where do you volunteer in your spare time? Do you have to compulsorily devote a certain number of hours for community service as a graduation requirement? Either way, mention it here.
Paid work, internships and research: Do you work for someone and are compensated for your time? Do you own a small business of your own? Or maybe you’re interning for someone. That goes here.
Independent projects and hobbies: All the other things which are left on your list will be compiled here. Are you into coding and have built your own apps? Include it here. Do you spend hours gardening? Definitely add that. Maybe you’re into knitting, stargazing or bee keeping. Or are you a sudoku aficionado? This is the place for all those personal passions. Embrace all your quirks.

Step Two:

On the Common App, you get ten slots for your extracurricular activities and for each of these ten slots, you need to specify seven details:

Leadership or position: You need to remember that titles aren’t the only way to demonstrate leadership. Sure, if you’re the President of the Drama Club or Captain of the Basketball Varsity Team, that’s great. However, that title holds little to no meaning unless you attach your work and impact to it.

If Student A is the President of the club where Student B is just a member, but Student B organized two communal events with a participation of over a hundred people, led a project which was featured in the newspaper and managed to increase the club membership by sixty percent, it is clear that Student B’s leadership was evaluated based on the difference they made and not on the title they held.
Looking at leadership a little differently will make sure you talk about it uniquely in your application. If you are the Treasurer of the Debate Club at your school but you also spent a lot of time developing the website for the club, your box should read: Treasurer, Website Developer.

Organization name: This one’s straightforward. Just write down the official name of the club that you’re a part of and boom, you’re done. If it’s a company or a personal project, give it a clear name. To stand out a little more, you can also mention how many members the club has, other partner organizations or details about the club or company in brackets.

I’ll give you an example to explain what I mean. I devoted my tenth slot to talk about my bakery and for the organization section, I wrote, ‘Cake Culture, my artisan bakery (20+ American & French desserts in classic and Indian flavors)’. This way, I didn’t have to use up space elsewhere to elaborate on how my bakery was special.

Description: While writing the description, you need to focus on answering a couple key questions. What did you do? What were your responsibilities? What problems did you solve? What lessons and skills did you learn? How have you applied them? What impact did you have?

Use strong and assertive verbs here to highlight your investment in the activity. Being intentional and specific with your words is very important in this section. Words like ‘developed’, ‘spearheaded’ and ‘launched’ sound a lot better than ‘made’, ‘led’ or ‘started’, even though they are practically synonymous.
Quantifying your impact is another way to make it easier for the admissions officer to understand the scale and scope of your activity. Here is where you focus on numbers, awards and growth.

Participation grade levels: This space is to tell the admissions officers the years of high school you were involved in a certain activity—9th, 10th, 11th and 12th. You also have the option to click on post graduate if you’re a student on a gap year and picked up or continued with an activity during that time.

Weeks per year: This can be a little tricky to pin down to the T but there are ways to calculate it pretty accurately. Are you involved with this activity every week of the school year? That would be around forty weeks. If you are involved in a seasonal sport that runs only during the summer, that would be twelve weeks for most students. If it is a year-long involvement, that’s all of the fifty-two weeks. You get the idea.

Hours per week: Chances are, you aren’t spending the same amount of hours a week all throughout the year for any of the activities on your list. My advice would be to take out your calculators and add up the total time you spend on the activity in a year and divide it by the number of weeks you spend on the activity. The average you get will be the number you report on the Common App.

Be sure not to overestimate your hours, but at the same time, don't underestimate and under value your hours either. If you are in a leadership position, don't just count the time spent at meetings but also the time it takes you to prepare outside of meetings. Do you run the social media page? Make phone calls to find event venues? Email group members? Create teaching materials? Design t-shirts? Count every second of that time.

Continue activity in college: This space is only to let colleges know if you plan to continue participating in the activity once you’re on campus.

Step Three:

Continue to rephrase and revise your descriptions for the first three boxes. It took me seven drafts to properly optimize the space provided in the Common App. The whole process of counting the characters repeatedly, only to exceed the limit by one character and then spend another ten minutes editing, can be very frustrating but it is worth it. The final list I ended up with looked very different (and more importantly, conveyed a lot more about me) than the list I had started with.

For the formatting, I suggest using a combination of commas, colons, semicolons and vertical bars to divide up the matter without taking up too many characters. However, do remember to stay uniform with your formatting. No, you won’t get rejected for a misplaced comma, but it does take away from the professionalism of the application and can be somewhat distracting. It is also okay to use symbols, digits and abbreviations, but be reasonable with their usage. Just for the sake of using up less space, you shouldn’t make your reader’s job a hassle by forcing them to look up what ‘DLOTY’ means (for those of you who are curious, it stands for Democratic Leader of the Year).

If you think that there’s no way you can explain the true significance of an activity in the short space provided to you, you can use the additional information section of the Common App to dive into details about the aspects of your work.

Step Four:

The order in which you display your activities matters more than you think it does. Rearrange them based on their meaning to you instead of putting them in an order you think will impress the reader. List the uncommon and niche things you participate in first. Chances are, reading about your internship at an aquarium will intrigue the reader a lot more than reading about the Key Club for the fiftieth time. Not because one is more impressive than the other but because the reader doesn’t know what one entails and is all too familiar with the other.

I have another piece of advice that worked great for me (and my OCPD brain) which was grouping my activities. This basically means, the first three activities were related to the environment, the next three were related to policy and the last three were related to community service (the tenth one was about baking).

Step Five:

Input it to the Common App and click on the preview button to make sure there are no typos, unintended capitalizations or misplaced punctuation marks. If you’re happy with how everything looks, you are ready to go.

And there you have it—the ins and outs of making your extracurricular activities shine on your application. The crux of the matter is, you just need to dig in and figure out what you want to share about your life. The rest will flow naturally. Thank you so much for joining me today and if you’ve made it to the end, stay tuned for the next article in the series where we will be discussing the mystical personal essay. Until next time, keep dreaming big!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hey there, college-bound crew! I’m Kaashvi, an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College from India. I’m the brains (and heart) behind the College Countdown series here at The Ivy Institute and I am stoked to be your guide through this process.

So, a little bit about me: I was a STEM kid through and through in high school and all my classes were the highest level ones offered at my school and graduated at the top of my class for three consecutive years. Outside of class, I was involved in activities that let me nurture my love for inventiveness, responsibility and storytelling. From designing a vehicle to aid oil spill cleanup to working as an elected representative for the youth advisory council to volunteering at the local deaf school—I devoted a lot of my time to projects that were true to my values.

When I’m not typing away at my keyboard, dishing out college advice to people in my inbox and on this blog, you can catch me exploring new hiking trails, whipping up some questionable (but oddly delicious) desserts at my bakery or getting lost in a gripping mystery novel.

As an international student, the application process wasn’t just about finding a spot at a prestigious university but also about finding a place that felt like a second home. Now that I’ve made it out alive to the other end (with a boatload of stories to tell), I'm here to spill all the tea on how you can do the same. With some guidance and a whole lot of oversharing, together we’ll crush this admissions game like absolute pros.

Catch you on the flip side,

Kaashvi