The Ivy Institute | College Admissions Research | November 2026
Research study Students and families
2024–2026 entry cohorts
Activities, Engagement, and Ivy+ Admission
Publicly documented admitted-student profiles · A descriptive scoping study
Evidence reviewed through November 10, 2026
AI-assisted desk research · Not externally peer reviewed
- Public profiles
- 96
- Source pages
- 68
- Institutions
- 12
- Entry cohorts
- 3
In this study Contents
Abstract
Families planning for highly selective colleges face an understandable question: which activities deserve a teenager's limited time? Publicly shared successful applications appear to offer an answer, but the examples are uneven, selective, and often incomplete. This study examines what can responsibly be learned from those materials. It combines a structured search of public admitted-student profiles with a descriptive content analysis, independently published freshman surveys, relevant admissions research, and university guidance. Ivy Plus is defined as the eight Ivy League institutions together with Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago. After duplicate handling and exclusions, the main individual-profile corpus contains 96 unique students associated with the fall-entry cohorts of 2024, 2025, and 2026, documented on 68 source pages. It includes 31 university profiles, 12 scholarship-provider profiles, 10 journalistic interviews, 11 commercial or school-provider accounts, and 32 anonymous personal reports. Extractors flagged 26 records as apparent activity inventories using nonuniform criteria. No profile was independently authenticated against a submitted admissions file.
Service or teaching appeared in 69 profiles, arts or writing in 43, civic, environmental, or school organizing in 41, athletics in 35, research in 32, paid work or family responsibilities in 23, and technical creation or enterprise in 16. These are frequencies of published mentions, not estimates of participation among all admitted students. The results change substantially by source type, especially for ordinary employment and family commitments. Princeton's separately published entering-student surveys provide broader evidence that community service, sports, and employment recur across recent cohorts, but do not identify activities that cause admission.
The strongest practical conclusion is that families should evaluate opportunities through the learning, responsibility, contribution, and credible evidence they enable. Activity labels alone provide little basis for ranking admissions value. The report develops a four-year planning framework, compares activity domains, and explains how to document work honestly. It cannot establish causal admissions weights, a required activity combination, an optimal weekly schedule, or a guarantee of admission. Its contribution is a transparent account of recurring public patterns and a practical method for making decisions without mistaking selected success stories for a formula.
Keywords public applications extracurricular activities Ivy Plus admissions high school planning selection bias student engagement
1 Main findings for families
1 1 The most useful conclusion
A strong activity plan gives a student repeated opportunities to become useful, capable, curious, and responsible. It should produce experiences the student can describe specifically and that other people could recognize as real. The evidence reviewed here supports taking that process seriously. It does not support assigning a universal admissions value to research, nonprofits, debate, music, a job, or any other label. The same category can contain very different experiences: observing a laboratory for a few afternoons, maintaining a careful research notebook for a year, managing a real service operation, or attending meetings without much responsibility.
This distinction changes the family's central planning question. Instead of asking which impressive activity to add, ask what the student will actually do, what they will learn, who will rely on them, and whether there is room in the schedule to do it well. That is a decision framework developed from this review, not a scoring system published by an admissions office. It applies to a student with access to a sophisticated laboratory and to a student whose most demanding commitment is an evening job.
1 2 What appeared repeatedly
The individual records contain community work, teaching, creative practice, civic participation, school leadership, sports, research, technical projects, and employment in many combinations. Service and teaching were the most frequently documented broad domain. Creative work also appeared often, including among students with scientific interests. Research was visible but absent from the published account of most students in the full corpus. Because many accounts were short, an omitted activity cannot be treated as something the student did not do. The results separately report anonymous self-reports with five or more coded items as a check based on extraction length, rather than verified list completeness. [D01]
The documented combinations do not establish a universal admission requirement. This does not mean every possible activity plan is equally strong. It means the public evidence is better at showing different ways that students develop and contribute than at establishing an exact recipe that other students should reproduce.
1 3 What the larger surveys add
The Daily Princetonian collected 732 responses for the entering class of 2024, 877 for 2025, and 610 for 2026. These are separate surveys of enrolled or entering students, with optional questions and changing response rates; they are not additional individual records in this study. Their published findings repeatedly place community service among the most common high-school engagements. The 2024 survey also reported that 56.4 percent of respondents had held summer jobs and 37.3 percent had worked during the school year. Those employment categories can overlap. [A01, A02, A03, A04, A05, A06]
The surveys matter because a family could read several polished biographies and conclude that ordinary jobs barely exist among successful applicants. A broader question asked directly of entering students produces a different picture. Neither source provides an admissions advantage for employment, but together they show why families should resist judging the value of a real responsibility by how often it appears in promotional stories.
1 4 What official guidance changes
Penn says it does not seek a predetermined list of activities and describes work, family duties, and varied forms of contribution as relevant. Stanford's published guidance recognizes depth, personal context, and responsibilities at home or work. Harvard emphasizes the substance of involvement over filling every available activity slot. These are statements about how institutions describe their review, not independent measurements of every decision they make. They nevertheless give families a stronger basis for rejecting rigid activity checklists than anonymous online rankings do. [G04, G06, G07]
Dartmouth's guidance also makes room for interests discovered later in high school. This is particularly valuable for a ninth grader who is still exploring or an eleventh grader whose initial plan no longer fits. Continuity can create room for improvement; staying indefinitely in a poor fit solely to preserve a four-year line is a different matter. [G11]
1 5 What this report recommends doing
Start with the student's actual week, interests, obligations, and available opportunities. Choose commitments that permit repeated participation and increasing competence. Before adding something, examine what it would displace. Keep modest records of responsibilities, work produced, feedback, and changes over time. Seek useful opportunities to contribute within existing organizations before assuming a new organization is necessary. Preserve room for academic preparation and ordinary life.
When an activity becomes more advanced, improve the work rather than only its presentation. A tutor can learn to diagnose misunderstandings; a musician can improve interpretation and ensemble reliability; a programmer can test whether other people can use a tool; a paid employee can learn to train a new colleague. These examples are recommendations about development. This study has no experimental evidence that making any one of those changes produces a specified increase in admission probability.
Families should read the results and the practical sections together. The results show what was documented. The practical sections explain defensible choices under uncertainty. Maintaining that distinction is essential to using the report well.
2 Research questions and scope
2 1 The question behind the question
An activity list is a compressed account of several years of a student's life. Families naturally look for patterns in successful lists because time is scarce and the consequences of choosing poorly can feel substantial. The search for a useful pattern is reasonable. The difficulty arises when a pattern among published successes is treated as a rule about what an admissions committee rewards.
This study asks four related questions. First, which broad activity domains are visible in recent public accounts of Ivy Plus admits and entrants? Second, what forms of responsibility, production, learning, or community engagement recur within those accounts? Third, how much do the apparent patterns depend on the source, the published format and number of extracted items, or the entering cohort? Fourth, which planning recommendations remain sensible after those limitations are taken seriously?
The phrase carrying the most weight requires a separate question: how would an otherwise comparable student's admission prospects change if they selected one activity rather than another? That is a causal question. The available public success stories do not answer it. This report therefore distinguishes an activity's frequency in the observed records, its potential to demonstrate an applicant's qualities, and its unmeasured effect on an admissions decision.
2 2 The institutions included
The core institutional group is Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago. This matches the twelve-institution Ivy Plus grouping used in the admissions research by Chetty and colleagues. Other reasonable everyday uses of Ivy Plus may include additional selective universities. They are not included in the individual-profile denominator here. [R02]
A commercial provider's broader top-university dataset is discussed separately because its population includes institutions outside this definition. It does not expand the institutional sample.
Columbia refers to undergraduate admission associated with the conventional first-year college or engineering pathway where that was identifiable. Graduate, professional, transfer, and nontraditional pathways were not intentionally combined with the core population. If the public account could not establish the intended pathway, that uncertainty was treated as an eligibility concern rather than silently resolved in favor of inclusion.
2 3 The three years included
The review focuses on students entering, or admitted for intended entry, in fall 2024, fall 2025, or fall 2026. These usually correspond to college classes of 2028, 2029, and 2030. An early admission announced in December 2023 belongs to the fall 2024 entering cycle. A person graduating from college in 2024 usually belongs to a much older admissions cycle and was not included on the basis of the year 2024 alone.
Publication date and admission date were recorded separately where possible. This matters because an application retrospective can appear long after the event. One screened 2024 post was excluded after its author explained that the application was older. Another post published in December 2025 was assigned to the 2025 entering cohort because the author described it as the previous year's cycle. These corrections reduce a common source of error in searches organized only around a webpage's date. [D02]
The entering-cohort definition is more practical than requiring every formal decision letter to be publicly visible, but it has limits. A gap-year student can enter within the window after an earlier admission. When the decision timing was unresolved, the record is identified as an entry-cohort account rather than evidence about a specific decision month. No result in this report should be interpreted as a precise census of all decisions issued between January 2024 and December 2026.
2 4 What counts as an activity
The review treats activities broadly: organized clubs, independent projects, community work, artistic practice, sports, paid jobs, family responsibilities, sustained hobbies, and relevant learning beyond ordinary required coursework. An achievement can support an activity description without being a separate activity. A prize for a robot is not automatically a second engagement in addition to building the robot. A grant for an environmental project is not necessarily a new project.
Required coursework was not intentionally recoded as an extracurricular simply because a student listed it among other accomplishments. A course paper, for example, may demonstrate intellectual work but does not become an independent research engagement solely through its placement in a public post. The same caution applies to future intentions. Wanting to invent an assistive device is different from having built and tested one.
The institutional documents support a broad understanding of engagement. The Common App's activity guidance includes jobs, family responsibilities, hobbies, and sports. Its ten available entries are a reporting limit, not an instruction to accumulate ten commitments. MIT's current application page requests four meaningful activities, illustrating that form design itself changes the length of a submitted list. [G01, G02]
2 5 What an extensive online review can cover
There is no reliable public directory of every successful application. Search engines do not expose a complete inventory of social posts, videos, websites, deleted pages, or material available behind accounts and payments. Some public accounts present an activity inventory; others describe a few achievements. Students who publish nothing are unobservable in this corpus. A claim to have studied all publicly available successful applications would therefore exceed what this investigation can verify.
The actual deliverable is a documented, bounded scoping review of discoverable and readable public material, with every included record linked to a source. It aims for breadth across the twelve institutions and three cohorts, checks dates and outcomes, and makes exclusions visible. It does not claim an exhaustive census, a random sample, or full coverage of every platform or language.
These boundaries determine which questions the evidence can answer. The review can reveal diverse examples, recurring descriptions, omissions, and conflicts between popular advice and institutional guidance. It can also show families how to read future success stories more carefully. It cannot tell a family that copying a particular student's activities will reproduce that student's result.
3 Methods
3 1 Study design
This was an exploratory desk-based scoping study with descriptive content analysis. The material was assembled on November 10, 2026. The search and extraction were assisted by AI tools, with coordinated institutional coverage and a final harmonization of the records. The study was not preregistered. No admissions office supplied confidential files, ratings, or decisions. No students were recruited, interviewed, or asked to disclose private materials for this project.
Three evidence layers were kept distinct. The first was the individual-profile corpus constructed for this study. The second was already published survey or provider data, whose original denominators and limitations remained separate. The third was contextual research and official admissions guidance used to interpret the findings. A statement about what Penn says it considers is thus different from a count of Penn admits in the corpus, and both are different from a causal finding in an administrative-data study.
This separation prevents a false increase in sample size. The 96 profiles are not added to Princeton's survey responses, Harvard's survey respondents, or a provider's client counts. The populations may overlap; their measures differ; and no person-level linkage was attempted.
3 2 Search strategy
Searches combined institution names with terms for admitted students, acceptances, activity lists, extracurriculars, successful applications, entering classes, and the relevant years. Targeted searches covered university news and admissions sites, student newspapers, public application-results forums, schools, scholarship organizations, and providers publishing student interviews. Promising pages were opened, and linked material or author clarifications were checked when they could resolve eligibility or chronology.
Search results served as leads. Full readable source text was preferred for coding individual profiles. Videos without a sufficiently accessible activity list or transcript were not treated as though their contents had been examined. Material that required private access was not incorporated. The evidence register records source type and any access limitations for contextual guidance that was available through a substantial official search excerpt but not a successful direct page retrieval.
The accompanying audit materials contain the actual query strings retained during the work and reasons for selected candidate exclusions. They are an operational search log, not a claim that every result displayed by every query received full screening. Search engines change their rankings and indexes, so another researcher should expect some retrieval differences even when repeating the queries.
3 3 Eligibility and provenance
An individual record needed an explicit admission claim or institutional identification as an entering or enrolled undergraduate, evidence linking the student to an eligible cohort, and at least one concrete activity reported as past or current at entry. A statement that a student intended to join a college club was insufficient. Generic admissions advice and hypothetical sample applications were not counted as real student profiles.
University and scholarship biographies offer stronger public attribution than an anonymous post, but they remain selected accounts. A university's statement that someone is an entering student is useful admission evidence. It does not verify every achievement, establish that each activity was submitted or preceded the decision, or explain the committee's reasoning. Anonymous reports were treated as self-reports throughout. None became an independently verified admission simply because it was detailed or popular.
Commercial interviews and school-provider stories were included only with their provenance visible. Their educational detail can be useful, but the publisher may have a reason to select unusually attractive outcomes or emphasize services it provides. The study therefore reports results with commercial or school-provider accounts removed as a sensitivity check. Removing them does not remove every possible selection pressure from the remaining sources.
3 4 Units and duplicate handling
The primary unit was a student profile, not a college offer, webpage, activity entry, or award. A person reporting seven eligible admissions contributed one observation to the overall activity analysis. That same person could appear in several institution-coverage rows. This is why the 96 unique profiles generate 128 institution appearances. Eleven profiles involve more than one eligible institution. [D01]
The initial extracted files contained 99 rows. One Penn report was found twice in different research streams and merged under a single identifier. Two additional records were set aside from the primary counts because unresolved issues affected their interpretation. One involved uncertain first-year classification and activity-list format; another contained a sport-description discrepancy. The resulting corpus contains 96 unique students on 68 source pages. Exclusion was a conservative analytical choice, not a finding that either person had intentionally misrepresented anything.
Public names, page addresses, activity combinations, and explicit repost notes were used where available to identify duplication. Anonymous cross-platform duplication may remain undetected. Multi-person university features were split into separate student records while retaining the shared source identifier. This makes the student denominator visible without pretending that several students featured by one editor constitute several independent publishing processes.
3 5 Extraction and coding
The extraction recorded source address, publisher, date where known, cohort evidence, admission evidence, institutional destination or offers, source type, format and completeness cautions, activity descriptions, and reported duration when explicit. Unknown information stayed unknown. Sensitive demographic and personal details were not needed for the activity analysis and were not compiled as a student-level dataset.
Activities were harmonized into ten broad, overlapping student-level domains: service and teaching; arts and writing; athletics; research; work and family responsibility; academic clubs and competitions; civic, environmental, or school organizing; technical creation and enterprise; programs, internships, and independent learning; and informal hobbies. The coding dictionary in the supplement specifies how the original extraction categories were mapped.
A student received a domain indicator when at least one reported engagement mapped to that domain. Several robotics entries did not increase the student's contribution to the technical-creation count beyond one. Because a student could have several domains, percentages do not add to 100. A paid research role could support both research and employment when compensation was explicitly described. Ordinary commercial enterprise was not automatically classified as salaried employment.
Technical creation or enterprise required an explicit description of creating or refurbishing a technical product, or operating a business. Examples include software, devices, and engineering prototypes. Membership in a coding or robotics club, participation in DECA, or an investment competition did not by itself establish this domain. Internship and shadowing titles did not establish compensation or service delivery. Unspecified and required curricular entries remained in the source record but did not contribute to a harmonized extracurricular domain.
These broad categories are analytical conveniences. They are not a hierarchy of merit, a ranking used by universities, or perfectly separate aspects of life. A debate coach can teach, lead, and practice public speaking in the same activity. The codebook makes these boundaries reviewable, but another sensible codebook could assign some borderline cases differently. Most extracted activities had one primary category, with selected reviewed overrides allowing more than one. The resulting indicators do not exhaust every possible purpose of an engagement. Counts should therefore be interpreted at the level of broad documentation patterns rather than as precise rankings between closely spaced categories.
3 6 Documentation format and chronology
Thirty-one anonymous self-reports contained five or more coded items. An item is an activity object in the extraction, and an extractor could combine related descriptions into one object. This mechanically defined subset is therefore called self-reports with five or more coded items. The threshold does not count submitted application slots, distinct organizations, or simultaneous commitments. Some qualifying accounts are brief. It measures extraction length, not authenticity, writing quality, or a recommended activity load.
Separately, extractors flagged 26 records as apparent activity inventories. The flag reflects heterogeneous judgments about format or an author's presentation. It is not a uniform measure of completeness: a short all-activities template could receive the flag, and one flagged account explicitly forgot an item. An unflagged account could still contain numerous structured entries. The flag is retained only as secondary, qualified information, rather than as a validation subset.
These two subsets are non-nested: neither is wholly contained in the other. They must not be described as successively broader or more reliable samples. The 43 university and scholarship profiles form a different, provenance-based comparison group. Comparisons show how documented patterns vary with the selected sources and extraction formats; they cannot isolate an independent effect of format.
The timing of individual accomplishments was less secure than cohort assignment. A university feature written after enrollment may describe a high-school history without saying which achievements existed by the application deadline. A summer result may have occurred after an admission decision. Unless the account explicitly established timing, the report did not treat a listed achievement as confirmed committee evidence. These histories can also include a gap year or participation beginning before ninth grade. Cohort eligibility therefore does not establish that every accomplishment occurred within four high-school years or was available to an admissions committee.
3 7 Analysis
The main calculation was simple: the number of included profiles mentioning a domain divided by 96. A percentage therefore means share of this documented corpus with a positive mention. It does not mean share of all admits who participated. The same calculation used each subset's own denominator for self-reports with five or more coded items, records flagged as apparent activity inventories, university and scholarship profiles, and datasets excluding commercial or anonymous sources.
No significance tests, admission-probability model, or causal effect estimates were fitted. Conventional sampling confidence intervals would imply a sampling design that this corpus does not have. Presenting a narrow statistical interval around a biased web sample would add precision without fixing the underlying problem. Counts and transparent sensitivity comparisons are more informative here.
The published surveys were summarized using the original authors' quantities and denominators. Where an article used approximate language, this report retained that approximation rather than inventing a decimal. Optional-question surveys can have item denominators smaller than their total response counts. No pooled cross-college participation rate was calculated, and changing response rates across years were not ignored.
3 8 Quality control and reproducibility
Source review checked admission claims, cohort evidence, whether descriptions established past or current engagement rather than future intentions, and whether an apparent project was curricular or extracurricular. The analysis also distinguished athletic participation from documented recruitment, research involvement from publication, a preprint from a reviewed article, and personal responsibility from a team-wide result where the source permitted those distinctions.
The numerical analysis was performed by script from the extracted records, reducing arithmetic and denominator errors. The supplement includes the coded profile register, source mapping, category definitions, exclusions, and a reproduction script. It does not distribute complete copyrighted applications, essays, or copied webpages. Readers can follow the original sources and contest a classification without needing to accept an undocumented count.
These checks are useful but limited. The work did not include independent human double-coding, an adjudication panel, or a formal inter-rater reliability study. No agreement coefficient is reported. The existence of several research streams should not be confused with independently validated measurement. Source authenticity, author self-selection, and incomplete timelines remain substantial uncertainties after arithmetic is checked.
3 9 Interpreting recommendations
The recommendations that follow use three explicitly different bases. Observed findings describe the corpus or a published survey. Institutional statements describe what an admissions office publicly says. Researcher-developed recommendations translate those observations into practical choices while considering costs, feasibility, and benefits beyond admission. An illustrative schedule or example is identified as hypothetical rather than passed off as another successful applicant.
This approach permits useful guidance without manufacturing a hidden admissions formula. A recommendation to keep an honest project notebook, for instance, does not require proof that notebooks raise admission rates. It is sensible because it supports learning, accurate reflection, and reliable reporting. The report makes those reasons explicit so a family can evaluate the recommendation on its actual merits.
4 Results
4 1 Coverage and composition of the evidence
The final individual-profile corpus contains 96 unique records from 68 pages. Thirty-four records concern the fall 2024 entering cohort, 32 concern fall 2025, and 30 concern fall 2026. All twelve institutions appear in each cohort. That coverage is useful for a broad scoping study, but the near balance between years should not be mistaken for a probability sample. The search deliberately sought recent examples across institutions. The resulting proportions reflect that search and the availability of public material. [D01]
Table 1 shows institution appearances. A person admitted to more than one institution appears in more than one row, so the total is 128 appearances rather than 96 students. Harvard and Yale each have five appearances; Cornell has 22. Duke's coverage is concentrated in the earliest cohort, while UChicago's is concentrated in the latest. These differences make an institution-by-institution activity ranking inappropriate. For example, an apparent difference between Duke and UChicago could result from which university features and personal posts were available, rather than from different admissions preferences.
| Institution | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brown | 3 | 5 | 6 | 14 |
| Columbia | 1 | 2 | 4 | 7 |
| Cornell | 9 | 6 | 7 | 22 |
| Dartmouth | 3 | 6 | 3 | 12 |
| Harvard | 1 | 2 | 2 | 5 |
| Penn | 5 | 4 | 7 | 16 |
| Princeton | 2 | 2 | 3 | 7 |
| Yale | 1 | 2 | 2 | 5 |
| Stanford | 2 | 5 | 4 | 11 |
| MIT | 2 | 1 | 3 | 6 |
| Duke | 8 | 2 | 2 | 12 |
| UChicago | 1 | 3 | 7 | 11 |
One student may appear at several institutions. Total 128 appearances from 96 profiles. This is coverage, not a comparison of admissions preferences. [D01]
The sources also differ in purpose. Thirty-two records are anonymous personal accounts, 31 are university profiles, 12 are scholarship-provider profiles, ten are journalistic interviews, and eleven are commercial or school-provider accounts. A university welcoming a new class may highlight one engaging story. A student posting an admissions retrospective may attempt a longer inventory. A scholarship organization may focus on community contribution because that is central to its own program. Those are plausible routes by which the publication process can shape the data; they are not findings about the motives of any particular author.
No included record was authenticated against the complete application that an admissions office actually reviewed. Twenty-six carry an extractor's apparent-inventory flag, but that designation is heterogeneous: an apparently comprehensive template can contain only a few entries, an omitted item, or uncertainty about whether the list is complete. The main documentation-length comparison therefore uses the mechanically defined subset of 31 anonymous self-reports with at least five coded activity items. This provides a transparent way to separate longer inventories from many short biographies without labeling them verified applications.
4 2 Documented activity domains
Service and teaching is the most frequently documented domain, appearing in 69 of 96 profiles, or 71.9 percent. Arts and writing appears in 43, civic or environmental organizing and school governance in 41, academic clubs and competitions in 37, and athletics in 35. Research appears in 32 profiles; the combined category for programs, internships, and independent learning also appears in 32. Work or family responsibilities appears in 23, technical creation or enterprise in sixteen, and informal hobbies in fourteen. Table 2 provides the counts and their denominators. [D01]
| Domain | Profiles out of 96 | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Service and teaching | 69 | 71.9% |
| Arts and writing | 43 | 44.8% |
| Athletics | 35 | 36.5% |
| Research | 32 | 33.3% |
| Work and family responsibilities | 23 | 24.0% |
| Academic clubs and competitions | 37 | 38.5% |
| Civic and environmental organizing and school governance | 41 | 42.7% |
| Technical creation and enterprise | 16 | 16.7% |
| Programs internships and independent learning | 32 | 33.3% |
| Informal hobbies | 14 | 14.6% |
Domains overlap. Nonmention is unknown participation. Percentages describe this selected corpus and are not admissions odds. [D01]
Published mentions in 96 selected profiles. Domains overlap; unmentioned participation is unknown. The bars do not rank admissions value. [D01]
The percentages describe published mentions under this study's coding rules. They are not estimates of the share of all Ivy Plus admits participating in these activities. A nonmention can mean absence, lack of space, an editorial decision, incomplete recall, or a detail that the student chose to keep private. The table therefore has no category labeled students who did not do research, students who did not work, or students without hobbies. The available evidence supports a documented or not-documented distinction, with the second state remaining unknown as to actual participation.
The broad categories also differ internally. Service and teaching includes multiple forms of helping or instructing other people. Arts and writing can include music, performance, visual work, journalism, or creative writing. A high count in a broad category partly reflects how many activities it contains. If tutoring, environmental service, and school service were separated into narrow types while all research remained one category, their apparent order could change. Families should read the descriptions behind the categories before treating the largest bar as the strongest instruction.
Technical creation and enterprise illustrates the importance of this point. An initial broad mapping captured generic STEM and business labels, including clubs and competitions. The audit narrowed the category to explicit creation, prototypes, refurbishment, software, or operation of a venture. That changed the person-level count from 29 to sixteen. The corrected result is more faithful to the label, but it also shows how a seemingly precise percentage depends on a substantive definition. An activity does not lose educational value because it moves from one analytical category to another.
4 3 What changes when the source format changes
The largest interpretive differences emerge when records are grouped by source format. Among the 31 anonymous self-reports with five or more coded items, eighteen document paid work or family responsibilities, or 58.1 percent. Among the 43 university and scholarship profiles, three document that domain, or 7.0 percent. The difference is 51.1 percentage points. It is a difference in what these selected sources document, not a measured difference in how frequently their students actually worked or cared for relatives. [D01]
Academic clubs and competitions appears in 24 of the 31 longer self-reports, compared with six of the 43 university and scholarship profiles. Research appears in sixteen and six, respectively. Service and teaching appears in 26 and 29, corresponding to 83.9 and 67.4 percent. Because the denominators differ, raw counts alone can obscure the comparison. Table 3 and Figure 2 retain the denominators and make the documentation contrast explicit.
| Domain | Self reports with 5 or more coded items n = 31 | University and scholarship profiles n = 43 |
|---|---|---|
| Service and teaching | 26/31 (83.9%) | 29/43 (67.4%) |
| Arts and writing | 17/31 (54.8%) | 13/43 (30.2%) |
| Athletics | 15/31 (48.4%) | 12/43 (27.9%) |
| Research | 16/31 (51.6%) | 6/43 (14.0%) |
| Work and family responsibilities | 18/31 (58.1%) | 3/43 (7.0%) |
| Academic clubs and competitions | 24/31 (77.4%) | 6/43 (14.0%) |
| Civic and environmental organizing and school governance | 23/31 (74.2%) | 10/43 (23.3%) |
| Technical creation and enterprise | 3/31 (9.7%) | 7/43 (16.3%) |
| Programs internships and independent learning | 16/31 (51.6%) | 9/43 (20.9%) |
| Informal hobbies | 7/31 (22.6%) | 6/43 (14.0%) |
The groups differ in both their people and their documentation. Differences cannot be attributed to source format alone. [D01]
Differences reflect selected people and their descriptions. They do not estimate a causal effect of source format or an admissions advantage. [D01]
Several explanations could produce these contrasts. Longer inventories offer more opportunities to mention an ordinary job, school club, or background responsibility. University and scholarship features may select students with different experiences from those who choose to publish anonymous retrospectives. The populations may also differ in institution, geography, resources, or admission pathway. The present study cannot determine how much of the gap comes from incomplete description and how much comes from actual differences between the groups.
The practical implication is narrower and still important: a short public biography is an unreliable model of the full set of activities a successful applicant had. A family reading only institutional features could receive a very different impression of ordinary employment from a family reading longer personal lists. Neither reading strategy establishes an admissions return, but comparing them reveals why an apparently missing category should not be dismissed as unimportant.
These comparisons also discourage ranking the source groups as simply good or bad. A named university profile may provide stronger evidence of enrollment while offering little detail about the application. An anonymous list may provide many details while offering weaker independent assurance of their accuracy. Provenance and completeness are different dimensions. The study preserves both instead of creating a single numerical credibility score that would conceal the tradeoff.
4 4 Sensitivity to commercial and anonymous accounts
Removing the eleven commercial or school-provider profiles leaves 85 records. In that subset, service and teaching remains documented in 59 records, or 69.4 percent; arts and writing in 35, or 41.2 percent; and research in 24, or 28.2 percent. Research's share is lower than the full-corpus 33.3 percent, while work or family responsibility is slightly higher, at 22 of 85 records, or 25.9 percent. These movements show that the provider accounts influence the measured composition without wholly determining it. [D01]
Removing all 32 anonymous accounts produces a different result. Among the remaining 64 records, service and teaching appears in 43, research in sixteen, and work or family responsibilities in only five. The corresponding percentages are 67.2, 25.0, and 7.8. This does not demonstrate that anonymous authors exaggerate responsibilities, or that attributed biographies conceal them. It shows that excluding one kind of source also removes a kind of documentation that made many ordinary commitments visible.
The lesson from sensitivity analysis is therefore not to select the subset whose percentages look most reassuring. Each subset answers a narrower descriptive question. The whole corpus offers breadth but combines uneven forms of evidence. The longer self-report subset offers more itemized material but retains self-report uncertainty. The attributed-source subset improves public attribution for many records but contains many compressed biographies. The full set of sensitivity results is supplied so that readers can see how strongly a conclusion depends on the choices used to assemble it.
One finding survives these changes in a limited form: service or teaching is visible across each major subset. That supports discussing it as a recurrent form of engagement. It does not distinguish among occasional participation, a demanding long-term obligation, or an unusually strong program. The data cannot establish that adding another service activity would improve a given student's application more than improving an existing commitment.
4 5 Combinations and the problem of an ideal portfolio
The records contain both concentrated and mixed activity patterns. Under the harmonized coding, the median profile documents three of the ten domains, with a range from one to seven. The median is five in the 31 longer anonymous self-reports and two in the 43 university and scholarship profiles. These are measures of documented category breadth. They are not counts of organizations, application slots, activities pursued at the same time, or subject areas in which a student achieved distinction. [D01]
Selected co-occurrences illustrate the mixture. Twenty-eight profiles document both service or teaching and arts or writing. Twenty-four document both service and research. Fourteen document both research and arts or writing; seventeen document both work or family responsibilities and service. These counts establish that the domains can coexist in successful public narratives. They do not identify beneficial combinations, because the study has no comparison group and no information about the opportunity cost of pursuing both activities.
Nor is a category pair necessarily a pair of separate commitments. A paid research role can support research and employment. A student teaching music can contribute to both service and arts. Coding overlap is a feature of the activity, not evidence that the student has twice as much free time. Conversely, several separate commitments can fall in one category, such as orchestra, chamber music, and composition. Category breadth and workload should therefore remain distinct throughout the family's planning.
An optimal-portfolio claim would require more information than these combinations provide. It would need to identify the student's interests and available opportunities, the intensity and quality of each activity, the academic and personal costs of participation, and the relevant admissions alternatives. Without that information, recommending exactly three categories or five activities would convert the study's measurement system into a rule it was never designed to support.
4 6 Duration and responsibility cannot be reduced to a single metric
Twenty-five records contain at least one explicitly coded participation duration. That variable includes years, grade spans, or other stated periods, and can include participation beginning before high school. It does not provide a comparable measure of four-year high-school involvement for the whole sample. Nor does it establish that a student held a leadership role for the full time they participated. A mean years-of-leadership statistic would therefore suggest a level of measurement consistency the sources do not supply. [D01]
The review also does not report average weekly hours, a median number of leadership titles, or a fraction with national recognition. Those quantities would require more standardized definitions and more complete reporting than the corpus offers. Some authors report a peak season, others an average, and others no hours. A captain, an informal mentor, and a founder may all accept responsibility, but they are not interchangeable units. Award levels likewise depend on the specific competition and its eligibility.
For a family, this missingness points toward a more useful personal record. Track the period of participation separately from changes in responsibility. Distinguish an ordinary week from a peak week. Note what the student actually controlled and which results belonged to a team. These records can later support an accurate application description, but they also help the family make better decisions while the activity is happening. The practical chapters develop this approach without assigning a target number of hours or titles.
4 7 What the larger entering-student surveys show
The separate Princeton surveys broaden the evidence beyond a collection of public biographies. Their response counts were 732 of 1,438 invited students for the class of 2028, 877 of 1,408 for the class of 2029, and 610 of 1,483 for the class of 2030. These correspond to approximately 50.9, 62.3, and 41.1 percent of those invited. Participation was voluntary, questions could be skipped, and the published results were not weighted to correct nonresponse. The total survey response count is consequently not the denominator for every activity question. [A02, A04, A06]
For the class entering in 2024, the published academics section reported community service at 76 percent, honor societies at 54 percent, and varsity sports at 50.6 percent. Summer employment was reported at 56.4 percent and school-year employment at 37.3 percent. Those work categories can overlap; adding them would double-count students who worked in both periods. The results support the presence of organized activities and ordinary employment in the same broader entering population. [A01]
The class entering in 2025 also reported substantial community service, described in the publication as nearly three quarters of respondents. The published account placed varsity sports at 49 percent and summer jobs at 58 percent; more than a third reported school-year work. For the class entering in 2026, the academics summary reported community service above 70 percent and varsity sports and honor societies each above half. Approximate narrative statements are retained as approximate rather than converted into invented exact percentages. [A03, A05]
Harvard's independently published class-of-2028 survey offers additional, institution-specific context. The Crimson reported community service above 71 percent, and both athletics and student government above half. Approximately one third of the class responded, and the article acknowledged selection bias. These findings reinforce the visibility of conventional engagements in a broader survey, while the response process prevents treating them as a complete census of Harvard admits. [A07]
| Institution and entry | Responses | Invited | Response share | Methods |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Princeton 2024 | 732 | 1438 | 50.9% | [A02] |
| Princeton 2025 | 877 | 1408 | 62.3% | [A04] |
| Princeton 2026 | 610 | 1483 | 41.1% | [A06] |
| Harvard 2024 | Not stated here | Class survey | About 33% | [A07] |
Voluntary surveys with question-specific denominators. Responses are not pooled with the 96 individual profiles. Activity percentages appear in the accompanying text.
The survey evidence changes the interpretation of the individual-profile results in two ways. First, service remains recurrent when the unit is a survey respondent rather than a person selected for a public profile. Second, employment is much more visible when students are asked directly about it. The surveys do not measure the same categories as this study, so their percentages should not be pooled or used as statistical corrections. They provide complementary context, with their own selection and measurement limits.
4 8 What a commercial activity-list dataset can and cannot add
A separate Crimson Education article reports data from 349 US and Canadian clients admitted in two recent cycles to Ivy Plus and other highly selective institutions. It reports that 317 used all ten available activity entries and 320 quantified at least one activity. These are useful facts about that provider's selected client dataset. The population extends beyond this study's institutional definition, its selection is commercial, and the underlying student-level records were not independently authenticated here. The 349 are not added to the 96 profiles. [A08]
The contrast with the present corpus raises a practical question about reporting norms. A long, carefully quantified list may be common within a particular advising environment without being a universal admissions requirement. A form with ten slots can shape how students divide and describe their experiences. It does not tell a ninth grader to acquire ten simultaneous commitments. Quantification can clarify real work, but it can also create a false appearance of comparability when one number counts unique people and another counts repeated contacts.
Families can use a commercial example to learn how a concise description communicates responsibility. They should be more cautious about using its selected outcomes to justify an expensive service or a rigid planning rule. The counterfactual is missing: what happened to comparable applicants who did not follow the provider's preferred format or purchase the same support? This review cannot supply that answer, and a polished success dataset does not supply it by itself.
4 9 Recurring patterns are clearer than year-to-year trends
The three cohorts establish recent coverage, not a reliable time series. A temporal trend would require comparable sampling and measurement across years. Here, each year contains a different mixture of institutions and source types. The activity domains are harmonized, but the underlying publication process is not standardized. A higher research count in one year's retrieved stories could arise because more research-oriented stories were found, rather than because colleges changed how they evaluate research.
The Princeton surveys offer a more consistent annual format, yet changing response rates and question-specific participation still matter. The published evidence supports the descriptive statement that service, sports, and employment recur across recent cohorts. It does not establish a general Ivy Plus shift toward one activity or away from another. The difference between a recurring pattern and a temporal trend is essential when families encounter advice claiming that a particular credential is newly necessary.
The most consequential surprises concern interpretation. Ordinary responsibilities become much more visible when source format changes. Creative work appears alongside scientific interests. Research descriptions cover different levels and types of contribution. The apparent prevalence of enterprise changes sharply when generic business participation is separated from an actual venture or product. Each finding advises closer attention to the student's work and to the way evidence is presented. None supplies a universal ranking of what an admissions committee will reward.
5 What the patterns can mean
5 1 Frequency and admissions value answer different questions
The largest number in a table of successful students is easy to mistake for the most important activity. That interpretation is not justified. Frequency tells us what is common within the selected records. Admissions value would require information about the alternatives available to otherwise comparable applicants and about applicants who were not admitted. Those are different quantities.
Consider a hypothetical example, invented only to explain the problem. Imagine finding 100 admitted students, 80 of whom volunteered. In one possible applicant pool, 800 volunteers and 200 nonvolunteers applied. The observed admitted group would then be compatible with a 10 percent admission rate for each group. In another possible pool, 400 volunteers and 600 nonvolunteers applied. The same admitted group would now be compatible with rates of 20 percent and about 3.3 percent. Seeing the 80 volunteers among the admits does not tell us which applicant pool existed.
Even the second scenario would not prove that volunteering caused the difference. The volunteers might differ in academic preparation, available resources, application choices, recommendations, or other unmeasured respects. A sensible study would need to address those differences before interpreting the association. The example shows why a public collection of accepted applicants cannot supply an activity multiplier or a numerical return on hours invested.
There is also no reliable way to infer the reverse lesson from an omission. A student admitted without mentioning research demonstrates that a research entry was not visible in that particular public account. If the account is incomplete, it does not establish that the application lacked research. An authenticated submitted application that explicitly ruled out research would bear more directly on a claim of a universal research requirement. This corpus does not provide that verification, including for records flagged as apparent activity inventories. Even such a verified case would not show that research would have been unhelpful for another student.
5 2 Activity names compress differences in substance
Labels are useful for navigating the evidence but poor substitutes for understanding it. Sources use research for literature reading, data cleaning, experimental design, model development, a school course, or participation in a mentored team. Required curricular projects themselves were excluded from this study's extracurricular counts; separately described extracurricular work remained eligible. Leadership can mean a title, reliable coordination, technical authority, teaching beginners, or taking responsibility when something fails. The available descriptions do not consistently provide enough detail to separate all of these.
For planning purposes, families should examine the verbs and the responsibilities behind the label. What did the student make, investigate, maintain, organize, explain, or improve? How independently did they work? Which parts required assistance? What happened after the first attempt? These questions are a practical response to incomplete labels; they are not a claim that every admissions reader uses an identical checklist.
A particular activity can be educationally weak even when its name is prestigious. A modest local commitment can create demanding decisions, relationships, and learning. The report's recommendation is to assess those features directly whenever possible. Doing so also makes an activity plan more resilient: its benefits do not disappear if the eventual college decision is disappointing.
5 3 Depth is a trajectory rather than a clock
Repeated involvement can create depth because it gives a student time to encounter harder problems and become more dependable. Duration by itself does not reveal whether that happened. Four years of passive attendance and two years of progressively demanding work are not interchangeable experiences, but the public evidence cannot assign a universal conversion between them.
This distinction matters when families look at reported grade spans. A student may participate in a club from ninth through twelfth grade but become its captain only in senior year. Coding the entire period as four years of leadership would exaggerate the record. Several profiles in this review explicitly distinguish participation from later responsibility. Their structure illustrates why families should record both the starting point and the change in role. [NE09, NE11] Some histories elsewhere in the corpus begin before high school or include a gap year. They cannot be read as a standard dose of four years of high-school involvement. [D01]
The planning implication is to ask what has changed since last term. A returning participant might tackle a harder technical task, take more ownership of preparation, train a new member, or become more attentive to the needs of a community partner. Those developments can be meaningful without a new title. Conversely, changing direction can be sensible if an activity no longer provides learning or useful contribution. Dartmouth's allowance for later discoveries is consistent with evaluating meaning rather than treating longevity as an automatic credential. [G11]
5 4 A coherent application need not describe a single interest
Some public profiles have a clear thematic concentration. Others combine activities that would look unrelated on a simple subject chart. A musician can work in a laboratory; a student interested in engineering can spend much of their available time tutoring, working, or participating in school government. The corpus supplies examples of both focused and mixed engagement. It does not establish that one structure has a higher acceptance rate. [NE01, IV-DA06]
Coherence can come from a way of participating rather than from a single subject. A student might repeatedly teach, investigate, build, or organize across different settings. Another student may have two separate interests that are both serious. There is no need to invent a unifying slogan if it distorts the record. The useful task is to help a reader understand the student, including how they spend time and why particular experiences matter to them.
Prematurely forcing every activity into a career theme carries a practical cost: the student may abandon an important source of enjoyment or competence before learning what they actually want to study. That is a reasoned concern about decision-making, not an experimentally established admissions penalty. Penn's guidance explicitly accommodates both focused and broad interests, which gives families little reason to treat a single predetermined passion as an institutional requirement. [G07]
5 5 Contribution and recognition should be read separately
Recognition can help an unfamiliar reader understand an achievement. It does not always explain what the student personally contributed. A competition result may belong to a team. A publication may involve many collaborators. A leadership title may refer to an organization whose useful work depends on several people. Families should preserve these distinctions instead of turning every shared outcome into an individual accomplishment.
The same distinction works in the other direction. Useful work can occur without a formal prize. Training a replacement, maintaining an accessible resource, answering users' questions, or showing up reliably for a care responsibility may be demanding and valuable even if no competition recognizes it. The evidence does not allow the claim that unrecognized work receives equal consideration in every admissions decision. It does support including such work in the account of a student's actual life rather than excluding it merely because it lacks an award category.
Brown's advice about describing unfamiliar awards asks applicants to make the context understandable, including the nature of the competition and whether an accomplishment belongs to an individual or team. That guidance supports a practical reporting principle: provide enough context to make an achievement legible, then describe the contribution accurately. [G10]
5 6 Academic preparation remains part of the explanation
An activity-only study removes much of what colleges actually review. That limitation is especially serious when a public post attributes a successful result to one unusual engagement. The same applicant may have a demanding academic record, strong recommendations, relevant personal context, or other qualities not captured in the activity summary. The observed acceptance belongs to the whole application.
Yale describes academic potential as its first consideration and places particular importance on the high-school transcript. Brown similarly identifies high-school performance and preparation as central to its review. Neither statement provides a public formula for trading a lower grade against a stronger activity, and this report does not invent one. [G05, G09]
For families, the implication is to evaluate opportunity cost. If adding another commitment undermines the student's capacity to learn in existing courses, the family is changing more than the extracurricular portion of an application. The decision should be assessed as a whole. This is also why the practical chapters begin with available time and responsibilities rather than with an idealized list of clubs.
5 7 Athletic recruitment is a distinct pathway
Sports participation and athletic recruitment should not be collapsed into a single category. A student who enjoys a school team, a nationally accomplished competitor, and an applicant receiving a coach's support can have different relationships to the admissions process. A public biography that mentions fencing or swimming does not establish recruitment.
The Ivy League states that coaches may support prospective athletes while admissions offices retain authority over admission. MIT describes a different arrangement: coaches may advocate, but it does not use likely letters or coach-controlled admission slots. These institutional distinctions prevent a general claim that a sports activity has one fixed admissions effect across Ivy Plus. [G16, G17]
The corpus includes an explicitly recruited Stanford athlete, but a single self-reported recruit cannot measure the advantage attached to recruitment or show that a family could reproduce that path by starting the same sport. Athletic decisions involve demonstrated ability, available roster needs, academic preparation, and institution-specific procedures that this study did not measure. [PL007]
5 8 Inequality affects what becomes visible
Access influences which opportunities a student can pursue and how those opportunities are described. Park and colleagues analyzed more than six million Common App applications from the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 cycles. Their research found substantial differences in reported activities, leadership, and distinctions associated with socioeconomic circumstances and school context. The study concerns reporting patterns in a much broader and earlier applicant population; it is not a causal estimate for the recent Ivy Plus profiles studied here. [R01]
Chetty and colleagues used confidential administrative data to examine selective-college admission and later outcomes. Their work identifies nonacademic credentials and athletic recruitment among mechanisms associated with high-income admissions advantages. It does not supply a current table assigning admissions points to particular high-school activities. [R02]
These studies caution against interpreting a highly polished activity list as a pure measure of individual effort. They also caution against turning contextual review into a promise that unequal access has no consequences. The responsible family response is practical: identify usable opportunities, count real work and family obligations, explain relevant constraints accurately, and avoid purchasing expensive experiences on the assumption that their brand name establishes their value.
5 9 The strongest claim is about a process of development
Across these interpretations, the most defensible guidance concerns how a student approaches commitments. Choose something feasible and meaningful. Learn enough to participate competently. Accept responsibility appropriate to the student's age and skills. Seek feedback. Improve the work. Record the experience accurately. Reassess whether the commitment remains useful.
That process can occur in different activities and at different scales. It does not require every student to found an organization, publish a paper, win a national competition, or connect every hobby to a planned major. It also does not make distinction irrelevant: exceptional work can be worth pursuing when the student has the interest and opportunity. The report simply places the quality of the work ahead of unsupported claims about the automatic power of its label.
The following domain analysis applies these ideas to specific kinds of engagement. It explains what families can examine before choosing an opportunity, what forms of progress might matter, and which common comparisons the public evidence cannot settle.
6 Activity domains and the decisions families can make
The following interpretation concerns the quality of an activity experience and the evidence a student can honestly provide about it. It does not assign an admissions coefficient to any activity category. A laboratory placement, an orchestra, a shop job, and a neighborhood service commitment involve different work. Each can also be superficial or demanding, depending on what the student actually does. Families therefore need two questions: whether an activity offers worthwhile development, and whether its responsibilities can be described clearly. Prestige alone answers neither question.
Public profiles are useful for expanding the range of possibilities a family considers. They are much less useful as shopping lists. A student may discover that a familiar interest can support more ambitious work, or that an ordinary responsibility deserves recognition. The examples below demonstrate possibilities present in particular published histories. They do not establish that the named activity caused an admission, that the student's published account reproduces the application, or that another student should imitate it.
For planning purposes, the most helpful unit is the recurring task. What will the teenager actually spend Tuesday afternoon doing? Reading unfamiliar material, teaching a lesson, revising a drawing, practicing an instrument, debugging a device, handling customer questions, and coordinating a volunteer shift are concrete answers. Joining an impressive organization is only an address. The quality of the experience depends on the work behind that address. The sections below examine how families can distinguish the two without turning adolescence into a contest to manufacture the most impressive label.
6 1 Research and intellectual investigation
Research can give a student experience with uncertainty, careful reading, systematic observation, and the difference between a plausible explanation and a supported conclusion. Those are worthwhile learning goals even when a project produces no publishable result. For a prospective participant, the useful questions begin with the work itself. What question will the student investigate? What preparation is needed? What decisions can the student make? What feedback will a knowledgeable adult provide? A position called research assistant does not answer these questions.
A Cornell admit's anonymous account distinguished a published medical-school project from a second, unpublished university project in which the student reported greater involvement. That distinction illustrates why a publication count can misrepresent the substance of an experience. [IV-CO18]
Families should separate at least four experiences that publicity may place under the same heading. Reading and summarizing published studies is intellectual study. Reproducing an existing analysis is a useful exercise in methods. Contributing a limited task to a larger investigation is collaborative research. Designing an original question and carrying out a defensible analysis is another level of responsibility. These experiences can build on one another, but they should not be described as interchangeable achievements. A careful replication may teach more than a nominal original project that the student cannot explain.
An account of decisions can make understanding visible. A student might explain why a measurement was unreliable, how a coding error changed a result, or why the available data could not answer the initial question. Such explanations provide a basis for assessing understanding. A prestigious affiliation with an unexplained role provides much less information.
A hypothetical student interested in local environmental conditions could first examine public data, learn what each variable measures, and reproduce a simple published chart. A later project might compare two measurement approaches or explain a limitation to a community audience. The hypothetical example illustrates a learning sequence; it is not an admitted applicant in this dataset. For work involving people, patients, animals, or hazards, obtain qualified supervision and follow the permissions and safeguards applicable to the setting. A teenager should not collect sensitive information or offer health advice merely to make a project seem consequential.
For a paid research program, ask about student ownership, the mentor's contribution, and publication policy. A guaranteed paper is a deliverable promise, not proof of rigorous inquiry. Compare the proposed learning with accessible alternatives. An affordable course followed by independent study may suit one student; a supervised placement may suit another. Section 8.4 provides the broader framework for evaluating summer opportunities.
6 2 STEM projects engineering and making
Technical projects can make a student's thinking visible through something that operates: software, a device, a model, a repaired machine, or a tested design. The evidence becomes more informative when the student can explain the problem, identify personal contributions, and show how the work changed after a test. Finishing a small reliable tool may provide more opportunity for understanding than launching an expansive platform that remains unfinished.
One Penn interview combined robotics competition, app development, mentoring, internships, and school technical leadership. It shows how several activities can grow around related skills, while the published account still leaves the student's exact contribution to each team achievement uncertain. [IV-PE12]
Families should distinguish a prototype from a product, a download from an active user, and an attractive demonstration from a tested solution. A device may work in one carefully controlled setting and fail elsewhere. An app may receive attention without being used. These distinctions help a student choose a meaningful next step. An honest account of ten repeated users and the improvements they requested can be more understandable than an unexplained claim of thousands of impressions.
A hypothetical robotics student who has learned to assemble a standard mechanism could next document failures, compare alternative parts, and teach a new teammate to maintain the design. That sequence adds depth without requiring a new organization or a more expensive summer program. The student can retain sketches, test results, and a short explanation of individual responsibilities. Public posting is optional; the purpose of records is to preserve an accurate history, not to perform constant self-promotion.
Competitions can supply deadlines and external feedback, but the title of an event needs context. Was the result local, regional, national, or international? Did the distinction apply to one student, a team, or the entire school? What was the student's role? Was participation open, qualified, invited, or selected? The same questions apply to hackathons and innovation fairs. A team award can be meaningful without being represented as an individual invention.
The principal tradeoff is between expanding scope and improving execution. Adding artificial intelligence, a mobile interface, and a nonprofit partnership can multiply work before the original problem is understood. Families can ask whether the proposed addition serves a real user or simply makes the description sound more advanced. If the project already works, a period of maintenance, documentation, and handover may be the more substantial contribution.
Technical depth also does not require eliminating other interests. An engineering project and an unrelated musical commitment can both belong in a truthful history. Their connection need not be invented. What matters for planning is that the student has enough time to develop competence and follow through on obligations. The published profiles provide examples of technical concentration and varied interests, not evidence for a mandatory profile shape.
6 3 Humanities arts and media
Humanities and arts work can reveal sustained practice, interpretation, revision, and communication. These qualities are harder to compress into a single metric than a competition placement. Families should resist the conclusion that less convenient measurement means less meaningful work. A body of carefully revised writing, a developing performance repertoire, an original exhibition, or a well-edited school publication can provide concrete evidence of effort and responsibility.
A Cornell self-report described novel writing, orchestral music, piano, teaching, and paper-based creative hobbies. Another Cornell university profile mentioned an unpublished novel. These accounts include creative work at different stages; they do not establish each student's complete publication history. [IV-CO17, IV-CO15]
The distinction between output and development is especially useful here. Completing a story produces an artifact. Revising it in response to criticism shows a process. Reading work outside one's comfort zone can deepen that process. Organizing a reading or teaching younger writers can add a social dimension. These are different forms of engagement; a student does not need to perform all of them to justify an artistic interest.
A hypothetical school musician might spend the same additional hours entering another audition, learning a difficult piece, arranging music for a small ensemble, or helping beginners practice. The choice depends on the student's current needs and commitments. If technique is the limiting factor, more auditions may yield less growth than focused practice. If the student already performs confidently but struggles to collaborate, ensemble work may provide a different challenge.
For journalism and public communication, families can look beyond the existence of a website. What editorial standards does the student use? How are facts checked? How are corrections handled? Has the student interviewed sources respectfully, learned to edit another person's work, or followed a topic over time? A publication title does not establish those skills. A small number of carefully reported pieces can provide a clearer record than frequent unsupported commentary.
Arts competitions and publication credits should be described in proportion to what occurred. Paying a submission fee, attending a workshop, receiving acceptance into a school exhibition, and earning selection through a competitive external process are different events. None needs to be exaggerated to become legitimate. A student can identify the audience, selection process, role, and finished work without adopting promotional language.
Families can also preserve space for creative activities that remain private. A teenager may write poems or practice an instrument for enjoyment without creating an application artifact from every session. Keeping an interest alive can be a sensible use of time even when it is not the strongest item on an activity list. The practical goal is to support development and a truthful account, not to force every enjoyable activity into public recognition.
6 4 Civic participation service and teaching
Community engagement can involve responding to a need, supporting an existing organization, teaching a skill, participating in local decisions, or helping peers navigate a problem. The recurring question is whether the work is useful to someone beyond the student's application. Answering that question usually requires listening to the people or institution being served, rather than assuming that a newly invented initiative is needed.
A Cornell profile described nutrition lessons and food-pantry support through an existing extension service. The example matters because it locates contribution inside an established organization, without requiring a student to create a separate nonprofit to make the work identifiable. [IV-CO13]
Apply the distinctions in section 8.7 when describing service. Handouts distributed and money raised describe work delivered; neither establishes that recipients benefited. Reporting where funds went and who controlled them adds accountability. A modest role can require considerable reliability, preparation, and adaptation.
A hypothetical tutoring project can be evaluated through attendance, lesson preparation, supervisor feedback, and the student's ability to adjust explanations. The student should avoid claiming sole responsibility for another child's academic improvement. Grades depend on many influences. A more accurate description might explain the material taught, frequency of meetings, and changes made after noticing confusion. That account communicates useful work without promising a causal result the student cannot establish.
Starting an organization creates administrative duties that can displace direct service. A student who already volunteers effectively may contribute more by improving scheduling, training successors, or solving a persistent logistical problem. Section 7.8 examines the decision to join or create a group.
Civic engagement also includes disagreement. A student may draft a proposal, conduct respectful outreach, organize a discussion, or learn why a policy change cannot happen immediately. Losing a vote does not erase the learning involved. Families can help students distinguish influencing a conversation from claiming credit for an entire public decision. When a result comes from several organizations or years of advocacy, the activity description should identify the student's actual part.
Teaching and service deserve boundaries. Students should protect beneficiaries' privacy, avoid using vulnerable people as promotional material, and work within their training. Photographs, testimonials, and sensitive stories are not necessary to prove commitment. A supervisor's accurate account of reliable work may be sufficient. The strongest planning question is what a student can responsibly keep doing, improve, and eventually hand over. A project that disappears immediately after applications are submitted raises a practical continuity problem even when its initial intentions were good.
6 5 Entrepreneurship and business activity
Business activity can offer experience with customers, costs, communication, operational problems, and responsibility for promises. Its educational value does not depend on rapid growth or a dramatic title. A small enterprise can expose a student to repeated decisions that a purely hypothetical business competition does not, while a simulation can provide a manageable introduction without financial risk. Families should choose according to readiness and supervision rather than assuming that a founder label has a fixed admissions value.
A Cornell university profile described a farmstand that began with raising animals and expanded into food sales over several years. The account connected business activity to a local need and an academic interest, without describing a venture-capital model. [IV-CO14]
Distinguish revenue from profit when reading a promotional summary. Sales do not show what a student earned after expenses. A fundraising total is not business revenue, and the value of donated goods is not cash raised. An online audience is not a customer base. Keeping these measures separate supports clearer decisions and accurate descriptions.
A hypothetical student selling handmade items might track production time, material expenses, repeat customers, refunds, and changes requested by buyers. If demand grows, the next useful challenge may be quality control or reliable delivery. If demand remains low, the student can test a different design or decide that the activity should remain a hobby. Either outcome can involve learning. A business does not need to succeed commercially for the student to describe its limitations honestly.
Family businesses require particular clarity. Working in a parent's enterprise can involve serious responsibilities, but ownership by the family does not automatically establish the teenager's contribution. Useful details concern the actual tasks: updating inventory, handling customer questions, preparing orders, translating, maintaining a website, or reconciling records under supervision. The student should identify what was personally managed, what adults controlled, and whether the role was paid. Access through family is context to explain, not a reason to disguise the arrangement.
Entrepreneurship also has opportunity costs. Branding, registrations, websites, and social-media promotion can consume substantial time before a customer problem has been understood. Families can ask whether the next expenditure is necessary for delivering the service. Building a basic solution and receiving specific feedback may be more useful than purchasing the appearance of a sophisticated company.
The planning implication is to value responsibility over inflated scale. A student who can explain a mistake, repair a customer relationship, and adjust a process has a more intelligible account than one who claims to oversee an enterprise with no clear duties. There is no basis here for replacing a strong existing activity solely to add a business category.
6 6 Athletics and physical pursuits
Athletics can involve long practice commitments, technical improvement, cooperation, competitive pressure, and responsibility to teammates. It can also occupy most of a student's discretionary time. Families therefore need to be precise about the purpose of continued participation: enjoyment, personal development, team contribution, competitive ambition, or a possible college recruitment process. These purposes can coexist, but they lead to different decisions about additional travel, coaching, and training.
A Cornell profile described an international ice dancer who also started an initiative to improve beginners' equipment access. The source establishes the reported pairing of athletic experience and service; it does not establish that Cornell recruited the student or that the service caused admission. [IV-CO16]
A planning review should keep a documented recruitment pathway separate from ordinary extracurricular participation. Athletic achievement by itself does not demonstrate institutional recruitment support. Families should obtain current, sport-specific information directly from the relevant institution and coach before making major decisions around recruitment. This study does not estimate an athletic admission advantage or classify students as recruited unless their sources support that classification.
For students without a recruitment objective, the useful questions concern development and responsibility. Is the student improving? Does participation provide valued friendships or enjoyment? Is the training schedule sustainable alongside school and other obligations? Does the student contribute reliably to the team? A captaincy may indicate responsibility, but the title alone does not reveal whether the student organizes practice, supports new members, resolves problems, or simply holds a ceremonial position.
A hypothetical runner deciding between another season and an unrelated summer project should compare the actual experiences. If the runner is developing well and has an important role on the team, leaving solely to appear more academic could discard meaningful continuity. If participation has become incompatible with other priorities, continuing solely to preserve a four-year label can also be a poor decision. The relevant evidence is the student's situation, not a belief that every activity must be pursued indefinitely.
Personal physical pursuits can have a place in an activity history even when they produce no medals. Hiking, recreational skating, strength training, or informal games may explain how a student spends time and relates to others. Their inclusion does not require pretending that recreation is elite competition. Nor must every physical interest be converted into a service initiative. An honest hobby can remain a hobby.
The key distinction is between meaningful commitment and unexamined accumulation. More competitions, more seasons, and more titles do not automatically produce a stronger or healthier experience. Families can periodically review what the student is learning, what responsibilities remain enjoyable, and what the commitment is displacing. The present evidence supports recognizing varied athletic histories among selected admits, while leaving the comparative admission value of those histories unresolved.
6 7 Paid work household contributions and care
Paid employment and household responsibilities can be easy to overlook because they do not always arrive with certificates, club names, or public recognition. Yet they can involve repeated obligations and substantial demands on a teenager's time. A planning process that ignores them risks treating available time as equal across students when it is not. The first step is to identify the work accurately before considering whether additional optional commitments are realistic.
A Dartmouth self-report included paid community-band work and lifeguarding. A Cornell self-report combined research and school activities with substantial household duties. These cases show that work and care can coexist with other interests in published admitted-student histories. [IV-DA02, IV-CO18]
For paid work, useful evidence includes regularity, tasks, training, trust, and increasing responsibility. A cashier, food-service worker, tutor, farmhand, or assistant may learn through repeated interactions rather than a single celebrated achievement. The application description can explain the role without dressing it up as entrepreneurship or management. If a supervisor later entrusted the student with opening, training, inventory, or problem solving, that change is worth documenting accurately.
Household work requires similarly careful language. Routine occasional chores differ from recurring responsibilities that materially shape the student's schedule. Families can identify what the student does, how often, and why the contribution matters without disclosing another person's diagnosis or private circumstances. Cooking, coordinating transport, translating, supervising siblings, or handling practical household tasks can be described at an appropriate level of privacy. The student should not feel required to reveal intimate family information to make the time understandable.
A hypothetical student with a weekly job and recurring sibling care may have room for one optional school activity. Advising that student to add three clubs without considering existing obligations would be a planning error. A more useful discussion asks whether the current activity offers growth, whether a modest independent interest fits the remaining time, and what support could reduce avoidable pressure. This is a resource-allocation recommendation, not a claim that any particular combination secures admission.
The same principle applies when responsibilities change. A student may reduce a club commitment after a family need develops or increase work hours during a financial disruption. An activity history should explain the transition accurately. It should not reinterpret an unavoidable sacrifice as a strategically engineered profile. Nor should a family manufacture hardship or overstate ordinary duties in an attempt to appear distinctive.
Finally, jobs and care should be considered when evaluating summer opportunities. An unpaid prestigious program has a different practical cost for a teenager who would otherwise earn needed income or provide support at home. The choice is not adequately described by comparing program names. Families need to consider lost earnings, transportation, flexibility, supervision, and the student's own goals. Recognizing these costs makes planning more realistic and prevents advice based on the false assumption that every teenager can devote the same hours to optional enrichment.
7 A four year activity plan for students and families
7 1 The purpose of this roadmap
The practical goal is to help a teenager become more capable, useful, curious, and responsible while building a record that an admissions reader can understand. The recommendations below are a planning framework developed for this study. They are not a formula tested against admissions outcomes, and they do not assign an admission probability to any activity. A family can use the framework to make better choices even when the eventual college destination changes.
Start with the student who exists now. An enthusiastic musician, a reluctant ninth grader, a teenager with a demanding job, and a student who already spends weekends building machines need different plans. The question is where the student can make worthwhile progress from their present circumstances. A plan becomes less useful when it asks a student to impersonate a different person or promises an achievement that depends on resources the family does not have.
The four years should also remain open to revision. A student may discover a new subject, leave an unhealthy organization, lose access to transportation, or take on responsibilities at home. Harvard's application guidance does not expect every activity to last all four years. Dartmouth also cautions against equating longevity with importance. Continuity can make growth visible, but persistence is valuable when the work continues to teach something or serves a real purpose. [G04] [G11]
7 2 Establish a starting point before adding commitments
Begin with an inventory of a normal week. Include classes, homework, travel, paid work, household responsibilities, practice, religious commitments, and time needed to recover. Many students already do meaningful things that are missing from the family's picture of an activity list. Helping a sibling with homework, organizing deliveries for a family business, translating routine correspondence, repairing equipment, and rehearsing independently all deserve attention.
Next, ask the student to describe moments when they wanted to keep going after an assignment or event ended. They might mention explaining a difficult problem, improving a photograph, arguing about a historical decision, or organizing a team. These observations are more informative than immediately choosing an impressive sounding career. A teenager does not need to declare a permanent academic identity before exploring activities.
Map the opportunities that can actually be reached. A useful opportunity offers something concrete: a person who can teach, a group that needs dependable help, equipment the student can use, an audience that can respond, or a problem that can be investigated. An organization with a famous name may offer very little of this. A nearby library, school team, business, community garden, or arts group may offer much more.
Agree on how the family will review choices. The student should be able to explain what they enjoy, what they are learning, and what is becoming difficult. Parents can help with scheduling, costs, transportation, and questions that a teenager may not know to ask. The student should remain responsible for the work and for ordinary communication with supervisors. The plan should support independence as well as participation.
7 3 Ninth grade should build skills and reveal interests
The first year is a reasonable time to try different settings without treating every trial as a permanent commitment. Attend introductory meetings, volunteer for a small task, take an accessible class, or join a beginner group. Notice the actual experience. Does the student enjoy practicing the skill, or only imagining the award? Do they like the people and the daily work? Would they return if there were no application to complete?
Give early commitments enough time to become understandable. An activity can feel uncomfortable simply because the student is new. Learning a musical part, contributing to a debate, or writing working code involves mistakes before it becomes satisfying. Leaving immediately after the first difficulty prevents the student from discovering whether they like the underlying work. Staying indefinitely because a parent chose the activity creates a different problem. Review the experience after the student has had a fair chance to participate.
Focus on becoming useful. A new member can take accurate notes, prepare materials, help a younger participant, check an equipment list, or finish a task that others overlook. These small responsibilities reveal whether the student is dependable and make later opportunities more plausible. A ninth grader does not need to found an organization to begin showing initiative.
Build the basic skills the activity requires. A prospective researcher needs to read carefully and understand methods. A journalist needs to interview, verify, and revise. An athlete needs to practice and respond to coaching. A community organizer needs to listen, coordinate, and follow through. None of these skills becomes less valuable because it does not produce a dramatic award in the first year.
Begin a brief private record with an early draft, performance, or completed task. Later, the student can compare it with more developed work. Section 8.6 explains what to retain.
By the end of ninth grade, the family should understand more about the student's preferences and capacity. Some activities may continue; others may end. A good outcome is a clearer sense of what the student wants to learn next and a schedule that leaves room for academic progress and ordinary teenage life. This review provides no basis for requiring a nonprofit, research publication, or declared specialty by the end of ninth grade.
7 4 Tenth grade should deepen participation and introduce ownership
In tenth grade, ask where additional effort would produce real improvement. A student who enjoyed several activities may now choose to devote more attention to particular ones. This does not require dropping every unrelated interest. Music, sports, friendship, work, and service can remain meaningful alongside an emerging academic direction.
Move from attendance toward a defined responsibility. For a school publication, that might mean reporting a recurring beat or helping new writers revise. In a robotics team, it could mean maintaining a testing log or learning a subsystem well enough to explain it. At a food program, it might mean handling one recurring distribution task. A defined responsibility is useful because the student can see what depends on their work and receive feedback on whether it was done well.
Before proposing a new project, ask the people already involved what needs attention. A student might discover that an organization does not need another awareness campaign but does need clearer instructions, reliable scheduling, updated records, or a volunteer who returns consistently. Solving a modest problem can involve more learning and responsibility than launching something large without understanding its users.
Try a project that has a manageable beginning and ending. The student should be able to describe the question or need, the intended audience, the work they will personally perform, and the evidence that would show whether it helped. Completion matters because it exposes practical difficulties that are easy to overlook in a proposal. A completed first version also creates something that another person can critique.
Introduce feedback beyond family praise. A teacher, coach, supervisor, editor, or experienced participant can explain what good work looks like and identify the next skill to develop. Seek someone who can observe the work repeatedly, allowing the student to ask specific questions, act on advice, and return with an improved result.
At the end of the year, compare the student's current abilities with the starting point. Can they perform a task independently that once required help? Have they learned to revise after criticism? Can another person rely on them? These questions create a stronger basis for planning junior year than counting titles. If an interest has faded, document what the student learned and consider a more suitable direction.
7 5 Eleventh grade should produce stronger work and shared responsibility
As academic or other obligations become more demanding, improve existing work while choosing new opportunities carefully. Adding an activity is sensible when it offers a clear next step. Adding it simply because another applicant did it can fragment time without improving the student's experience.
A student pursuing an intellectual interest can ask a more demanding question. The next step might be a more careful experiment, a better documented engineering design, an extended historical investigation, a sustained translation project, or reporting that includes sources with different perspectives. The work should match the student's preparation and available guidance. A narrow project completed carefully is easier to assess than an ambitious claim the student cannot explain.
As projects become more substantial, record decisions, revisions, and outside help. For group work, distinguish the team's output from the student's contribution. The reporting guidance in sections 8.7 through 8.9 explains how to describe quantities, roles, and research accurately.
Seek an appropriate audience. Depending on the work, that could be a school performance, a local exhibition, an editor, a competition, a community meeting, a supervisor, or a knowledgeable teacher. The purpose is to receive a serious response. An audience that can identify weaknesses may be more valuable than a larger audience that offers little engagement.
Leadership at this stage can involve helping others do better work. Train a new teammate, write instructions that survive your departure, improve a meeting process, share useful materials, or take responsibility when a plan fails. MIT emphasizes collaboration in its admissions guidance. A record that shows listening, coordination, and shared credit can communicate more than a title without corresponding duties. [G03]
Review whether the schedule still makes sense. A student may need to reduce a peripheral commitment to preserve the quality of schoolwork or an important project. That is a planning decision, not an admission failure. When several commitments become demanding at once, decide what can be postponed, delegated, simplified, or ended.
Near the end of junior year, organize the record into an understandable account. What work is sustained? What changed? What did the student make, improve, learn, or take responsibility for? Which adults can describe that development from direct observation? This review should clarify the actual experience. It should not pressure the student to force every activity into a single artificial story.
7 6 Twelfth grade should emphasize follow through and accurate explanation
Senior year is a time to complete promises and communicate the record clearly. A rushed attempt to add an impressive activity can consume time needed for coursework, applications, and responsibilities already underway. A new opportunity can still be worthwhile, especially when an interest develops late, but its purpose should be understandable without reference to admissions.
Continue meaningful work after an application is submitted. If the student leads a group, plan a handover. Train successors, explain recurring tasks, and leave records that others can use. If the student has promised a report, performance, resource, or event, finish it as well as circumstances allow. Ending high school responsibly matters to the people involved, regardless of the eventual admission decision.
Before submitting applications, check the record against actual dates, duties, and time commitments. Distinguish a busy season from an ordinary week and a short intensive experience from a yearlong commitment. Verify what was completed by the submission date, and apply each institution's current instructions.
Explain significant responsibilities or access limits that would otherwise be misunderstood. A job, caregiving role, or long commute can help make the schedule understandable. Section 8 provides detailed guidance on describing context without unnecessary private disclosure.
Finally, separate application work from the student's entire identity. Admission decisions reflect more than any activity list, and a disappointing result does not erase the value of skills, relationships, or contributions. A useful four year plan leaves the student with something they can continue developing wherever they enroll.
7 7 Choose summers by the work they offer
Summer can provide longer blocks for the next learning need. An early summer might introduce an unfamiliar field; a later one might allow sustained practice or completion of a project begun during school. Employment, caregiving, independent study, and structured instruction can all belong in that sequence. The choice should reflect the student's actual responsibilities and preparation.
For independent work, define a narrow question, a realistic output, and a person or audience who can respond. Schedule progress reviews. For employment, choose a development goal such as learning a new task or communicating more effectively with customers. Consider what the student could continue during the following school year.
Use section 8.4 to compare instruction, supervision, accessibility, and total costs. Leave space between commitments for family, friends, recovery, and unplanned interests. The purpose of a summer plan is to create usable time for worthwhile work, not to fill every day.
7 8 Decide when to join and when to create something
Joining an existing organization can provide direct access to experienced people and an established community need, along with systems, equipment, and feedback. A student can exercise substantial initiative inside that structure. Improving a process or training participants does not become less meaningful because someone else founded the organization.
Creating a new group makes more sense when an important need is not being met and a workable plan exists to meet it. Before launching, identify intended users, existing alternatives, responsibilities, practical costs, and who will maintain the effort. Talk to people who might use the service. Their answers may change the idea or reveal that a partnership would work better.
The title of founder does not resolve these questions. A new organization may require registration, supervision, administration, scheduling, and continuity long after the initial excitement fades. A family should understand whether these duties help the student learn or merely consume time that could have gone into the underlying work.
Compare options using the same questions. What will the student learn? What responsibility will they hold? Who can evaluate the work? What useful result is plausible? What time and money does it require? What will the student give up? There is no need to convert these questions into a fabricated admissions score.
Stopping can also be responsible. End an activity when its duties are persistently unclear, it leaves no room for growth, its environment is harmful, or its costs exceed its value to the student. Finish essential commitments and communicate the departure. Record what was learned. Penn's guidance does not prescribe a particular set of activity types; there is no reason to maintain an unsuitable commitment merely to imitate a supposed preferred profile. [G07]
7 9 Four illustrative paths
The following examples are hypothetical planning scenarios. They are not students in the research sample, and their sequences have not been shown to cause admission.
7 9 1 A student interested in science and engineering
In ninth grade, the student joins an accessible science or engineering group, learns basic tools, and contributes to existing work. They discover that they especially enjoy testing why designs fail. In tenth grade, they take responsibility for a testing procedure and use it to improve a team project. A teacher helps them distinguish an observation from a claim.
In eleventh grade, the student develops a manageable investigation or design project using resources they can reach. They document unsuccessful trials, revise the method, and seek feedback from someone who understands the subject. If a laboratory placement is available and provides meaningful work, they consider it. If it is unavailable, they continue a careful project through school or another accessible setting.
In twelfth grade, they finish the work, prepare a clear explanation, and teach younger participants how to use the process. Their application describes their actual contribution and the limits of the result. A publication may or may not emerge. The educational value comes from improved methods, technical skill, persistence, and the ability to explain evidence. An unrelated sport or musical interest can remain part of their life throughout.
7 9 2 A student interested in history writing and public affairs
In ninth grade, the student contributes to a school publication, reads beyond class assignments, or joins a discussion group. They learn to ask questions and revise writing. In tenth grade, they notice a local historical issue and work with a teacher, librarian, or community organization to identify reliable sources.
In eleventh grade, they produce a series of articles, an oral-history project, an exhibition, or a carefully researched report. They learn how to represent disagreement accurately and distinguish evidence from advocacy. They may help newer writers, organize a discussion, or improve access to the finished work.
In twelfth grade, they complete revisions and leave usable materials with the relevant school or community group. Their application can explain the question, the research process, their editorial decisions, and the audience. It does not need to translate the project into a scientific publication or business startup. The student's intellectual development is visible through stronger inquiry, clearer writing, and more responsible treatment of other people's experiences.
7 9 3 A student whose time is shaped by work and family care
This student already has a demanding schedule. The first step is to recognize the responsibilities that exist and protect academic time. In ninth grade, the family records recurring duties and identifies an interest the student can pursue flexibly. That might be reading, drawing, coding, exercise, or an accessible school activity.
In tenth grade, the student becomes more skilled in existing responsibilities. At work, they may learn inventory, train a colleague, or handle a more complex task. At home, they may coordinate schedules or support a younger sibling's learning. These developments should be described accurately without inflating routine work into an executive title.
In eleventh grade, the student chooses additional opportunities only when they fit. A modest project connected to an existing interest may be feasible; an expensive residential program may not be. A counselor can help preserve context that the activity list alone would miss.
In twelfth grade, the student explains the work performed, its frequency, and the responsibility involved. They do not apologize for having fewer optional activities. The plan has helped them preserve skills and interests while meeting real obligations, and the application allows a reader to understand how time was spent.
7 9 4 A student who remains undecided
An undecided student does not need an invented specialty. In ninth grade, they try accessible activities and learn what kinds of work they enjoy. In tenth grade, they retain commitments that offer useful learning while trying a new subject or responsibility. Their interests may include unrelated areas.
In eleventh grade, the student develops more ownership within those activities. Perhaps they become a reliable stage technician, contribute to a community program, and pursue an independent reading interest. The common thread may be a way of working, such as explaining, organizing, or making things, rather than one academic topic.
In twelfth grade, they describe each activity clearly and explain what they learned when reflection is useful. They can express curiosity about several subjects without claiming a settled career plan. The record may show breadth, but that breadth should consist of actual engagement rather than a list of memberships.
The family's role is to help distinguish uncertainty from passivity. A student can remain undecided while asking serious questions, developing skills, and taking responsibility. Choosing a college direction later does not make earlier work meaningless. A flexible plan can help the student arrive at that decision with more knowledge of themselves.
7 10 Respond constructively when a plan changes
A project may fail to attract participants, a competition result may disappoint, or a student may discover that an imagined career does not fit the daily work. Before replacing the activity, examine what happened. Was the problem preparation, scope, access, timing, or interest? Different explanations require different responses. Better preparation may justify another attempt; a persistent lack of interest may justify leaving.
Separate a disappointing result from an unfinished responsibility. A student can complete an honest report on an experiment that did not support the hypothesis. A team can document why a prototype failed and what should be tested next. An event with low attendance can still produce useful information about scheduling or community needs. The result should be described accurately, without converting failure into an exaggerated success story.
When circumstances change, identify what can be preserved. A student who moves may continue a writing project remotely, transfer useful records to a successor, or begin again in a new setting. A student with less available time may reduce a project's scope while maintaining its essential service. There is no obligation to reproduce the original plan at any cost.
A late change of interest deserves thoughtful exploration. Begin with accessible work that tests the new interest, rather than immediately purchasing an elaborate program. Keep earlier experiences in the record because they remain part of the student's development. The application can reflect a changing person; it does not need to portray four years of perfect foresight.
7 11 Use a simple review instead of constant optimization
At natural transition points, review the student's commitments together. Ask what they now do better, what surprised them, what is difficult, and what they want to try next. Examine whether promises are being kept and whether the schedule remains manageable. The review should end with a few concrete decisions about continuing, changing, or ending commitments.
Use the activity record described in section 8.6 to examine how the student's skills and contribution have changed.
Avoid comparing a teenager's ordinary week with the most polished moment in someone else's published profile. A short account may compress years of work and omit help, unsuccessful attempts, or changing circumstances. Families can learn from examples while making decisions on the basis of their own student's circumstances.
A sound plan gives the student growing ownership over their time. By graduation, they should have better judgment about commitments, stronger skills, people who have seen their work, and experiences they can explain honestly. Those outcomes remain useful across many colleges and careers. They are also the aspects of activity planning that a family can directly influence.
8 Choosing activities when time and money are limited
The recommendations in this section are researcher-developed planning guidance. They are not admissions weights, validated prediction rules, or estimates of the effect of an additional hour of participation. Their purpose is to help a family make a decision that remains sensible even when an admissions outcome is uncertain. The underlying principle is to assess the actual work a student will do, the learning and responsibility that work can produce, and the alternatives that must be given up.
A family can begin with a question that is more concrete than whether an activity is impressive: What would the student be able to do six months from now that they cannot do today? Useful answers might include editing an interview, teaching a beginner, troubleshooting a robot, keeping accurate accounts, organizing a rehearsal, or fulfilling a dependable shift. The answer can also concern relationships or judgment. Learning to listen to a younger student and adapt an explanation is a substantial development, even when it produces no award.
This approach is consistent with MIT's public guidance, which recognizes differences in access, family and work obligations, informal pursuits, and changing interests. MIT asks applicants to describe the activities most important to them rather than presenting a universal preferred menu. That official position supports contextual planning; it does not establish that any particular activity causes admission. [G21]
8 1 Activity count and simultaneous workload
An activity list is a summary across time. It is not a weekly schedule. A student might describe a winter sport, a summer job, a short theater production, and a year-round music commitment. Those are four entries, but their largest demands may occur in different months. Another student might describe only three commitments, each consuming substantial time throughout the entire school year. Comparing the number of entries would misrepresent their workloads.
Families should therefore maintain two views. One records the history of participation, including changes in responsibility. The other records a realistic calendar for the next several weeks. The calendar should include transportation, preparation, messages, practice, and cleanup. An activity described as a two-hour meeting may require another two hours of travel and preparation. Those additional demands are real even when the application form never asks about them separately.
There is also a distinction between related activities and duplicate accounting. Playing in a school ensemble and a weekend youth orchestra can be separate commitments. Describing the same concert under an ensemble role, a service project, and a leadership title does not create three independent blocks of contribution. Keep the description understandable and account for the time once.
8 2 A hypothetical weekly decision
Consider a hypothetical student with 168 hours in a week. The following figures illustrate planning arithmetic, not a recommended lifestyle or a finding from admitted-student data.
| Existing commitment | Illustrative weekly hours |
|---|---|
| Sleep | 56 |
| School and commuting | 40 |
| Homework and study | 16 |
| Meals and personal care | 14 |
| Family responsibilities | 10 |
| Unstructured time and relationships | 12 |
| Available for other commitments and contingency | 20 |
A hypothetical arithmetic example, not a recommended lifestyle or a measured admitted-student schedule.
Suppose the remaining twenty hours currently include six hours of music practice and rehearsal, three hours of an academic club, eight hours of necessary paid work, and three hours left unassigned. A five-hour research opportunity cannot be added simply because it sounds desirable. The student must identify what changes. Treating the three unassigned hours as expendable also leaves no room for an unusually difficult assignment, a longer work shift, or an event running late.
Several decisions could be reasonable. The student might decline the opportunity, ask whether it can begin during a less crowded season, or replace a club that no longer provides meaningful learning. A two-hour introductory project might fit if the student and supervisor agree on a narrower task. If the paid work is necessary, reducing those hours may not be available at all.
The decisive question is whether the proposed learning justifies its specific cost to this student. The study cannot assign a numerical admissions return to music, work, or research. A manageable, well-supervised project may be worthwhile. A vague promise of a publication accompanied by unpredictable hours may be a poor choice. Both conclusions depend on the actual opportunity.
8 3 Evaluating the next hour
The benefit of the next hour can depend on the stage of an existing commitment. An additional hour of aimless attendance might add little. An hour spent getting feedback on a draft, fixing an unreliable device, or preparing to teach a new lesson could produce clear progress. This is the practical meaning of marginal value: what the next increment of time changes.
It is useful to ask the student to name the current bottleneck. Perhaps a debate team needs better practice feedback, a tutoring program has inconsistent attendance, or a student musician cannot yet perform a difficult passage reliably. A modest commitment to that bottleneck may be more useful than joining another organization. This is a recommendation about productive work, not a claim that depth always defeats breadth in admissions.
Exploration also has value. A beginner needs some time to discover whether an activity is engaging before there can be sustained expertise. The family should agree on a trial period and a review point. Continuing, narrowing, or leaving a commitment can all be responsible decisions. Withdrawal should involve notice and a handover when other people depend on the student.
8 4 Comparing summer opportunities
Evaluate a summer option through its teaching, supervision, tasks, accessibility, and cost. The institution's name is one piece of information about the setting. It does not reveal how much the student will actually practice, whether feedback is individualized, or whether the claimed relationship with that institution is substantive.
Ask for a sample schedule, instructor qualifications, the expected student-to-instructor ratio, and an explanation of the work students complete themselves. For a research experience, ask who defines the question, who teaches the method, who checks the analysis, and how a student's contribution is documented. For an arts program, ask about rehearsal time, critique, and portfolio development. For a civic program, ask which community partner defines the need and what the partner receives.
Calculate total cost rather than tuition alone. Travel, accommodation, equipment, and earnings forgone can materially change the decision. A local job and an independent project might offer a better combination for one student; an intensive residential program with substantial aid might be an excellent option for another. This review does not establish a universal preference between them.
A completion certificate, selectivity claim, or university logo should not substitute for these answers. The family should be able to explain the purchase without mentioning a hoped-for admission: this opportunity supplies particular instruction, equipment, mentorship, or community that the student needs. If that explanation remains unclear, seek more information before committing resources.
8 5 Planning within the student's circumstances
A useful plan begins with the opportunities and obligations that exist. For a rural student, travel may be the limiting factor. For a working student, shifts may be fixed. For a caregiver, availability may change unexpectedly. For an international student, the school calendar, examination system, and local organizations may not resemble American extracurricular structures.
These differences call for different implementation choices. A student without a nearby laboratory could learn a method through an accessible dataset, conduct a carefully bounded local observation project, or develop another interest entirely. A student without a formal debate team could practice public speaking through an existing school or community setting. Such alternatives should be chosen because the work is meaningful and feasible, not presented as universally equivalent substitutes for every specialized opportunity.
When family responsibilities occupy substantial time, describe their practical demands without manufacturing an organization around them. The activities discussed in section 6.7 can be explained at a level the student is comfortable sharing. Context does not require publishing intimate details about another person's health, finances, or circumstances to justify a shorter list.
8 6 Keeping a useful activity record
A modest logbook can improve both planning and later accuracy. After a meaningful period of work, record the date, approximate time, task, student role, collaborators, output, feedback, and next step. A few sentences can be sufficient. The record should help the student remember and reflect; it should not become a daily surveillance system.
Useful evidence might include a rehearsal program, a project version, meeting notes, a supervisor's feedback, a lesson plan, or a short account of a problem solved. Save material that belongs to the student and can be retained appropriately. Do not collect private information about beneficiaries merely to create an impressive application archive.
Separate completed work from plans. “Drafted a lesson and tested it with two learners” is different from “planning a districtwide curriculum.” Both can matter to the student's development, but only the first describes something already accomplished. Keeping dates makes it easier to distinguish what existed when an application was submitted from what happened afterward.
Record setbacks as well. A prototype that repeatedly failed, a poorly attended meeting, or an unsuccessful competition can reveal what changed in the student's methods. The purpose of the log is to preserve an honest account of development, including the work that did not end in a public success.
8 7 Reporting quantities with care
Numbers should clarify the scale of work. They should not make a claim larger than the evidence supports. Ten workshops, fifty registrations, thirty distinct attendees, and twenty repeat participants describe different things. A student should know which number is being reported and how it was counted.
Digital reach requires particular care. Views, followers, downloads, active users, and people helped are not interchangeable. A webpage receiving many visits does not establish that every visitor learned something, changed behavior, or received meaningful assistance. A factual statement about distribution can stand on its own without becoming an unsupported statement about impact.
A guide is an output. Documented use or a measured change in a reader's understanding is an observed outcome. Claiming that the guide caused that change is a causal effect claim and requires evidence that addresses alternative explanations. Longer duration alone does not establish causation. An activity description can report useful work accurately without making that stronger claim.
Group achievements should also be attributed appropriately. A fundraiser's total receipts belong to the team or organization unless the student independently generated that amount. The student's contribution might be scheduling volunteers, designing publicity, keeping accounts, or securing a specific donation. Clear attribution helps a reader understand responsibility while preserving credit for other people.
8 8 Describing roles clearly
An activity description is most useful when it answers three questions: what the student did, whom or what the work served, and what changed or was produced. A title can help orient the reader, but it should not carry the explanation by itself.
Consider this entirely hypothetical description: “Scheduled six weekly tutoring sessions, prepared algebra practice, and coordinated three peer tutors.” It communicates actions and responsibility without claiming that every learner's progress resulted from one student. If attendance records or feedback support a further statement, that information can be added within the form's limits. If such evidence does not exist, the description remains informative.
Choose verbs that match authority. “Assisted,” “designed,” “coordinated,” “maintained,” and “led” describe different roles. A student who contributed code should not claim sole authorship of a team application. A participant who suggested an idea should not automatically use “founder.” A cofounder can identify that role and then explain the work performed.
Respect the institution's requested format. MIT's current instructions request four meaningful activities and direct applicants to use the form rather than a résumé. This illustrates why families should check the live requirements instead of assuming that every college wants the same number or presentation. [G02]
8 9 Describing research and publication
Research descriptions should make the student's contribution understandable. Identify the question, the method learned or used, the part completed, the supervision received, and the status of the output. Reading background literature, cleaning data, performing experiments, writing software, and interpreting results are different contributions. Each can be substantial when described accurately.
Publication status also needs precision. A draft is not an accepted paper. A manuscript posted publicly before formal review should be described as a preprint when that is its status. A journal submission, a journal acceptance, a conference presentation, and a workshop paper should retain their actual labels. Do not collapse them into a general claim of peer-reviewed publication without checking what review occurred.
The same principle applies to authorship and affiliation. A student's name on a paper does not explain the contribution by itself. Working with a university mentor does not necessarily mean the student was employed by the university or enrolled in its research program. Record the relationship as it existed.
A negative or inconclusive result can still represent careful research. Families should avoid making publication the only acceptable endpoint. A well-documented analysis, an improved method, or an honest explanation of why the initial approach failed can provide stronger evidence of learning than an output whose process the student cannot explain. This is an educational judgment, not a measured admissions ranking.
8 10 The parent's role
Parents can make participation possible through transportation, a workable budget, help identifying accessible opportunities, and regular conversations about workload. They can ask whether the student is learning, whether promises match the experience, and whether adults are providing appropriate instruction. They can also help the student recognize paid work and ordinary responsibilities as worthy of an accurate account.
The student's decisions and work should remain recognizable. A parent may help clarify a confusing description, but should not supply achievements, invent motivation, or quietly perform the project. If an adult creates most of the substance, the resulting activity no longer represents the student's independent contribution. Appropriate mentorship gives feedback and support while allowing the student's judgment and skills to develop.
Use periodic conversations to review commitments without continually redesigning the student's schedule. Ask what has become interesting, what is frustrating, and what the student wants to try next. Listen for responsibilities that have outgrown the original schedule. The family's task is to create conditions for meaningful engagement, not to convert every afternoon into an admissions performance.
8 11 Value that remains after decisions
A strong plan should retain value if every highly selective application is unsuccessful. The student should emerge with skills, knowledge, relationships, useful work, or a clearer understanding of interests. This test helps families separate an educational investment from a purchase whose appeal rests entirely on a predicted college outcome.
The question is practical: would the student still be glad to have spent this time if no admissions officer saw it? Not every difficult rehearsal, shift, or experiment will feel enjoyable. The broader commitment should nevertheless offer a reason to persist that the student can explain in their own words.
Admitted-student profiles can expand a family's imagination about what engagement looks like. They cannot identify one allocation of hours that guarantees the same result. Use the evidence to notice possibilities, examine unsupported assumptions, and choose work the student can sustain honestly. The lasting objective is a young person better prepared to learn, contribute, and exercise judgment wherever college begins.
9 Limitations and a stronger research agenda
9 1 A selected public record cannot represent every applicant
The central limitation is the way the evidence becomes public. An eligible outcome must be reported in a public, discoverable account that provides enough information for inclusion. The student may write the account, participate in an interview, or appear in an account assembled by someone else. Each step can select a different kind of person or experience. The resulting corpus contains useful evidence about its records, but it does not represent a known fraction of all successful applicants. There is no defensible sampling weight that converts the 96 profiles into a population estimate.
The search was extensive within its defined workflow, but it did not inspect every page, platform, language, or video. Search rankings are dynamic. Private groups, deleted posts, inaccessible transcripts, paywalls, and unindexed materials create additional gaps. Some students protect their privacy by publishing no application material. These limitations mean that the phrase all online applications would be an inaccurate description of this study, even if many more profiles were added.
Coverage across institutions and years helps avoid relying on a single school's publicity or one admissions season. It does not solve selection. Likewise, a larger convenience sample would reduce some random instability within the collected material but would not automatically remove systematic differences between people who publish and people who do not. The source register and documented search boundaries are therefore more informative than a claim that the sample has reached an unspecified level of completeness.
9 2 A public activity history is not the submitted file
Many sources were written after admission, sometimes after enrollment. Retrospective narratives can combine predecision activities, later developments, and the author's present interpretation. Even a genuine admitted student may understandably describe an experience differently from the way it appeared in the original application. The study distinguishes those public accounts from authenticated admissions files, but cannot reconstruct the exact information available to each committee at the time of decision.
This is particularly important for research, awards, and organizations that continued developing during senior year. A paper published after an admission decision could not have influenced that decision in its later published form. A project might nonetheless have appeared earlier as work in progress. Without dated application copies and update records, the study cannot resolve such timing for every achievement. It therefore avoids counting a later public accomplishment as a demonstrated reason for admission.
The same timing problem affects four-year advice. An entrant may have taken a gap year, started an activity before ninth grade, or benefited from an opportunity available only after graduation. Their history can still illuminate forms of engagement, but it cannot automatically become a schedule that a current ninth grader can reproduce before senior-year applications. The roadmap in this report is explicitly a planning framework, not a reconstruction of an average admitted student's calendar.
9 3 Coding improves transparency without eliminating judgment
The ten domains organize heterogeneous accounts. Their boundaries require judgment, particularly when one activity involves several functions. The audit corrected broad category mappings, distinguished curricular work from extracurricular engagement, and checked denominators. Those steps improve consistency. They do not eliminate ambiguity in a source that provides little detail or retrospectively combines several commitments.
AI assistance also creates limitations that should remain visible. The study used coordinated extraction, source checks, a targeted audit, and scripted calculations. It did not conduct independent human double coding of every record, calculate a validated inter-rater reliability statistic, or obtain admissions-office verification. A reader can reproduce the supplied counts from the released coded data; reproducing a calculation is different from independently validating every original coding decision.
The evidence supplement therefore includes the codebook, source addresses, neutral identifiers, exclusions, and analysis code. The published dataset minimizes personal information rather than reproducing entire autobiographical accounts. Another researcher can examine a disputed category and show how an alternative rule changes the result. That form of openness is more useful than presenting a single percentage without exposing the decisions behind it.
9 4 Missing comparison groups prevent admissions weights
Every person in the primary corpus has a reported eligible admission or an institutional association with the entering class. There is no systematically assembled group of unsuccessful applicants and no denominator of all applicants pursuing each activity. The dataset consequently cannot estimate the probability of admission conditional on an activity, much less the effect of changing a student's activity plan.
Even a comparison with rejected applicants would require care. Students selecting research, sports, employment, or arts may differ in academic preparation, opportunity, application strategy, and personal circumstances. Institutions may evaluate the same experience differently in different contexts. An observed association could reflect those differences rather than the activity itself. A claim such as research doubles the odds would require evidence capable of addressing those competing explanations.
The study also lacks the committee's internal ratings, recommendations, essays, interview reports, institutional priorities, and judgments about the application as a whole. Isolating activities from that context is useful for this report's topic but incomplete as a description of admission. Families should therefore treat the practical guidance as a method of choosing worthwhile development, not as a substitute for academic preparation or a complete admissions strategy.
9 5 Privacy and proportionate interpretation
Public availability does not make every detail necessary to repeat. The report uses neutral case identifiers and avoids compiling sensitive student-level characteristics that are not required for its analysis. Source links preserve provenance while the narrative concentrates on the activity and the relevant interpretive question. A student's public story should not become an invitation to investigate private records or compare intimate family circumstances.
The two excluded records also require proportionate language. An unresolved discrepancy or unclear pathway justified setting a record aside from numerical analysis. It did not justify accusing the author of dishonesty. Similarly, retaining an anonymous report means treating it as a report, with its uncertainty visible. Neither inclusion nor exclusion is a public judgment about the student's character.
For families, the same restraint applies to comparison. A published achievement may omit resources, assistance, unsuccessful attempts, or competing obligations. A student should not feel required to disclose hardship or convert private family life into an admissions narrative. Relevant context can be communicated accurately and selectively, with the student's comfort and the application's actual questions guiding the decision.
9 6 What a stronger next study would require
A stronger descriptive study would begin with a defined sampling frame, such as a randomly selected set of entrants invited through several institutions. Researchers would ask the same activity questions, record nonresponse, and distinguish admitted students from enrolled students. They would preserve institution and cohort denominators and document how missing responses differ from explicit reports of no participation. This would improve estimates of participation, although it would still not establish causation.
To study admissions associations, researchers would need comparable information from the applicant population, including unsuccessful applicants. Activities would need consistent measures of duration, responsibility, independence, outputs, recognition, and timing. School opportunities, work obligations, available resources, and academic preparation would need to be recorded sufficiently to interpret differences. The design should avoid reducing all of that information to a title or a binary research indicator.
To approach causal questions, researchers would need a credible way to separate an opportunity's effects from the characteristics of students who obtain it. A carefully designed allocation process or another defensible source of variation might help, depending on the question. Randomly encouraging participation, for example, would raise different analytical questions from randomly offering access. It would also be necessary to examine educational benefits, costs, and burdens, not just a highly selective admission outcome.
Independent coding and replication would strengthen each stage. Researchers could preregister definitions, publish a protocol, compare coders before resolving disagreements, and report sensitivity to reasonable alternative classifications. Student privacy and informed participation would need explicit consideration. Such a study would be more demanding than collecting successful profiles, but the additional work follows directly from the stronger claims families would like the evidence to support.
9 7 How to use incomplete evidence responsibly
Uncertainty does not require a family to postpone every decision. It changes the standard for making one. When choosing between two activities, prefer an explanation grounded in the student's interests, feasible participation, quality of instruction, opportunity for responsibility, and costs. Ask what benefit would remain if the activity never appeared in an application. A choice with several credible benefits is less dependent on an admissions effect that no one has measured.
When new success stories appear, compare them with the source questions in this report. Is the outcome explicit? Is the cohort clear? Is the account a full inventory or a brief feature? Did the work happen before the decision? What did the student personally do? What information is missing? These questions improve interpretation without requiring a family to become professional researchers or to distrust every account.
The appropriate level of confidence depends on the claim. There is direct support for the counts in the coded corpus. There is separate support for what official guidance says. There are reasoned grounds for planning around learning, responsibility, and realistic time. There is insufficient support for assigning universal admissions points, prescribing a mandatory combination, or promising that a costly opportunity will pay for itself through admission.
10 Conclusion
The recent public evidence contains many forms of serious engagement. It includes research and specialized achievements, but also creative practice, teaching, school communities, sports, paid employment, and family responsibility. The most defensible pattern is not a single preferred activity. It is that the meaning of an activity depends on the work, the student's contribution, the available context, and the evidence used to describe it.
The numerical results make that distinction concrete. They record what 96 selected public profiles document, while the sensitivity analysis shows how strongly some frequencies change with source format. The larger entering-student surveys add perspective on conventional activities and employment. Official guidance provides a basis for contextual planning and accurate reporting. None of those layers converts a successful public story into a guaranteed path for another student.
For a family planning four years, the useful response is to build a sequence of feasible commitments that can develop over time. Explore enough to learn what fits. Deepen skills where the work remains meaningful. Accept responsibility, seek feedback, and improve the contribution. Adjust when interests or circumstances change. Describe the resulting experience honestly, including ordinary duties that matter in the student's life. Pursue distinction when it grows from substantive work, rather than treating the name of an activity as a substitute for that work.
An excellent high-school plan should remain worthwhile across several possible college outcomes. It can prepare a student to learn, contribute, collaborate, and exercise judgment wherever they enroll. That is a sound basis for allocating four years of effort, and a more supportable conclusion than any numerical ranking of extracurricular labels available from the public evidence reviewed here.
Appendix A Case register
These 96 neutral identifiers refer to public profiles associated with fall entry in 2024, 2025, or 2026. Institution names represent reported admissions or the identified institution of entry. Domain codes mean documented mentions under this study's rules. An omitted code means unknown participation, not demonstrated absence. Source links retain provenance; the register is minimized rather than anonymous.
ST = service and teaching; AW = arts and writing; AT = athletics; RE = research; WF = work and family responsibilities; AC = academic clubs and competitions; CG = civic and environmental organizing and school governance; TE = technical creation and enterprise; PL = programs internships and independent learning; IH = informal hobbies.
| Case | Entry | Institutions | Documented domains | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NE01 | 2025 | Harvard | ST, AW, RE, WF, AC, CG | SRC001 |
| NE02 | 2026 | Princeton | ST, WF, AC, PL | SRC002 |
| NE03 | 2025 | Princeton | ST, AW, AT, RE, AC, CG, PL | SRC003 |
| NE04 | 2026 | Columbia | ST, AT, RE, WF, AC | SRC004 |
| NE05 | 2024 | Columbia, Princeton | ST, AW, CG, PL | SRC005 |
| NE06 | 2025 | Columbia | ST, AW, RE, WF, AC, CG, PL | SRC006 |
| NE07 | 2025 | Brown, Yale | ST, AW, AT, AC, CG, PL | SRC007 |
| NE08 | 2025 | Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton | AT, RE, WF, AC | SRC008 |
| NE09 | 2024 | Harvard, MIT, Yale | ST, RE, WF, AC | SRC009 |
| NE10 | 2024 | Princeton | ST, AT, AC, CG, IH | SRC010 |
| NE11 | 2026 | Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth | ST, AW, CG, IH | SRC011 |
| NE12 | 2026 | Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Princeton, Stanford | ST, AT, RE, AC, CG, PL | SRC012 |
| NE13 | 2026 | Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale | ST, RE, WF, AC, CG | SRC013 |
| NE14 | 2025 | Yale | ST, AW, RE, WF, AC, CG, PL | SRC014 |
| NE15 | 2026 | Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn | AW, AT, WF, AC, TE | SRC015 |
| NE16 | 2026 | Penn | ST, AT, AC, TE, PL | SRC016 |
| NE17 | 2025 | UChicago | AW, AT, WF, AC, CG, TE | SRC017 |
| NE18 | 2025 | Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Penn | ST, CG, PL | SRC018 |
| IV-CO01 | 2024 | Cornell | ST, CG | SRC019 |
| IV-CO02 | 2024 | Cornell | ST, AT | SRC019 |
| IV-CO03 | 2024 | Cornell | ST, AW | SRC019 |
| IV-CO04 | 2024 | Cornell | ST | SRC019 |
| IV-CO05 | 2024 | Cornell | ST | SRC019 |
| IV-CO06 | 2024 | Cornell | ST | SRC020 |
| IV-CO07 | 2024 | Cornell | AT | SRC020 |
| IV-CO08 | 2024 | Cornell | AW | SRC020 |
| IV-CO09 | 2024 | Cornell | AT, IH | SRC020 |
| IV-CO10 | 2025 | Cornell | ST, AT, PL | SRC021 |
| IV-CO11 | 2025 | Cornell | ST, RE | SRC021 |
| IV-CO12 | 2025 | Cornell | ST, RE | SRC021 |
| IV-CO13 | 2025 | Cornell | ST, AT, PL | SRC021 |
| IV-CO14 | 2026 | Cornell | TE | SRC022 |
| IV-CO15 | 2026 | Cornell | ST, AW | SRC022 |
| IV-CO16 | 2026 | Cornell | ST, AT | SRC022 |
| IV-PE01 | 2024 | Penn | AW | SRC023 |
| IV-PE02 | 2024 | Penn | ST, AW, AC | SRC023 |
| IV-PE03 | 2024 | Penn | ST, AW | SRC023 |
| IV-PE04 | 2024 | Penn | AT, TE | SRC023 |
| IV-PE05 | 2024 | Penn | AT | SRC023 |
| IV-PE06 | 2025 | Penn | ST, AW, RE, CG, PL | SRC024 |
| IV-PE07 | 2026 | Penn | ST, AT, PL | SRC025 |
| IV-PE08 | 2026 | Penn | ST | SRC026 |
| IV-PE09 | 2026 | Penn | AW, RE | SRC026 |
| IV-PE10 | 2026 | Penn | RE | SRC026 |
| IV-BR01 | 2025 | Brown | ST, AW, RE, AC | SRC027 |
| IV-BR02 | 2025 | Brown | ST, AT, WF, AC, CG | SRC028 |
| IV-BR03 | 2025 | Brown | ST, RE, AC, CG | SRC029 |
| IV-BR04 | 2024 | Brown, Dartmouth | ST, RE, CG, PL | SRC030 |
| IV-BR05 | 2025 | Brown | ST, AW, RE, CG, PL | SRC031 |
| IV-BR06 | 2024 | Brown | ST, AW, AT, RE, AC, CG | SRC032 |
| IV-BR08 | 2024 | Brown | AW | SRC033 |
| IV-BR09 | 2026 | Brown | ST, AW | SRC034 |
| IV-BR10 | 2026 | Brown | AW, PL, IH | SRC034 |
| IV-BR11 | 2026 | Brown | AW | SRC034 |
| IV-DA01 | 2025 | Dartmouth | AW, WF, AC, CG, PL | SRC035 |
| IV-DA02 | 2025 | Dartmouth | ST, AW, AT, WF, CG, PL, IH | SRC036 |
| IV-DA03 | 2026 | Dartmouth | ST, AW, CG | SRC037 |
| IV-DA04 | 2025 | Dartmouth | ST, AW, TE | SRC038 |
| IV-DA05 | 2025 | Dartmouth | ST, AW, AT, RE, TE, PL | SRC039 |
| IV-DA06 | 2024 | Dartmouth | ST, AW, CG | SRC040 |
| IV-DA07 | 2024 | Dartmouth | AW, RE, WF, AC, CG, IH | SRC041 |
| IV-CO17 | 2025 | Cornell | ST, AW, CG, PL, IH | SRC042 |
| IV-CO18 | 2026 | Cornell | ST, AT, RE, WF, AC, CG, IH | SRC043 |
| IV-PE12 | 2025 | Penn | ST, AT, RE, AC, TE, PL | SRC044 |
| PL001 | 2024 | Duke | RE | SRC045 |
| PL002 | 2024 | Duke | ST, AW, PL | SRC045 |
| PL003 | 2024 | Duke | ST, AW, TE | SRC045 |
| PL004 | 2024 | Duke | ST, AT, RE, IH | SRC045 |
| PL005 | 2024 | Duke | ST, CG | SRC045 |
| PL006 | 2025 | Duke | ST, AT, CG, IH | SRC046 |
| PL007 | 2025 | Stanford | AT, AC, TE | SRC047 |
| PL008 | 2026 | Columbia, Cornell, Duke, MIT, Penn, Stanford, Yale | ST, AT, RE, AC, CG, PL | SRC048 |
| PL009 | 2026 | UChicago | ST, AW, AT, WF, AC, CG, IH | SRC049 |
| PL010 | 2026 | UChicago | ST, AT, RE, WF, CG, PL | SRC050 |
| PL011 | 2026 | MIT | AW, AT, RE, AC, TE, PL | SRC051 |
| PL012 | 2026 | UChicago | AW, RE, WF, AC, CG | SRC052 |
| PL013 | 2026 | Stanford | ST, WF, AC, PL, IH | SRC053 |
| PL014 | 2024 | Stanford | ST, PL | SRC054 |
| PL015 | 2024 | Stanford | ST, WF | SRC055 |
| PL016 | 2024 | MIT | ST, AT, AC, CG, TE | SRC056 |
| PL017 | 2024 | Duke | AC, TE | SRC057 |
| PL018 | 2024 | Duke | ST, CG, PL | SRC058 |
| PL019 | 2024 | Duke | ST, AC, CG | SRC058 |
| PL020 | 2025 | MIT | ST, AT, RE, WF, AC, TE, PL | SRC059 |
| PL021 | 2025 | Stanford | ST, TE, PL | SRC060 |
| PL022 | 2025 | Stanford | AW, CG | SRC061 |
| PL023 | 2025 | Stanford | ST, WF, CG | SRC062 |
| PL024 | 2025 | Stanford | ST, AC | SRC063 |
| PL025 | 2026 | MIT | ST, CG, TE | SRC064 |
| PL026 | 2024 | UChicago | ST, AW, WF, CG | SRC065 |
| PL027 | 2026 | UChicago | ST, AW, RE, AC, CG, PL | SRC066 |
| PL028 | 2025 | UChicago | RE, AC | SRC067 |
| PL029 | 2025 | UChicago | AT, CG, PL, IH | SRC067 |
| PL030 | 2026 | UChicago | AW, IH | SRC068 |
| PL031 | 2026 | UChicago | AW, AT | SRC068 |
| PL032 | 2026 | UChicago | ST, AW | SRC068 |
Appendix B Reading the data
Each profile contributes at most once to a domain. Domains may overlap. A role may support more than one domain where the source explicitly supplies the relevant detail. Required coursework and unspecified entries are retained in the underlying extraction but omitted from these extracurricular domain counts. The released supplement supplies the full coding rules and the 36 reviewed activity overrides.
The 31 self reports with five or more coded items form a documentation-length subset. Extracted items are not necessarily application slots or simultaneous commitments. The separate flag for 26 apparent inventories uses heterogeneous extractor judgments. It does not authenticate a complete submitted application, and the two subsets are not nested.
Counts and percentages can be reproduced with the supplied Python standard-library script. The reproduction verifies the arithmetic of released coding. It does not authenticate admission, reconstruct committee decisions, or establish causal admissions weights.
References and source register
Context references identify guidance, academic research, and separately published surveys. Case identifiers link to Appendix A; SRC identifiers resolve to the original public profile pages. All sources were retrieved for this study on November 10, 2026. Current guidance may differ from requirements in earlier cycles.
D01 Original descriptive analysis for this study. Ninety-six profiles, 68 pages, harmonized coding, sensitivity results, and reproduction code are documented in the accompanying evidence supplement.
D02 Operational search audit. The supplement records 135 profile-discovery queries and selected exclusion events. It is not a complete denominator of all search results screened.
G01 Common App. Approaching the Activities section. 2023. Read source.
G02 MIT Admissions. Essays activities and academics. Current page. Read source.
G03 MIT Admissions. What we look for. Current page. Read source.
G04 Harvard College. Application Tips. Current page. Read source.
G05 Yale Undergraduate Admissions. What Yale Looks For. Current page. Read source.
G06 Stanford Undergraduate Admission. Holistic Admission. Current indexed page. Read source. Direct open timed out; guidance checked from substantial search-indexed official page text.
G07 Penn Admissions. Activities. Current page. Read source.
G09 Brown Undergraduate Admission. Admission Process. Current page. Read source.
G10 Brown Undergraduate Admission. Supplementary Materials. Current page. Read source.
G11 Dartmouth Admissions. Counselors. Current page. Read source.
G16 Ivy League. Prospective Athlete Information. Current page. Read source.
G17 MIT Admissions. Does MIT recruit athletes. Current page. Read source.
R01 Park Julie J and colleagues. Inequality Beyond Standardized Tests Trends in Extracurricular Activity Reporting in College Applications Across Race and Class. 2025 journal article; December 2024 preprint. DOI 10.3102/00028312241292309. Read source.
R02 Chetty Raj Deming David J and Friedman John N. Diversifying Societys Leaders The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges. August 2025 working paper; journal publication listed February 2026. Read source.
A01 The Daily Princetonian. Frosh Survey 2028 Academics. 2024. Read source.
A02 The Daily Princetonian. Frosh Survey 2028 Methods and introduction. 2024. Read source.
A03 The Daily Princetonian. Frosh Survey 2029 Academics. 2025. Read source.
A04 The Daily Princetonian. Frosh Survey 2029 About. 2025. Read source.
A05 The Daily Princetonian. Frosh Survey 2030 Academics. 2026. Read source.
A06 The Daily Princetonian. Frosh Survey 2030 About. 2026. Read source.
A07 Church Samuel A and Hung Madeleine A The Harvard Crimson. Class of 2028 Recruited Athletes Boost Average Athlete SAT Scores by 110 Points Survey Finds. 2024-12-05. Read source.
A08 Crimson Education. Examples of Extracurricular Activities from Top Admits. Updated 2026-10-26. Read source.
G21 MIT Admissions. Extracurricular activities. Current page. Read source.
Public profile sources
SRC001 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-03-17. Profiles NE01. Open original profile source.
SRC002 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-12. Profiles NE02. Open original profile source.
SRC003 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-12-13. Profiles NE03. Open original profile source.
SRC004 Reddit r/ApplyingIvyLeague. 2025-12-17. Profiles NE04. Open original profile source.
SRC005 Crimson Global Academy. Publication date not stated. Profiles NE05. Open original profile source.
SRC006 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-02-05. Profiles NE06. Open original profile source.
SRC007 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-07-06. Profiles NE07. Open original profile source.
SRC008 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-03-30. Profiles NE08. Open original profile source.
SRC009 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-05-05. Profiles NE09. Open original profile source.
SRC010 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-03-29. Profiles NE10. Open original profile source.
SRC011 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2026-06-18. Profiles NE11. Open original profile source.
SRC012 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2026-08-03. Profiles NE12. Open original profile source.
SRC013 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2026-03-30. Profiles NE13. Open original profile source.
SRC014 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-18. Profiles NE14. Open original profile source.
SRC015 People. 2026-05-24. Profiles NE15. Open original profile source.
SRC016 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2026-03-28. Profiles NE16. Open original profile source.
SRC017 Reddit r/collegeresults. Publication date not stated. Profiles NE17. Open original profile source.
SRC018 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-06-12. Profiles NE18. Open original profile source.
SRC019 Cornell Chronicle. 2024-08-19. Profiles IV-CO01, IV-CO02, IV-CO03, IV-CO04, IV-CO05. Open original profile source.
SRC020 Cornell Chronicle. 2024-03-28. Profiles IV-CO06, IV-CO07, IV-CO08, IV-CO09. Open original profile source.
SRC021 Cornell Chronicle. 2025-03-27. Profiles IV-CO10, IV-CO11, IV-CO12, IV-CO13. Open original profile source.
SRC022 Cornell Chronicle. 2026-03-26. Profiles IV-CO14, IV-CO15, IV-CO16. Open original profile source.
SRC023 The Daily Pennsylvanian. 2024-01-18. Profiles IV-PE01, IV-PE02, IV-PE03, IV-PE04, IV-PE05. Open original profile source.
SRC024 Borderless. 2026-05-14. Profiles IV-PE06. Open original profile source.
SRC025 The Daily Pennsylvanian. 2026-01-15. Profiles IV-PE07. Open original profile source.
SRC026 The Daily Pennsylvanian. 2026-04-02. Profiles IV-PE08, IV-PE09, IV-PE10. Open original profile source.
SRC027 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-12-16. Profiles IV-BR01. Open original profile source.
SRC028 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-12-17. Profiles IV-BR02. Open original profile source.
SRC029 Borderless. 2026-03-27. Profiles IV-BR03. Open original profile source.
SRC030 Borderless. 2025-05-14. Profiles IV-BR04. Open original profile source.
SRC031 Borderless. 2025-04-23. Profiles IV-BR05. Open original profile source.
SRC032 Borderless. 2025-04-07. Profiles IV-BR06. Open original profile source.
SRC033 Brown University. 2024-09-03. Profiles IV-BR08. Open original profile source.
SRC034 Brown University. 2026-09-10. Profiles IV-BR09, IV-BR10, IV-BR11. Open original profile source.
SRC035 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-12-31. Profiles IV-DA01. Open original profile source.
SRC036 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-12-14. Profiles IV-DA02. Open original profile source.
SRC037 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-16. Profiles IV-DA03. Open original profile source.
SRC038 Borderless. 2025-04-05. Profiles IV-DA04. Open original profile source.
SRC039 Borderless. 2026-01-18. Profiles IV-DA05. Open original profile source.
SRC040 Borderless. 2026-03-24. Profiles IV-DA06. Open original profile source.
SRC041 Borderless. 2024-05-21. Profiles IV-DA07. Open original profile source.
SRC042 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2024-12-13. Profiles IV-CO17. Open original profile source.
SRC043 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-22. Profiles IV-CO18. Open original profile source.
SRC044 Borderless. 2025-01-24. Profiles IV-PE12. Open original profile source.
SRC045 Duke University Scholars Program. 2024-10-18. Profiles PL001, PL002, PL003, PL004, PL005. Open original profile source.
SRC046 Duke Baldwin Scholars. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL006. Open original profile source.
SRC047 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-06-05. Profiles PL007. Open original profile source.
SRC048 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2026-06-27. Profiles PL008. Open original profile source.
SRC049 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-20. Profiles PL009. Open original profile source.
SRC050 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2026-06-23. Profiles PL010. Open original profile source.
SRC051 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-20. Profiles PL011. Open original profile source.
SRC052 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-21. Profiles PL012. Open original profile source.
SRC053 Reddit r/chanceme. 2026-03-28. Profiles PL013. Open original profile source.
SRC054 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL014. Open original profile source.
SRC055 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL015. Open original profile source.
SRC056 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL016. Open original profile source.
SRC057 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL017. Open original profile source.
SRC058 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL018, PL019. Open original profile source.
SRC059 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL020. Open original profile source.
SRC060 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL021. Open original profile source.
SRC061 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL022. Open original profile source.
SRC062 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL023. Open original profile source.
SRC063 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL024. Open original profile source.
SRC064 Greenhouse. Publication date not stated. Profiles PL025. Open original profile source.
SRC065 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2023-12-19. Profiles PL026. Open original profile source.
SRC066 Reddit r/collegeresults. 2025-12-20. Profiles PL027. Open original profile source.
SRC067 University of Chicago. 2025-10-01. Profiles PL028, PL029. Open original profile source.
SRC068 University of Chicago. 2026-10-01. Profiles PL030, PL031, PL032. Open original profile source.
