Guide to Common Application Extracurricular Activities: What Do I List On My Resume?
Elton Lin
By now, you've probably picked up all kinds of extracurriculars over the course of your high school career: varsity sports, robotics club, maybe even volunteering at your local beekeeping farm. Now it's time to put those extracurriculars on your Common App, where there's a section devoted solely for college applicants to list them!
This activities list is very similar to a resume, and, just like writing resumes, putting together your activities list can be a daunting process. It's one thing to have two years as the secretary in school government under your belt, and another to put the experience down on your Common App in a way that appeals to the colleges that will be reading it! Which of your extracurriculars should you choose to share? How do you describe them? Where do you even begin? We've prepared a guide on the Common App activities section to get you on track:
Choosing Your Activities
The activities list has a 10-entry limit, meaning you'll have to be selective when deciding which activities to include on their Common App.
Think about the order of your activities. Just as it is with a resume, the order of your activities and experiences on the list matters! Activities that you think have a stronger impact, greater importance, or the most relevance to the version of yourself that you want to show college admissions boards should come first on your list. We’ll talk more about what makes an activity a “stronger” item for your Common App list in our next few tips, but one general rule of thumb is to highlight activities related to your intended major first. Assuming you have a pretty good idea of what you want your major to be in college, putting activities related to your major first on your activities list will give college admissions boards an idea of your passion for it.
Diversify your categories. However, you shouldn't fill all ten activity spaces with major-related extracurriculars—going overboard is redundant and may make you appear one-dimensional as an applicant. The College App activities section provides a drop-down menu from which applicants can select their activities' categories, e.g. "Cultural" or "Debate/Speech". Have your activities cover a variety of these categories! If you've already decided to talk about your years competing in the Science Olympiad, vary your list by adding your time in the school band, too.
Also, use these drop-down categories to your advantage when diversifying your list. For example, say that you're editor-in-chief for the school newspaper, but you've also been religiously writing a blog on your latest eco-friendly escapades. While these activities may seem to "repeat" in that they're both writing-related activities, you can vary them by categorizing the newspaper as "Journalism/Publication" and the other as "Environmental".
Consider the timing and commitment of your activities. While it is definitely a good idea to prioritize major-related activities first and to diversify your extracurriculars, it is also important to consider how long you have spent engaging in your activities. It's all well and good to include the chemistry club to balance the varsity basketball team, but if you were only part of the club for a month or came to club meetings to passively listen, it's probably better to leave the chemistry club off your list. Colleges want to get a sense of your involvement and commitment in your extracurriculars, and a month in chemistry club does very little to prove your passion for the subject. On the flip side, if there's any activity you've actively engaged in for an extended period of time, that activity is definitely a strong contender for the Common App list.
However, some activities have a set short time frame (e.g. summer research or camp counselor work), and college admissions boards are fully aware of this. In cases like these, your commitment to the activity is shown in the fundamental density of your work despite the short amount of time. Maybe you got into a very selective academic summer program that only lasted for three weeks—the time frame may be short, but the selectivity and likely challenging work of the program more than compensates for that. Time commitment is just one measurement of what colleges are actually concerned about: your passion for and engagement with the activity in question.
Ideally, pick leadership over participation. As a follow-up to the previous point about timing and commitment, prioritize activities in which you served some kind of leadership or otherwise important position, rather than simply being a participatory member. There’s nothing wrong with simply participating—every group needs members for leaders to lead, after all, but in your Common App you want to emphasize activities in which you had an active, essential role. However, leadership isn’t a quality reserved only for presidents, vice-presidents, and directors! If you had an exclusive, important responsibility in your team or club, then that’s leadership that you want to place higher in your activities list.
Personal projects count. The activities you can put on your Common App aren’t limited to things like clubs, summer programs, and sports. You’ll also notice that there are other less “conventional” categories in the aforementioned drop-down menu, too; “Family Responsibilities” and “Foreign Exchange”, for example—and personal projects are perfectly sound options as well! Maybe you have a website devoted to your own short stories, or you sell personal artwork and merchandise online, or you build all kinds of robots and contraptions at home, or you run a how-to YouTube channel and take requests from subscribers—you get the idea. Personal projects and hobbies into which you’ve poured a lot of time and effort are excellent (and incredibly genuine) examples of students’ drive and commitment to pursue what interests them, even beyond the classroom.
Describing Your Activities
Now that you’ve chosen your activities, you’ll have to describe them in a way that exemplifies your experiences, emphasizes your personal involvement, and does so in 150 characters or less for each activity.
Highlight your personal impact. This is the time and place to be self-important. You don’t have to do this at the expense of your peers—teamwork and collaborative achievements are always good to acknowledge—but in your activities descriptions, do bring attention to what you specifically did within the group to help your team succeed. Colleges are interested in you, after all! This means singling out the more exclusive of your successes and responsibilities. What unique role did you play, if this was a collaborative activity? What are some selective awards or honors you received doing this activity? What are some of your most impressive accomplishments? Rather than simply participating in your club or team, what did you do that actively pushed you and your peers towards success, or improved the extracurricular for the ones who will come after you?
The activities list is not the place to prove your writing skills. With only 150 characters to work with per activity entry, you can’t afford to go into too much moving, poetic detail about your role in your extracurriculars. You have the Common App essay section to prove your mettle as a writer; the activities list is about efficiency! Again, much like in a resume, you don’t have to use complete sentences (you can forgo the “I” in “I prepared meals for the homeless”, for example). Avoid unnecessary adverbs and adjectives as well—you can use that space to instead add another crucial detail about your involvement in an activity.
Use action words—they’re brief and powerful. This is another key strategy against wordiness. Instead of loading your description with passive words, helping verbs, tacked-on infinitives, and the like, get straight to the point with action words. For example, “looked for companies to partner with our club” and “go to weekly poetry discussion meetings” will have more impact when rephrased as “established company partnerships” and “discuss poetry weekly”. Action words not only frame your role in the activity, but they also get the message across in fewer words.
Avoid stating the obvious. Sometimes the activities can be somewhat self-explanatory, saving you the need to summarize the obvious. For example, if you’re the captain of your tennis team, you don’t need to mention “played tennis” in your description, as that can be assumed from your activity title. Instead, focus on your role in conducting regular practices, organizing team-building events, planning fundraising events for your team in collaboration with the coach and school, etc. If you volunteered regularly at an animal shelter, talk about the detailed work you did with the animals, e.g. keeping track of feeding times and responding to rescue calls, instead of stating “worked with animals in need”.
Quantify. When you can quantify your responsibilities and successes, do so. For example, saying that you get meals to 500+ homeless people a day, or that you led your speech and debate team to win 2nd place in a competition of 128 teams, makes your specific impact more concrete. In other words, quantitative measurements in your activities descriptions give colleges a better sense of what exactly you did than qualitative ones. (Just make sure not to exaggerate—colleges have enough sense to know something’s not right if applicants claim to have volunteered 60 hours a week!)
With this guide, you should have a better understanding of how to craft your own Common App activities list. It’ll take some more planning, consideration, and editing, but soon enough you’ll have an activities list to be proud of—and one that will impress colleges, too!