What is the Common App Activity List and Why is it Important?
With Early Action deadlines days away, high school seniors are finalizing and submitting their applications. In addition to their essays, the piece of the Common Application that creates the most anxiety for our students is the activity list.
The Common App activity list is the space on the application where you name and briefly describe your non-academic pursuits. This section of the Common App allows applicants to demonstrate their talents, skills, passions, commitment, and leadership by providing specific examples of extracurricular activities they participated in throughout high school.
In addition to your essays and letters of recommendation, your activities list can make a big difference in your application. It is one of the few holistic sections of the Common Application that help admissions officers understand who you are in addition to your demographic and academic information. According to Jorge Delgado, Associate Director of International Admissions at Brandeis University, “Extracurricular activities can be a great opportunity to see how an applicant has self-directed their passions and interests. There are only so many hours in the day so seeing how a student has involved themselves outside the academic arena is a great way of understanding their potential fit for a university campus.” As a result, you should put as much effort into your Common App activities list as you do for your essays since the activity list can be one of the most defining pieces of your application.
Before beginning the activity list, list all of your high school activities both in and out of school. Of course, there are obvious activities, including athletics, student government, fine arts, high school clubs, journalism and media, academic clubs, community service, internships and jobs, and so on. However, activities can and should include many things you may do outside of school that you might not consider an “activity.” This type of involvement is as important and as impressive as the organized activities listed above. It can include family responsibilities such as taking care of younger siblings or elderly family members, hobbies such as playing a musical instrument or creating your own music, doing yoga, writing, photography, or crafting, getting involved in your church, temple, synagogue or mosque, starting and running your own business (such as tutoring, snow shoveling, dog walking, selling baked goods), taking free, online college courses, teaching yourself a foreign language through apps such as Duolingo, starting or being part of a book club, reading, running your own blog or vlog, and acting as the manager of your fantasy football team. This list is far from exhaustive. If you do anything after school that occupies a significant amount of your time and feel that this activity is an integral part of who you are, then you should include it.
After brainstorming a list of all of your activities throughout high school, carefully consider your list and if you have more than ten, select the ten activities that you feel best represent who you are, your involvement outside of the classroom, and the strengths and values that you will bring with you to college. The activity section of the Common App allows for ten activities; however, that does not mean applicants must have ten activities to be competitive. According to a blog written by an admissions officer at Tufts University, “Just because you can list as many as ten activities on this list does not mean that you should. Maybe you volunteered at a soup kitchen for one week in 9th grade. I’m happy you did this. It’s thoughtful, and hopefully, it got you excited about giving back in the future. But that does not make it something you should include in the “Activities” section of your Common Application. Instead, it would be best if you focused on meaningful activities (that is, meaningful to you – volunteering at a soup kitchen is meaningful, but clearly, it didn’t stick for you). Meaningful activities are things you sustained over time (i.e., not a couple of weeks three years ago). Meaningful activities also require teamwork, leadership skills, specialized knowledge, or significant time or energy. Six meaningful activities can be far more impressive than ten “far-fetched” activities, like going on sunny vacations with your family or joining that club for a hot second in tenth grade before you made the dance team and promptly quit.”
Once you have your final list of the activities you want to include on your Common Application, it’s time to describe your involvement to admissions officers. Unfortunately, you are allowed only 100 characters to name the organization or activity, 50 characters to document your role or leadership in the activity, and 150 characters to describe your involvement. And, yes, you read that correctly, that’s characters (including punctuation and spaces), not words. In other words, you have less than the space of a tweet to describe your involvement. So, the question is, how can you use the limited space you have to define your activities in a way that will help you stand out in the application process?
First, some basic tips. Do not use complete sentences when describing your activities. Feel free to abbreviate (so long as you use an easily recognizable abbreviation). Skip pronouns and articles (if it makes sense without them). Use the “&” sign in place of and, and instead of spelling out numbers under ten, use the numbers.
Use active verbs and try to aim for variety. For example, do not start every description with “participated,” “taught,” or “led.” If you are still participating in an activity, describe it in the present tense, not the past.
Take advantage of the 100-characters you are allowed to name the organization and the 50-characters you are given to describe your role or leadership in order to save characters for the 150-character description. Consider the following (under) 100-character organization description, “Energy Dance Team, a highly selective, multi-day audition-based, competitive hip hop team.” This description uses 89 out of the 100 characters allowed. Seventy of those characters give additional context to the activity without wasting any of the 150-characters when describing your involvement.
Admissions officers are familiar with common activities such as athletics, student government, journalism/media, theater, dance, art, DECA, Model UN, debate, etc. Therefore, wasting characters describing the actual activity (they know what it means to play tennis or be on the debate team) is unnecessary. Additionally, unless you are looking to be recruited as a varsity athlete in college, admissions officers care less about your skill and talent in a sport and more about your impact or contributions to the team. Therefore, before creating your descriptions, brainstorm your content for each activity to make your descriptions the most impactful.
Ask yourself the following questions: what did you do? What were your responsibilities or jobs? Did you take on any unofficial responsibilities or leadership roles, for example, mentoring new members or cheering your team up when they lost? Did you earn any awards or honors, official or unofficial? Did you learn new skills that will help make you a more successful college student? These can be hard skills such as learning Excel, becoming fluent in Spanish or learning about the stock market. Or, they can be soft skills such as improving your communication or public speaking skills or learning to work as part of a team. Did you solve any problems, whether personal challenges, a local issue, or even a global one?
Admissions officers also want to know about the impact of your involvement, whether on your school, local community, yourself, or society in general. Share specific details and examples. For example, the food drive you organized and ran collected enough food to feed 50 local families in need. Or, as a member of the varsity lacrosse team, you made it your mission to mentor and support new team members, ensuring everyone felt included and respected. Don’t forget to consider what impact your involvement had on yourself personally. How did you grow or change as a person? What did you learn? Did you gain new skills? Admissions officers want to know how your involvement in your extracurricular activities will make you a better college student through your contributions to your future college community.
More and more, an applicant’s character is a factor in college admissions. According to a Forbes article, “The fact that 70% of admission officers deem character to be moderately to considerably important to an applicants’ candidacy should have students’ ears perking up. It reinforces the reality that it matters who they are beyond a grade or test score. Empathy, resilience, integrity, selflessness—these attributes are significant and could be factors that give an applicant the bump they need to land in the admit pile.” Therefore, you must use the holistic pieces of your application (your activity list/resume, essays, and letters of recommendation) to demonstrate your core values to the admissions officers reading your applications. Before incorporating your values into your activity descriptions, however, you need to determine what your core values are. Check out this Core Values List to get started. Once you select the values that resonate with you, work to incorporate them into your activity descriptions to help admissions officers understand who you are and why you would be a valuable member of their college community.
It is important not to rush through this section of the Common Application. You should give it the same attention that you give to your essays. Take advantage of the opportunity to share your story with colleges. You are so much more than your grades and test scores, so make sure to let colleges know exactly who you are and what you will bring to campus to make their community a better place.