activity hours...please help

dashboard · 10-30-2009, 03:34 PM

Okay, so for my activities section, I found that most of the activities I do (like science club, math club) only require about 2-3 hours a week time commitment, although it is in these clubs that I have really good leadership positions/big awards (some national). another activity I have, which is a position at the school board, has only two four-hr. meetings per month (so that averages out to two hours a week). Same with science, only four hours a week. However, that's during the year, and during the summer, I am much involved with science and OUTSIDE of the school clubs, I have other science activities/math activities that are completely unrelated to school.
So, although i have only a few hours (about 15) listed on the 5 extracurricular section, as long as I elaborate on my further involvement in a resume, is it okay? Will I look bad compared to people who spend about 20 hours a week on one activity?
any advice/suggestions would be appreciated. i already sent them in my resume.

CalAlum · 10-30-2009, 03:45 PM

^^It will be fine. Stop fretting.

Djokovic · 10-30-2009, 04:13 PM

...
dude it is fine.

dashboard · 10-30-2009, 06:14 PM

I hope u guys are right....how many hours you spend on an activity shouldn't determine how passionate you are about it...at least that's what I think

Djokovic · 10-30-2009, 08:02 PM

I think hours is important but there are other factors too.

1. how much you accomplished in it (awards from it?)
2. how many years u did it
3. How many weeks you do it (1hr/week for 40 weeks > 15hr/week for 2 weeks)
4. Your role in it. (Vice pres? pres? officer?)

If you really are passionate about it, write about it more in the additional info part!
Hell write about it on your essays too!

GL to all you EA out there

dashboard · 10-30-2009, 08:17 PM

^yeah, I agree, that's what I meant. It's just that for stuff like math team, asides from attending that weekly lunch meeting and the monthly contest, there's not much physical time you actually spend doing it (3 hours a week at most). Hopefully, the fact that I'm president, have been doing it all four years, won a lot of stuff w/ it, will cancel that out.

Unfortunately, I have many acquaintances who are putting down the same extracurriculars with many many more hours a week on an extracurricular than they actually did, which is kind of base. Hopefully, colleges like MIT will be able to see through stuff like that.

what do you guys think?

sujinpark8 · 10-31-2009, 03:44 PM

I agree with everyone else.
2 of the activities I listed I only do 2-3 hrs per week.
the other 3 are my primary activities and so i average about 8-10 hrs per week but that's spread out. like my school newspaper I do usually 2hrs per week for 3 weeks each month and then 30+ hrs for one week each month when I have to do the layout and put the whole thing together so I wrote I did about 8hrs a week.
don't worry too much about the hours just list the ones you like best

dashboard · 10-31-2009, 05:03 PM

^yeah, that's what I did. There were some activities I spent a lot of time on (like academic team) but I didn't think it was too important ( so i ended up listing on the additional info section), since I feel that although I spent less time on the others, they were more important to me.
hopefully the adcoms understand...