I’m trying to include a detailed documentation of my extracuricular activities in my college application, but all I can find is the Common App’s “activities” section. But the description in there only allows up to 150 characters, which is obviously not enough for a description. Are there any other places I can describe the activities?
Where do you all introduce your activities, e.g. volunteering, drama club, internships?
That’s because the schools don’t want a long list. They’re interested that you did something, the frequency, and a quick description of what you did. Don’t over do it. You don’t get extra points for quantity - in # of activities and descriptions.
Some schools allow an optional essay and you can expand there. If they don’t want it, don’t provide.
Some will take an activity and write their essay about it.
But any activity can be described in brief.
Your extra description isn’t as important or impactful to admission as you think it is. Make sure they know what you did (briefly) and what you accomplished.
Good luck.
You also get 50 characters for the position/leadership description and 100 characters for the organization name. You can creatively use all of those characters too. Sentence fragments and abbreviations are ok. If you must, you can use the additional information section to share more detail about certain activities, but ideally not more than a paragraph each… be judicious on your use of this.
Started a business with significant revenues and/or impact? First author of a peer reviewed, published paper in a credible journal? Go ahead and provide more detail. Shadowed a pediatrician for a summer, or captain of the football team? Nope.
Here is some guidance on effectively using the characters in each of the lines you have: 80+ Extracurricular Activity Examples for the Common Application
They specifically don’t want that. That’s why they limit the character count - otherwise students would be writing novels about each of their activities. If you have an activity that is very meaningful to you and which you feel is critical to how you present yourself as an applicant, you can write about it in your personal statement or a supplemental essay. But try to be concise in your activities list and highlight the only the most important things.
(It’s good practice - you’ll need to be concise on your resume, too, when you start applying for jobs, so start thinking now about how you can boil down your main activities to a few impactful bullet points.)
So, I’m going to reply to this as but one admissions reader. Prior to that, a college counselor. First, there is no ‘they’ when referring to AOs…these are people who have different thoughts, preferences, and biases.
As a college counselor, a highly rejective AO once said to me when talking about the addt’l info section ‘if we give a student space to tell us more about themselves, why wouldn’t they use it?’ Indeed. After that, I encouraged ALL my students, even the recruited athletes, to use all of the space on the apps to put themselves in the best light.
Now, as one who reads lots of apps everyday for a different institution, I feel the same way. I read every word of every app, and appreciate the extra detail that some students add. Of course there are good ways and bad ways to do that…for example, do add details or color not contained elsewhere in the app, and don’t be repetitive or cliche, etc.
Said differently, which student would I (or any admissions person) be likely to know more about when I’m done reading the app? One who uses every character in the Activities descriptions and/or utilizes all or part of the 650 words in addt’l info section and/or completes all the ‘optional’ supplementals? Or one who didn’t max out their descriptions, didn’t write in the addt’l info section or didn’t complete the ‘optional’ supplementals? IME there are plenty of activities that could benefit from some more detail/color/context.
For the record, I have never heard someone involved in admissions say that they don’t like it when a student uses all of the space they are allotted in the app…again, with the caveat it’s additive to the app.
You need to learn to summarize. 150 characters is plenty to do so for a single activity.
And you can add relevant addition info in the additional info section, and in your essays.
Great insight - thank you for your detailed thoughts!
Just for your consideration, the Yale Admissions Podcast addressed this issue in Episode 17 (The Choices Game). In this episode, they upvoted or downvoted various common choices. The relevant section:
[Mark] All right. Number one on my list, a choice that an applicant might make, would be to use the additional information section to include a long resume listing every Science Olympiad or debate team competition they have participated in and their various awards or recognitions from them.
[Hannah] If you have been a listener of this podcast, hopefully this won’t come as a surprise. But I’m going to have to downvote this choice.
[John] I’m going to have to downvote with a little–
[BUZZER]
[John]–asterisk that we can explore later.
[Hannah] Yeah.
[Mark] But Hannah, why downvote?
[Hannah] So we give you space on the application to tell us the things that we want to hear of you. [LAUGHS] So we give you a place to list your extracurricular activities, to list your honors and awards. That space is limited and it’s limited for a good reason. More is not always better in these cases. We just want to see what has been the most important to you. And listing a resume in the additional information is often redundant and it often doesn’t give us more information that’s actually helpful to us.
[John] I agree. I think when you fill out pieces of an application, there’s meant to be a reflective process involved as well.
[Hannah] Yeah.
[John] Not just a brain dump. And aside from not wanting to read lots of extraneous information, we’re really keenly interested in what you’ve reflected on as important.
[Hannah] Yeah.
[John] And how you convey that.
[Mark] Right.
[Mark] Totally.
[John] Yeah. Now my one little asterisk is, if there’s kind of an acronym, or some detail that you couldn’t fit into the description box, that for some reason we would not understand, that additional information space can be helpful to provide some clarity.
Of course this is only one group of people at one college. Still, I think that concept of reflection, and how you are communicating what is important to you when you are forced to be brief, is an interesting one to consider.
I agree that the additional info section should not be used for a resume dump.
You have gotten good advice and insights already. If you focus on impact/results, you will be surprised at how much you can convey by fully utilizing all the fields that @Mwfan1921 mentioned.
I am not sure if we are allowed to suggest resources here to consult, but if you google The College Essay Guy, he gives really sound advice on all aspects of the application for free, including how to best write your activity descriptions. There are others who also give good advice, but CEG is pretty straightforward and will be easy to digest if you are trying to get these done for fall 2024 applications.