Same thing as the title. I hear a lot that you should quantify your impact in the activities section, but the numbers I have are pretty low. Is it better to put the numbers anyway or not? Thank you in advance
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Provide for context but in general quantifying is better.
This is sort of straight out of Rhetoric 101, but I would say yes. Specific numbers have a tendency to grab the reader’s mental attention. So even if the number is low, if it is very specific I think it can help increase the impact of the description.
And for this reason, I would not use a description like, “Raised approximately $250,” if you can avoid it. Much better, I think, to say, “Raised $247.38.” It might seem trivial, but I do think the second is likely to have more rhetorical impact. Indeed, I think the connotation is you are proud of every last cent, which speaks well to your values.
I would only use quantifications that cast your efforts in a positive light. For example, you wouldn’t want to say “tutored a learning disabled student after school in math, and saw a 2% increase in their test performance.” That would make you sound ineffective. But you could look at your result different ways and figure out if there is a way that is positive: for example, that 2%increase might translate from a B- to a B if the student was on the border. So you could say “helped tutee increase performance to a B average” (don’t have to say starting point).
Since your application is partially a marketing effort (you selling yourself to the school you want), choose metrics that help you. For example, if your efforts saw a club membership increase from 4 to 8, you could call it a 100% increase rather than a 4 person increase. If you ran a book drive for a local underresourced school, and you managed to collect 40 books from a total of 30 donors, you might be better to reframe things to emphasize that you conceived the idea, got the school approval, ran a publicity campaign, organized the transport of the books to the schools, and then instead of pointing out that only 30 kids donated, say for example that you received donations from 90% of the homerooms/classes in your high school (if the 30 donors did in fact divide that way), or that you received enough books that you were able to donate to the classroom library of every grade at the underresourced school (if that’s true).
Anyway, there’s a reason that statistics can be looked upon with skepticism, but the fact is, if you are going to include numbers, it makes sense to use the numbers that help you.
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