Regarding activities - you can expand in the Additional information section, correct? I’ve read that you could when looking up strategies on how a student can tell their “complete story” when the activity section only has limited space to type. The Additional information section has a ton of space. I made a template in Word for my D19 of the activity section. For each section I included a note for her on the “character count” limit. She completed it in Word, and then using the “count” feature in Word she tweaks it until she uses all the characters and fills the sections in with the most important highlights of that activity (such as roles, leadership, etc). I did a test on my parent test common app and it copies over great from Word. I especially like the Additional information section because in our draft we keep expanding on her activities and her roles. We keep tweaking it as we recall more specifics. It copies over beautifully from Word to the Additional information section. You can then define different sections with bold and underline - when in common app. And when you copy over to the Common App it counts the words - you get to use up to 650. She was able to tell them her complete story and still have words to spare. The preview feature in the app is a great feature too. You can get a very good idea of how this section will look when the AO reads it. We were bothered at first when we realized the schools on her list don’t have a section to download a resume; however, we actually really like the way it came out by using the Additional information section. So it’s all good.
Really DS could list one EC. “Theatre. 10-60 hours per week throughout the school year”.
@ninakatarina How ARE you handling the hours part of the activities section since theater is super heavy on hours for certain weeks and not as much other weeks? We will run in to the same issue with D21 and ballet. Weeks without rehearsals are about 18 hours. Weeks with rehearsals are about 25 hours. Weeks with shows are almost 35 hours!
@Stuffedquahog - So are you basically attaching all of the main information from the resume in the Additional Information section? We are in the “not enough to fill the spaces” group. D does not have a ton of ECs and we are trying to take what she does have and make it look good. We worked on ti this summer but I looked back at it and don’t think it is very good so we are back t the drawing board.
We leave tomorrow morning for New Orleans to visit Tulane - another weekend of not working on college apps. :-S
D had her first dual enrollment photography class last night. She was so worried because she knows photography class can take up a lot of time (it is a film/darkroom class not digital) and the grade goes on her college transcript. She came home feeling much better about it - teacher was nice and laid back and the class sounds pretty fun.
Hours are hard…averaging is what S19 is resorting to for his golf and debate.
@ThinkOn Yes. I guess that’s really the only option. For S19, he wants to list his summer art classes but some were once a week all summer and one was 40 hours for one week. I don’t want him to use up two spaces for these two classes. He will get them in there somehow but not sure how when the section asks for hours and number of weeks.
Son17 and Son19 just averaged the hours for their ECs in a rough manner. I don’t think the AO’s really expect an exact science on these things. So for example, with soccer they have practice every day or games 3 times a week for up to 12 weeks. He said he spends 20 hours, which is like 3 hours a day for practice and 3 hours for game days, roughly. He might spend more some weeks, or less depending on game location, weather, day of rest etc.
For something like a club he does once a week, he just wrote down an hour per week for the school year and then described what happened in club meetings weekly.
I think the AO’s know how much time sports or theater or marching band take up. I think they want to know how involved you were in something like debate, or sewing club, or volunteer work. They have no idea if a kid is really volunteering 20 hours a week if the kid doesn’t specifically mention it. My son only volunteers about 1x per month for several hours at a time, so he wrote down 1 hour per week, Now the AO will see he did volunteer but it wasn’t an all encompassing EC for him, compared to some of his other ECs.
@momtogkc Yes, that’s exactly it. My daughter has leadership roles in 3 of her EC’s and there are definite items that need to be elaborated on. For example, for the community service club she’s in (Interact), she is President and she brought a new fundraiser to the school. Planning started last March, she found & booked the venue, met with the comedy club organization for fundraising directions and suggestions, she coordinated and participated in extensive solicitations to businesses all summer for the event, and there will be much more work this fall right up until the event date this November. It’s very admirable that she took this on - she didn’t have to - so we are being detailed and spelling it out clearly in the Additional info section, yet not too wordy, but enough to paint a good picture. We are typing it like an outline using both bold and underline and it looks sharp when we click preview. If they have more to say, then they should say it. AO’s won’t know about it unless it’s in their app.
@Stuffedquahog The advice I was given on the ECs is to go for numbers…meaning on the fundraiser you should state either funds raised or expected to raise. The key is on the outcomes. (And that sounds like a great EC!)
@RightCoaster How can you have Summer Activities as a category since it’s not among the choices offered in the drop-down menu? D19 and I are playing around with how to list/categorize her ECs. She’s done two different categories of summer activities but since there’s not enough room to include either as part of her other relevant activities, I can see the value of listing them separately but again I’m not sure what category heading would make sense and I’m not seeing “summer” anywhere. “Other” is something I would naturally avoid.
D19 and I are definitely stumbling a bit out of the gate with this Activities section. We are chronically bumping up against word limits, even for the position/leadership description and org name, where we never have enough room. I also am not sure what order we should put them in so we’re tweaking that. I do like the Preview feature.
@homerdog What was the advice you got about phrasing in the Activities section? You’re suppose to use action words, like in a traditional resume?
@SDCounty3Mom he listed it as Academic in the Activity Type Field, Participant, Summer Academic Programs in the position/organization name field, and then he listed some summer courses he completed certificates in and he was also selected to go to an engineering camp one summer where he figured out which type of engineering he liked best.
Does it add much? Prob not, but at least somebody might read and think that my son didn’t just sit around every summer playing video games and sleeping until noon, lol.
The character limits are definitely tough. We abbreviated some where possible (ex. 9th/10th), used words like “led team to…”, “developed” “increased ___ participation”, “extensive involvement in…”. Even for his life guarding job, which is pretty basic and obvious, we added “received recognition and raises each summer”.
I agree with averaging hours over the course of the year. When D17 listed theater activities, hers took up the entire school year, and yes, some weeks were 15 hours and some were over 40 so we did a rough average.
I think it’s actually poor design to have 10 activities slots on the Common App—they’d be better off with an unlimited number of slots, because that would keep nervous applicants from feeling like they have to fill up all 10, or feeling like they’re slacking when they have precisely 1, no matter how all-consuming it might be.
Or maybe they should cut it to 3, and tell people to pick their 3 most significant ones. Can you imagine the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth here on CC if they did that? \m/
@RightCoaster Okay thanks. I am hating how little room there is to describe anything! Even just 15 more words, one more sentence, would help, and it wouldn’t look like that much.
@ninakatarina I don’t think it is a negative that your S doesn’t have breadth in ec’s. His activities show depth, passion and commitment- all positives.
@SwimmingDad Thanks - I will make sure she includes that info!
regarding @dfbdfb 's suggestion of only 3 activity slots on the common app, that’s actually almost exactly what MIT does. (They use their own app and don’t accept the common app.)
@mathmomvt Flagler College does something similar and asks for the student to list them in order of importance to them.
It’s nice for a kid like my S19 who found his EC passion (Theater) early on, and stuck with it. For kids who are more into a little of this and a little of that, it’s a tougher policy (though the option to submit a resume softens it somewhat).
Alas I have gotten far behind on the thread. S19 is back at school. He is moaning that life is too busy now as he is still deep in his major sport with a 10-day competition coming up that will involving missing a week and a half of school (arg). He is making piddling progress on his Common App. No applications submitted. No essays finished. He is still planning ED at the moment.
But the major news is that D16 got her driver’s license before turning 21!!! I honestly wasn’t sure if it would happen after she failed her 2nd drive test. Multiple fails are not uncommon here and 2 fails is actually not too bad. But she was leaving for college in 2 days and you have to schedule 2 weeks ahead for your drive test. So I took off the day from work, we drove out of the city where they there was a walk-in drive test place and then practiced backing up around a corner staying 18 inch from the curb and the parallel park…for 2 hours. Every curb touch is minus 4 pts and she was hitting it on both, not bad but touch it and it’s -4 each time. Thank goodness she passed on the 3rd go! Now it’s S19’s turn to start working on his license. What a pain (and $$) this is.