Building Your Common App Activity List

Webinar Transcription

2024-07-24 – Building Your Common App Activity List

Lonnie: Hello, everyone. Welcome to College Advice’s webinar, “Building Your Common App Activity List.” To orient everyone with the webinar timing, we are first going to begin with our presentation, and then we’ll have the opportunity to answer your questions in the live Q& A. Um, so let’s go ahead and get started by introducing our panelists.

Mariko: Hi everyone, my name is Mariko Rooks. I’m a senior advisor here at CollegeAdvisor, and I graduated from Yale University actually twice. Once in 2021 with a bachelor’s in the history of science, medicine, and public health, and in ethnicity, race, and migration. And then again with an MPH in social and behavioral sciences.

I currently work for the For the CDC foundation as a drowning prevention epidemiologist. So I do a lot of work on trying to make our community safer around water and collecting data that will enable us to do so.

Lonnie: Nice, nice, very impressive background. Um, so before we get right into our webinar, we’d love to get a sense of what grades are live audience are in.

So please let us know.

And I’ll give it just a few seconds, and then we’re gonna jump right on in to learning more about building your common aptitude. Activity lists and all the great strategies so that you can feel a little not as stressed when it comes to preparing that activities list. Okay, so we have 88 percent of our audience are in the 12th grade, followed by that 13 percent are in the 11th grade.

So for our live audience today, very special, we have just 11th and 12th grade students that are representatives. So with that, I’ll turn it over to you, Mariko, to go ahead and kick us off into sharing. What is the activities list?

Mariko: So, hi everyone. Okay, so our activities list is going to be a portion of our college application that is dedicated towards designating, so telling people what your extracurricular activities are and also describing those extracurricular activities.

So some things that you’ll include in the activities list are the name of the organization journey. Or the affiliation of whatever the activity is the position you personally held. So if you were the vice president or the secretary, the number of hours per week, and the number of weeks per year that you’re involved with that activity, it might just be a summer activity.

It could be a year round. And most importantly, the responsibilities that you personally have taken on. And so on the common app, that’s a narrative description of 150 characters total. So a little bit more than a tweet’s worth of information about what you’ve been up to in the activities that you are doing outside of school.

And if you have any questions, as I start to review the activities list and discuss what goes into the activities list on a successful application, you can feel free to ask them in our Q& A. Tab and we’ll get to them at the end of the webinar. So why is the activities list an important part of a student’s application?

I think actually the activities list is one of the most crucial components of your total application. And this is for a number of different reasons. The first is that the activities list is one of the places on your application where you can show both dimensionality and personality. So outside of the grades and numbers and statistics and test scores that make up your portfolio, who are you?

What are you drawn to? What do you care about? And that becomes really important in distinguishing students that are of the same statistical brackets, right? So if we’re talking, for example, about the super elite colleges and universities, Everyone has great grades. Everyone has a close to perfect ACT or SAT score.

So when you start to decide who you’re going to get let, who you are going to let in to these really selective universities, it comes down to things like your activities list and your essays that tell us what kind of student you’re going to be and how you’re going to contribute to your college campus and beyond.

And so some of the ways that you can do that, in addition to showing what exactly you’re interested in and what drives you personally when you’re not paying attention. required to be in English class or math class. You can also demonstrate valuable skills that you already have or that you’re working to build that would be useful pre professionally and on a college campus.

So, um, I think one of the biggest ones that we point to in this process is leadership. What kind of leadership skills do you have? And what kind of leadership experience do you have that you can then apply? It is you get involved with at your university and it doesn’t mean that you have to have an official leadership position.

That’s where the responsibilities section comes in handy because maybe you weren’t the president of an organization, but maybe you have done a lot to help the organization grow. Right? Um, things like community engagement, right? Who do you care about? Who do you consider yourself in community with? And how do you work with other stakeholders?

There’s to make the world around you a better place and also technical skills, right? If you are pre med, especially if you’re thinking about applying to a bachelor’s plus MD program distinctive evidence of early engagement in medical training, your EMT license, your hospital shadowing hours, your research.

Um, if you are a big event planner, right, you have event management skills that you could then use in college. If you are an artist, what kind of art do you practice and how might that art be used? Then drive the creative aspirations that you have, even if that’s not necessarily your major. And a lot of these things, especially these hard skills are not skills that you’re going to unfortunately develop at the average us high school, at least, right?

You have your core sort of liberal arts plus STEM curriculum, but you don’t always get to show off certain skills that are really useful professionally. And that maybe you’re add to your overall academic package as a potential applicant. The last thing that you can demonstrate is dedication and growth.

And so your activities list is sort of a vector, right? You have both magnitude and direction. And so being able to demonstrate your time and commitment to a specific organization or an initiative can give really good indication that you’re dependable, that you Stick with the causes that you care about, and also you can demonstrate how you’ve increased responsibility over time and improved your skills.

So a good example of that would be a sports team. You don’t have to make varsity all four years, but if you can demonstrate that you started out on the freshmen or the JV team and that you worked your way all the way up to being an all league player, that indicates that you have perseverance, that you have drive and that you have commitment to.

A team or an institution or an organization that will hopefully pan out into whatever it is you decide to do in college. And so there are lots and lots of things that count as an activity. I think some of which we’ve already mentioned. The first is community enrichment and volunteer work. So both through existing.

But also creating your own campaigns, passion projects, nonprofits, and other community engagement initiatives that you come up with by yourself or with friends. There are lots of pre professional opportunities, research, and internships that you can apply for. And We can talk a little bit more at CollegeAdvisor about how to find internships and other pre professional opportunities in your area.

Not all pre professional opportunities have to be the career that you end up following through with, but some of them either give you generic, really helpful skills, or they might help you refine what you are or are not interested in. A good example of that for me, I did a couple of clinical internships in high school, and realized that I could never treat patients on a daily basis.

So I’m in public health, which is related. But I am not individually diagnosing and helping out patients one on one because I am very bad at that. Uh, some other things that you can consider are extra academic advancement. So things like taking college courses or courses over the summer or camps and seminars and things that you’re interested in like robotics, third party academic and social work.

skills enrichment organizations. So some of them that you might have heard of are organizations like 4 H or Upward Bound and AVID. And some of those organizations are equity based. So they’re designed to give resources to folks who are systematically discriminated against when it comes to college application processes, maybe because they have parents that have not gone to college, or maybe because, um, your school, um, Perhaps like lacks other resources that, um, you know, wealthy private schools have whatever that might be things like sports and athletics, um, hobbies.

So if you again are into art or if you love video gaming, whatever that might be cultural activities. So if you are. culturally involved with a community that your family identifies with. This could be religious, this could be, um, again, traditional art, whatever that might be. And then two things that I feel like I don’t see talked about enough in this process, and there are categories for these, are family, Family caretaking and paid employment.

So if you are the oldest sibling or the person who looks after your grandma every day, that counts. And especially if having that kind of commitment prevents you from doing some of these other extracurricular activities, it’s really important to know how many hours you’re putting in in that kind of responsibility based setting.

And there are ways that you can talk about family caretaking to demonstrate the skills that you develop. As a caretaker of someone who is close to you, and lastly, paid employment. So if you have a job, you should put it on there. Now, on the common app, you can list 10 total activities and also five awards that you have received.

On other applications, that number may vary. So the UCs or the University of California application, for example, it’s 20 total activities, but that also includes awards and other non, um, non transcript academic courses. So there’s a little bit. Broader categorization on the UC list and on the common app, and that can be mirrored for other state schools as well.

So just make sure you’re checking whatever the regulations are for the specific application interface that you are using to apply somewhere. Okay. And so. Either way, right, or any, any which way that you apply, there is a limitation to the number of activities that you can include. And so you do have to be strategic about what you’re putting on your activities list and how you’re grouping the things that you’re putting on there.

And so one of the things that my Yale admissions officer said that will always really stick with me is that when Yale evaluates extracurriculars, they look at breadth and depth. And so breadth means how many. Things you’ve been up to, right? How well rounded of an applicant you are. Are you playing a sport?

Are you pursuing research? Right? Um, you know, having some well roundedness in the application and depth means how deep are you going, right? How committed are you to any particular activity? And some students have a lot of breadth, but a little less depth, right? Because you only have so many hours in a day.

And so there are some students at the opposite, right? They’re really, really passionate about one or two causes and they make that The majority of their entire sort of platform and the thing that they focus on in high school. And so as you’re considering these two things, think about right, the time and dedication you’ve put into a particular activity, right?

So hours per week, and then the length of total time you’ve been involved in something also. Think about your level of responsibility, right? I normally recommend that the first thing to go, for example, are school clubs where you’re only putting in a couple hours a week and you’re just a member. You don’t have a leadership role, and you also maybe aren’t that passionate about the cause that’s involved.

And the last thing to consider is your contribution to overall narrative and application themes. So, for What else are you talking about? What else are you indicating that you’re interested in? And what else are you saying is important to you, based on the classes you take, based on the essays you write, that kind of stuff.

So I wouldn’t, for example, add, um, the fact that in high school I was part of a, like, Friends, the sitcom watching club, because I had nothing to say about the impact of Friends on my life in an essay, and also it was, like, kind of a fun activity. Was I a dedicated member? And did I show up every week? Yes, yes.

But was that necessarily going to be relevant to the application themes on hand? Not really, right? So you want to think critically about the entire package and what each activity is telling an admissions officer about you and about what you care about. You can also root multiple activities together. Um, there are a couple ways you can do this.

The first is by topic. The second is by organization or institution. So if you’ve done multiple programs with the same institution, you can normally put in one institution and then specify the kinds of programs that you did. In the narrative section of the responsibilities portion, you can also group things by type of responsibility.

So if it’s logistics or project management, for example, you can say that, you know, you were a project manager for X, Y, and Z projects, and if they all are sort of in the same grouping, or the same categorization, then that can be a way in which you can Shrink the number of overall entries you have on that list.

Conversely, if you feel like you don’t have enough, then you can split some of these things up, right? So you can split up the programs that you have for an organization or institution based on timing and based on whatever it is that you were involved in. And so I did allude to a couple of different times this narrative responsibilities section, and this is really sort of where people start differentiating themselves when it comes to success and when it comes to portraying the sort of full range of their academic and extracurricular drive and accomplishments on the extracurricular section.

And so some things that I would recommend when you’re describing this activity is first of all, make it succinct. Get rid of all the extra words that you can. Don’t use full sentences. A big recommendation, too, is don’t use ING verbs. That takes up more space, right? That’s three characters per ING. And really choose verbs that give the Indication of both like specificity and impact right and there are a great way.

There are great sources of impact verbs that you can look up on the Internet that you can use so that you can be really specific about the responsibilities that you’ve had without taking up too much space. Um, speaking of specificity, be specific in those descriptions, right? How many people did you oversee?

How many events did you put on per year? What did you specifically actually learn, do or develop within the context of an activity or an organization and also make sure you’re highlighting your leadership and your executive skills. So there’s sort of really top high brain skills that, um, can be applicable to something else in college, but that are Yeah.

Really transferable and really indicative of your potential as a student leader. So I would always recommend that focusing on creating and expanding and building something new or building off of something is far greater than just doing what’s expected of you. So creating your own student organization versus.

putting in volunteer hours where you weren’t really in charge of things and you maybe like picked up trash off the beach or repainted a wall, right? Um, those are all really important things and if those are really meaningful experiences that you can spin into something that like really clearly, um, distinguishes you from other students, go ahead.

But I would always, always recommend the things that are more innovative and things that are more unique about you than this sort of like service based or sort of rote, uh, rote task based. Options if you can. And so some, and so, you know, sort of conversely, some of the mistakes that we often see in activity descriptions.

The first is non professional language. So this should read like a resume or a job application. This should not read like a casual chat and it’s really important to have that language be really clean. And again, right? Be succinct and specific and the kinds of things that you would look for on a good resume on a good job application.

Also, just remember that your readers may not know what the organization is or what it does, especially if it’s school or region specific. So I see a lot of folks not actually define what it is that they’ve been involved in or what kind of organization it is. And especially if that organization is an acronym, the odds are that your, that your admissions officer is not going to know it.

And even if they do know it, they want to see how you are going to describe that organization. And again, it’s tricky because you have to keep it short, but just remember that you don’t know who your reader is going to be, and you don’t know if they’ve ever seen the thing that you’ve been involved in before.

And then lastly again, right, make sure you’re including time consuming responsibilities to demonstrate where your hours are actually spent. If you are watching your younger siblings for five hours a day. Five days a week, that’s 25 hours. That’s a lot of hours, right? 365 days a year. Then make sure that you are thinking through how you are including that on an application.

Okay, so that would be what I would sort of focus on in that respect. So, Also, when we’re thinking about what we want to include in our activities list, we should remember that the activities list can and should be used in conjunction with other parts of your application, because when your application is reviewed, it’s being reviewed holistically, which means that it’s not just looking at each separate part, but also how the parts interact with each other and form a full picture of you as a student and a candidate.

Often, for example, your essays are connected to the extracurricular list. So whether it is your common app essay that will get submitted with almost all of your applications and that extracurricular, and that common app essay, right, is the longer one that’s between 600, that’s maximum 650 words, or if it’s a smaller supplemental essay.

And I find that often extracurriculars are mentioned in the supplemental essays because they’ll ask for a more specific and succinct example of something that you’ve been up to. So a time that you failed, a time that you succeeded, a time that you grew, at a time that you were a leader are all things that I see really frequently on these supplemental essays, which are often much shorter.

And so normally you would focus your extracurricular list, um, You would want that to be mirrored in the essay, so if you’re talking about something in an essay, it’s a good idea to mention it in the extracurricular list, and some examples of things that I made sure were sort of overlapping on my application were water polo, I played water polo in high school, played water polo in college, it made a lot of sense to talk about it, um, on it.

My, in one of my essays, um, as sort of a growth experience and also made a lot of sense to put on my extracurricular list because I was practicing, you know, four hours a day, five days a week, right? And another thing that I put in was a summer clinical opportunity and that was the failure part I’ve already mentioned that I could not see patients on a day to day basis and so I talked about that and what that taught me.

Secondly, themes. What does your activities list tell about you more broadly and what you care about, right? If you are really, really passionate about computer science and coding and specifically using coding to reduce climate change, right? Or something like that, then you want your activities list to maybe reflect some of the breadth that you have in different coding experiences and different things and different parts of the computer science industry and computer science academic field that you’ve been involved in.

And perhaps you have one essay that talks about your experience with computer science as a whole, right? That covers multiple activities on that list that are related to comp sci. Or again, Whatever that might be, um, also sort of think about in all of this, right, what are personality traits and strengths that you value?

So if you feel like you’re really loyal, or you feel like you are someone who perseveres quite a lot, or you feel like you’re someone who deeply, deeply feels or cares about things. You want to set up your activities list to be able to convey those themes, again, often in conjunction with your essays.

Alternatively, if you’re someone who’s involved in lots and lots of different things, right, you also want to convey that as well, right? If you’re like, I am just super intellectually curious, I love everything, right? Um, the activities list may reflect that a little bit differently. And the last thing is that you can more directly supplement or support your academic and professional interests, such as your major indication.

And again, some of these supplemental essays will ask why this program, right? Or why this major? And so being able to have extracurricular activities that, like, for example, in this computer science exam. In this computer science profile that I’m making up as we go along that are clear that you’ve taken the time outside of school outside of what you’ve been required to do to support your academic and professional interests, then that is a really good indication that number one, you’re passionate about what you do, even if you don’t end up pursuing it full time in college, or you realize you want to do something different, but Demonstrating that when you’re interested in something that you go the extra mile right outside of school outside of class to investigate and to get better at the things that you’re interested in and the things that you will be demonstrating and learning more about as a student is something that can be really useful and important.

starting in high school. And again, you don’t have to have everything figured out. And this is a little school specific too, right? If you have a school where you must apply into a specific major and it’s difficult to change majors, this is going to be more important than a liberal arts school where you’re not allowed to choose a major until the end of your second year.

And that was, for example, my school. Right. It was useful, um, in that you were asked about your academic interests on supplementals. So it was good to have them. Right. But you weren’t beholden to it in the same way that you will at, for example, a tech school, um, where there are limited numbers of majors and those majors are all sort of coalesced in a particular broader discipline or field.

Okay. So, the last advice that I would give to students who are building their activities list, um, I would say these are just general tips from me. The first is to look up resume oriented and professional language that’s commonly used to describe your responsibilities. Most likely, Whatever you have done, someone else has done before you and someone else has already market researched and said, this is what sounds good to employers and admissions officers.

And this is what doesn’t. And so that would be something that I would recommend doing. And that can be solved with like a simple Google search, right? And you really want to think about how to make what you’re doing sound as impressive as possible. Even if you don’t feel like this was something remarkable, you want to make it sound like it can put its best foot forward in this application, right?

And so an example I often give about this Is, um, if you work a retail job or, um, you know, a food service job or any other job that is wonderful and great and gives you really helpful real life experience as a high school student, but may not always sound that way on an application if you’re not tailoring your language.

So, for example, saying like, you know, man, the cash register answered phones. said hi to people, right? All of those things are not as strong as saying conducted sales, operating a POS system, which is something like a cash register, right? I’m giving a total of the number of customers that you’ve served, right?

Being a little bit more clear and specific and also using stronger verbs and more elevated professional language to describe What it is that you’ve been up to the second thing is that many applications including the common app Also still allow you to upload a resume or a longer document I very very strongly recommend that you do so because it will give you more space to Both include more than the 10 activities that were on your common app list and also to include other activities or sorry, more about the same activities that were on that list.

Right? So you only get 150 characters on the common app worksheet. And again, that varies with other sort of state or private schools, but. It’s limited and you have much more freedom and formatting on your resume. So that would be a thing that I would really recommend. Also, it’s just good to have a resume in general, right?

You’re going to need it for jobs. You’re going to need it for scholarship applications. So working to develop a resume in high school is something that I really recommend you don’t leave high school. Without developing a resume and folks at CollegeAdvisor can help you and often many schools have resume workshops So I really really would recommend attending one and having one in person submitted as part of your application.

And as always, right, we’ve talked a lot about sort of themes and how this relates to your profile as a whole. As you’re reading through your activities list and also the order that those activities are in, ask yourselves, what should readers learn about me as a whole applicant from this activity? So what am I hoping that people will take away from me, take away from reading this description about who I am as a person?

Right, and what do I value and what do I care about? And what can I demonstrate and bring to the table as a student? Okay, I think this might be time to turn it over to questions and answers.

Lonnie: Yes, it is. Thank you so much for sharing all this great information about building your. I’m an app activity list.

So now we are at our questions and answer portion of our webinar. So you can begin submitting your questions if you haven’t already done. So, um, by locating the Q and a tab. If you notice that you may, it may not be working. You don’t see it. Just try exiting webinar and entering through the custom link that was sent through your email.

Okay. So now moving into our first question, it reads. Is National Honor Society or student government something that can go on the activities list?

Mariko: Yes, absolutely. I strongly, strongly recommend that you include these kinds of activities on your list. I would say Say, think again, sort of critically, though, about how and in what ways you can stand out in those activities, right?

Um, a big example for me with National Honor Society is there’s a lot of service component in National Honor Society, right? And that’s great, right? Sort of categorically, unequivocally. Serving your community is awesome. I would really encourage you to think about your specific NHS chapter though and what you can create or build upon that might be new, that might be innovative, that might better meet community needs while giving you more skills development than just checking off your volunteer hours for the sake of checking off your volunteer hours.

So I would really suggest doing that. Student government, same thing, right? Um, and I think with student government that I’d really emphasize is that, Not everyone in student government, um, has. Sort of the same responsibilities between positions at each school, right? So even if you are not an officer, even if you aren’t president, if you have a signature initiative or you have something that you have really taken charge of, then I would just make sure to mention that in the narrative section, right?

You don’t have to be someone who won an election to make a difference at your school. And so just make sure you’re clarifying what you specifically are bringing to the table as well as what you as a team and what you as a sort of That year’s government have done to make your school a better place.

Lonnie: All right. Thank you. So moving into our next question, Ariz, how far back should I go in listing activities?

Mariko: So when we think about how far back we’re going, we want to think critically about Again, what is that telling us about the person we are today? Right? So I would ideally recommend prioritizing activities where you go really far back, but you’re still doing them.

Right? So if you can say I’ve had 12 years of experience as a competitive dancer, that’s great. Right? That shows that that’s something you’ve been really dedicated to and that you’ve continued throughout your life. I would recommend that if you’re putting activities that are earlier in your high school career, that you then have stopped doing, um, thinking about what kind of narrative and how you would be to sort of describing those activities and also the level of.

Rigor and the level of accomplishment and uniqueness that go along with those early activities. So, for example, if you got the opportunity in 9th grade to address the U. S. Senate, that better be on, right, this Common App Activities list through some sort of program. But it was a one year program. You do it once, you don’t get to go again, right?

You should still be mentioning that. But if it’s something that you tried in 9th grade and you didn’t really like it and you sort of pivoted to other stuff, that would not be something I would mention. Necessarily include unless again, that thing was addressing the Senate, right? Or whatever that might be.

So I would think through, right? What have you had the most continuity in and what has been the most meaningful to you, right? If you started something as a senior, but it really changed your life and you really put a ton of hours into it worth mentioning, right? Um, but normally we tend not to pull out the only 9th grade or only 10th grade activities unless we need more stuff to fill out our sheet, which sometimes happens, right?

Um, it depends on the student depends on the portfolio.

Lonnie: Okay. Okay. Thank you so much. So now moving into our next question. Um, what if I have multiple roles within one activity? I’ve been a secretary, I’ve been president, I, you know, I do a lot of different things. How do I kind of approach that?

Mariko: So I normally recommend putting the role that has the most sort of weight upon immediately reading as the first role in the list of roles.

In the, like, section where you put down, like, what your specific role is on the Common App. I will also, though, say that you can put down more than one role on the roles section. Um, as long as you meet, as long as you’re underneath the character limit. So you can do, like, President, comma, Secretary. and then specify the years that you’ve done that.

But I normally recommend putting in your sort of highest role and then mentioning in the responsibilities section the other roles in previous years. But I think also different advisors have had sort of different takes on this. Lani, what do you think?

Lonnie: Um, as far as like, you know, thinking about which activities should list, um, I would kind of, you know, I think it’s about how you may even be able to write the description.

Opportunity where you can kind of highlight it. Maybe you can think about, like, the roles that were, like, the most impactful for you, um, perhaps, like, you’ve been president, but you also, like, led this, like, really cool community service activity, like, you were the lead there, um, so I really think the heart of it is, like, the active description and, like, how you’re Thank you.

About that activity, um, because we know some students are rock stars and they’ve done multiple activities. Um, but unfortunately you don’t have as much, um, character counts to be able to put that into the description.

Mariko: I would really second that, right? And, um, you know, not all leadership opportunities are created equally, right?

Some people’s schools have fabulous student governments that really go all out. Some schools do not, right? Um, and student government is not a thing that really drives change and drives programming at your school. So thinking about sort of How you’re able to describe that role is going to play a huge part in how much weight that particular role carries, especially if you’re being compared against someone who’s done similar activities to you at their school, right?

That description is really what’s going to make the difference. And you being, again, a non officer who has led a clear campaign, who’s really put their sort of heart and soul into something specific, is going to mean more than just An officer that had a really poor activity description that didn’t clearly specify what they did, or maybe they didn’t do anything.

We all know that there are activities where that happens, and that’s okay too. Yes,

Lonnie: absolutely. So they’re, they’re looking to see what, what was the impact you had in your specific activities that really is going to showcase your, your leadership and your growth. So let’s move into our next question, which is if you don’t have many activities on your activities list, should I be looking for more opportunities, even if it’s not very deep in terms of depth?

Mariko: So I would strongly, strongly recommend filling out all 10 of those slots on the common app. whatever possible. And I think that number one, think about what you are, what you are doing in your free time that can be turned into a legible activity, right? Um, I use this example with e sports a lot. I have a lot of students who love to video game, right?

And that’s not something that feels particularly tangible. And also not something that I like. I think video games, unfortunately, get such a bad rap, even though they could teach you so many skills and can connect you with so much community, right? My biggest suggestion would be if, yeah, whether it’s gaming or whatever it might be, thinking about how you can convert that and formalize that into an activity that makes sense.

And that will add to your college application, right? If you need more space, right? So if you’re really into a specific game, thinking about like, You formalize that, like, that group is a thing, and that group has a motto, and that group has a purpose, right? And maybe that group does, like, a charity streaming tournament, right?

Where that group gets together and commits to doing X, Y, and Z for the community in a way that’s related to the game, right? Um, there are different ways in which you can drive something that you are already involved in. That may not feel the most like college specific into something that is number one actually meaningful right and is something you actually care about and number to make sense in terms of your application.

The other thing I would recommend doing is yeah, it’s never too late to join new activities. You can be. And rising senior and find something in the last year or year and a half of high school that actually does change your life. So I would not sort of panic join like five activities at once, but I would really think through right?

What is it that you want to get out of your last year of high school? What is something I might be interested in and trying to at least Commit to doing one or two new things your senior year so you can fill out that application and you truly, truly never know, right? Um, the thing that put me on my current career path, I did not do until the end of the summer of my senior year.

The summer directly before my senior year, right? So it sometimes is those like last chance opportunities or programs that make a huge difference in your life beyond what you can put on your college education or not.

Lonnie: Okay, so we’re going to take a short pause. from our questions and answers, um, because I’m going to share more about the work that we do within CollegeAdvisor, but during that time, I really encourage you, if you have a question, to please go ahead and place it into our Q& A tab. So thinking about the work that we do within CollegeAdvisor, we know how overwhelming the college admission process can be, especially for very ambitious students like yourselves.

Admission officers and admission experts are ready to help you and your family navigate it all through one on one advising sessions. Um, we’ve already helped over 6, 000 clients in their college journeys, and after analyzing our 2021 through 2023 data, we found that CollegeAdvisor students are 3. 6 times more likely to get into Stanford University.

4. 1 times more likely to get into Vanderbilt University and 2. 7 times more likely to get into Harvard University. Increase your odds and take the next step in your college admission journey. By signing up for a free 45 to 60 minute strategy session with an admission specialist on our team by using the cure code that we have on the screen during this meeting, you’ll receive a preliminary assessment of your academic profile along with some initial.

recommendations. And at the end, you’ll also learn more about our premium packages and ways that we can pair you with an expert who will support you with building your college list, editing your essays, even going more in depth around, you know, building out your activities list, um, and how to write those descriptions and much, much more.

So with that, we will transition back into our Questions and answers, and I will continue to have that QR code on the screen. If you did not catch it, it’s readily available for you right now. And

Mariko: maybe do we want to talk about our new extracurricular development team since we’re doing an extracurricular webinar?

Yeah, you want to share you want to give more insight. Yes, absolutely. So if you are someone who’s specifically looking to improve your extracurricular portfolio, and you want someone who can look over those activity descriptions who can fill in gaps of where you might want to join a new activity to make your profile stronger.

We actually have a new team at CollegeAdvisor that is dedicated to doing just that. So you can develop your activities list, submit it to our extracurricular team, and within 24 hours they will give you everything from grammar and writing suggestions on your responsibilities to suggesting other activities that you might be interested in and ways in which you can improve your portfolio.

I am a really, really big fan of our different specialty teams at CollegeAdvisor. They help me immensely as a primary advisor on a student’s account. And also they, I think are really great additions to sort of what you get out of the college advising process. So we’ve had essay team for a while. We’ve had a college list team for a while, and we now have this extracurricular development team.

So I really recommend utilizing those services. If you are already with CollegeAdvisor, please do ask your primary advisor about the extracurricular team. And if that’s something that. Sounds interesting to me. Scan the QR code.

Lonnie: Thank you for sharing about that specialty team. Um, because it definitely does align to the topic that we’re discussing.

Okay. So our next question says, can I attach additional documents? or provide links to further showcase my involvement, whether that’s like a certificate, a portfolio. Um, I’ve even had students who have asked, like, can I attach, um, links to specific, like, websites they may have created?

Mariko: Great question. So, Yes and no.

So I would say the first thing is things like certificates, right, or, um, certification, those can actually go on under the awards section, right? A certificate of, like, a completion is a, you have been awarded a thing that you now know how to do. So if you want more space on your activities list, then I recommend putting it there.

Um, And in terms of full documents that you can upload, if you are an arts person, there is an art supplemental portfolio that you can upload as part of your Common App application that will allow you to showcase whatever art it is that you do. Um, this is particularly useful for folks who do any kind of performance art.

So I’ve seen every, I’ve seen. portfolios that include everything from tap dancing to traditional Japanese drumming. Um, but you can upload that as part of your application through the specific art supplemental and for some colleges, if you are interested in majoring in something like dance, that will be required.

The other place where you can attach things like links is in this resume document, right? Um, while there are limitations to what can physically be copy pasted, right? Into the activities list section, and those limitations include URLs, and I would not recommend using your 150 characters to just put a website URL in there.

You can put the website URL as a link in a PDF or Word document. As part of your resume that is uploaded into that supplemental section on the common app I also will say that for especially the selective schools if you have the name of an organization And it has a website. They will be google stalking you anyway, so it’s good if you have strong search engine optimization Or SEO for anything that you are doing.

That is a separate organization, especially something that you’ve created yourself. So it is useful to have some sort of website that goes along with your advocacy or your community enrichment efforts. Also on that note, I would add local press is useful too. So if you reach out to local newspapers they can publicize your efforts and that will also show up when CollegeAdvisors search, or sorry not CollegeAdvisors, admissions officers search your portfolio on the internet and you can also add that coverage into your resume as a separate section for press.

Lonnie: Nice, that’s very helpful information for our audience. Next question reads, how should I prioritize activities? Should I list them in order of importance, duration, or any other criteria that you can, you know, suggest to our audience?

Mariko: So, I would definitely suggest thinking about, you know, what takes up most of your time, right?

And what you’ve been the most involved in those things should be prioritized. Towards the top. Um, I’ve seen a lot of folks recommend that if you have something that’s sort of unique or eye catching to put that second or third. Um, often the thing that you’ve spent the most time on may not be your most unique or interesting activity just because.

Many of the things that people spend lots of time on are similar. Um, but if you have something that you feel is sort of very uniquely yours or that you haven’t seen on a lot of portfolios, I often recommend putting that second or third, as long as you have a relatively large number of hours that you’re involved in that activity.

Um, but I would also really think again about what kind of profile are you trying to create, right? If you are someone who has spent. Almost all of your hours in general on developing a specific set of skills surrounding. So I’m going to use the example of pre med again. I am a public health person and I get a lot of pre med students.

Then I would say your first three or four activities would probably be the most important and influential pre med experiences. And then throw in something like a sport or an additional non pre med activity. And then fill out. The like last two or three things with either more of the same and or, um, sort of programs you maybe did early in your high school career things that did not take as many hours, but are still relevant and that kind of thing.

Um, and also again, thinking through, right, like, what are things that many high school students do that are still really important and really meaningful, but like, a lot of folks do them and a lot of folks have similar responsibilities in them. Versus what are things that are unique to you and things that you have developed yourself.

Um, If either in sort of like organizational level or in description, and those things should be closer to the top.

Lonnie: Hey, let’s see. Okay. So going into our next question. Okay. Should I list the activity? Um, you know, like, I’m writing, maybe I’m writing my essay on a specific activity that was like, really passionate and transformational for me. Um, should I still list that activity in my activities list?

Mariko: Yes, please do. In fact, I would most strongly recommend that you list those activities.

Um, I would say, first of all, because as soon as An admissions officer sees that there’s an essay with that activity, they’re then going to cross reference the activity list to be like, interesting, right? That was something that was really important. How many hours did this person spend on this activity per week, right?

And per year, which is not information that you’re probably going to put verbatim on that essay, right? Um, you know, what level of activity Is it, is it regional, is it national, right? I’d be curious about that. Also, what are the sort of broad and overarching descriptive responsibilities that this person had, right?

Because you might write about something that was really personally meaningful to you as a summer camp counsellor because you made a connection with one kid and really changed their life. But obviously you did other stuff as a summer camp counsellor too, and that might not be fully reflected in your essay.

Conversely, you can use the essay to expand upon, right, some of the responsibilities that you may be touched on briefly in the activity section to give admissions officers a better and more holistic idea of what you have really come down to that particular space, especially if you’re like, oh, the responsibility section doesn’t even cover it.

I would caution against just sort of listing accomplishments in your essays, but you can definitely create a narrative that explains why certain accomplishments are important to you within the context of that extracurricular activity, and what you’ve been up to, right, within the context of that, and why that might be meaningful.

So that would be my suggestion there. Um, I will say also essays are a great place to expand upon things that you maybe don’t get to include in your 10 total activities. So, for example, if you’re writing about your passion as a painter, right? You might put one or two or even three big and time consuming art opportunities on your extracurricular list.

But the essay is a great place to do that. For you to mention like, Oh, well, I did the school program in middle school, right? Because you can only choose 9th, 10th and 11th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade, right? On your actual activity sheet. And of course you can mention in responsibilities that, you know, seven years or 10 years of doing this thing, but since you can only say, Your years in high school that you’ve done it on the list.

The essay is a great way to sort of expand upon that and maybe mention other activities or programs that don’t make it into the full list, but we’re still transformational or important in your journey pursuing some specific passion.

Lonnie: Okay. All right. So with that, I don’t see any. More questions from our audience, I was like, giving it a slight pause in case there’s 1 where I wanted to come in. Um, but you’ve covered you did a great job at covering, you know, a lot of aspects of the activities list and for our audience that are still with us are listening to the recording you are able to download the handouts as well.

So, for our live audience, you can download the handouts by clicking on the handouts tab, and you’ll have all that information for you. With that, thank you, Marco, for this great webinar. Um, I always enjoy listening to your presentations because you have, you have so much like wealth of knowledge. Um, and so with that, we hope to see you also in another, you know, webinar leading another one.

But for the month of July, which is actually coming to an end, we have one more webinar that we’re going to be hosting in the spring. Month. But every single month and every week we have different webinars that we offer all geared toward supporting you through the college application process. So we hope to see you in a future webinar.

And with that, everyone that now concludes our webinar and have a great day. Bye.