If you’ll forgive some professional nerdery for a moment, please allow me to tell you about the Activities List and why it’s my favorite part of the Common App.
(Why do I even have a favorite part of the Common App to begin with? Well, as a longtime standardized testing and college essay tutor, I spend a lot of time with the admissions process…and I find it quite fascinating, I must say!)
Back to the Activities section: if well done, your list of what you fill your time with can provide a pretty thorough portrait of who you are.
That does NOT necessarily mean your list does a deep dive into your heart and soul (THAT is what the Common App essay specializes in!), mind you. But it does give a solid intro to the type of person you are: what spaces you would gravitate towards on campus, which other classmates you would bond and collaborate with, and how you would spend your free time. That’s actually quite a bit of info! Info that colleges really do care about as they select each new incoming class.
What should you be trying to achieve with your Common App activities section? And how can you make sure your Activities List achieves it? Read on, friend.
ARTICLE CONTENTS:
A. Watch this Article as a Video
B. The Two Goals of a Great Activities List
C. The Six Steps to a Great Activities List
D. Conclusion
Video version of this article
What an Activities List Is for
The Activities List actually reminds me of the old Facebook, or even MySpace or Friendster (which would be way before your time!). On all of those (now-ancient) social media sites, teenagers like you would write a profile and list their favorite movies and music and books and quotes. It was a form of self-expression that gets at a core truth: no matter how much we think we care about people’s values and essence, it’s hard not to instantly size people up based on their preferred bits of culture. (“She’s into JoJo Siwa?! Hmm, don’t think I want to sit with her at lunch!”)
College admissions officers might not be judging your Activities List to decide whether they want to be friends with you…but they do mentally put you into certain bucket(s) as they read this part of your app.
Think about it this way: each college needs to fulfill specific needs on its campus. A cappella, football, photography, debate team...the people drafting each class need to make sure they have genuinely committed students filling out all of those activities. They NEED to know if you’re going to audition for the orchestra or get involved in campus greening efforts. Otherwise, they might end up with too many clarinetists, and not enough people who love designing composting bins!
In essence, your Activities List should do two things: it should give the college admissions reader a sense of what spaces and roles you'll occupy once you get to campus, and it should show that you'll be an asset in those spaces and roles.
So now that we’ve got our sights set on what we’re trying to convey with our list, here's my six-step method for how you’re going to convey it, and convey it well.
Guide to writing a great Activities List
1) Brainstorm
Grab a pen and paper (or laptop) and make a list of every activity you’ve been involved in since high school began! Every club. Every job or internship (retail, restaurants, and babysitting all count!). Every volunteering stint. Church or synagogue groups. Any extra classes or lessons you’ve taken in the past 4 years outside of school. EVERYTHING.
Also, be sure to think outside the box of official clubs and groups. If you have a hobby or interest that takes a ton of your time, it’s a valid entry! Do you spend hours after school experimenting with cupcake recipes and sharing them with your neighbors? Or maybe you run a book club just for fun? Do you compose songs on the guitar? Those are all going on your Activities List!
2) Refine
Now, next to each activity, write down which grades you did them during (9th through 12th). Write down a rough estimate of how many hours you spend on a given activity weekly, as well as how many weeks you likely spend on it a year. Write down any titles or awards associated with it. Yes, you’ll also list out your Awards in a separate section, but this step will help you determine which activities are the strongest, and therefore the most deserving of the very limited space in this section of the application.
3) Group your activities
If you are like the vast majority of the students I work with, some common themes will naturally emerge from your list. Put all the volunteering together. Group all the sports. Connect all the performing arts stuff. The pre-med/STEM stuff. Debate/student government/political stuff. Babysitting/camp counselor/tutoring middle-schoolers/caring for kids. You get the idea.
4) Prioritize Your Groups
Now it’s time to make the (sometimes difficult) calls about what order to present your list in. Which grouping gets bumped to the top? This is an art more than it is a science, so you may have to shuffle your list around a few times before it feels right. You can try writing it out with pencil a few different ways, or putting each activity on a notecard/Post-It and shuffling the order around, or playing with a digital visualization tool or mind map. However, there are some things to keep in mind:
You probably want to put the group with the most activities in it first.
If one of your groups is related to the area of study that you indicated you'll be pursuing, that gives it higher priority.
Discontinued activities get lower priority on your list. For example, if you have just as many activities in your “Music” category as you do in your “Sports” category, but you recently quit sports and now only do music, the latter earns a higher slot.
5) Prioritize Within Your Groups
Now that you know which cluster of activities comes first, second, third, etc., you need to put the individual activities in order within a given cluster. Here are a few words of advice there:
Activities that are more recent should go before activities that you no longer do.
Activities that take more time (hours per week and weeks per year) and have more accomplishments associated with them should come before ones that aren’t as big of a time commitment and don’t have any awards or titles attached.
If an activity can act as a bridge between two different groups, underscore that by placing it between them.
6) Rejigger your wording!
You are not given much space at all (just 150 characters!) to describe everything you've done. That means you need to give a very bare-bones summary. Here are the best ways to get the most information crammed into those tiny slots:
Squeeze as much info as you can into the titles. Remember, you get 50 characters for the position/leadership title and 100 characters for the organization name. Use these spaces as much as you can! For example, instead of “Basketball,” see if you can fit in “Varsity Basketball: Captain (12th), MVP (10th-11th)." Instead of “Singing” or “Choir,” write “Ragazzi Choir: Tenor Section Leader.”
In terms of the main description of each activity, complete sentences are usually not the way to go! Instead, try to incorporate a diverse group of action verbs. You can separate them with semi-colons (;).
For example, here’s a pair of sentences that could stand to be way denser: “I tutor underserved sixth- and seventh-graders at the Lincoln Community Center every Wednesday night in English and Art History. Last year, I was selected as tutor of the month.”
Rewrite this as:
“Tutor middle schoolers in Humanities weekly at community center; selected as Tutor of the Month in 2024.”
Use present-tense verbs if you’re still doing the activity; use past-tense verbs if the event was in the past or you no longer do that specific activity.
And there you have it, folks: An Activities List that gives a complete, dynamic portrait of who you are to an admissions officer.
These six steps will help you pack the max amount of information into your Activities List while also providing a clear (and favorable) cross-section of who you are. You may need to tweak and/or reorder your Activities List a bit after you follow the process I’ve just outlined, but with a little more thought, you’ll be able to communicate at a glance what your passions and interests are to any college admissions counselor.
Best of luck to you! And if you need any more help with your Activities List, or even your college app essay, you can reach out to me here.
