For my Additional Info section, I used the space to elaborate (in two paragraphs) on one EC that is quite atypical & very significant to my application, as well as explain why I had to discontinue another activity & what one of my awards entailed. Is this an acceptable use of the extra room? I felt I needed to explain my EC here because not all of my applications have a supplement where I can discuss it – for the ones that do, I am talking about a different activity. I know that the space is supposed to be used to explain extenuating circumstances, but since I have nothing interesting to report, I just wanted to make sure that using the section in this way would be productive & not received negatively. Thank you!
Bump?
I don’t see why not. As long as it strengthens your application and tells more about you, i don’t think the job of the reader is to be nitpicky about exactly what you chose to share. They read tons of these every night. The key is to make it memorable, not to make it “perfect.” It could be perfectly forgettable!
Additional info should be used to explain things that actually need explaining. I am not a fan of explaining why you no longer participate in something. Why bring their attention to it? Plenty of students have schedule conflicts or lose interest in an activity. It’s okay to go into more depth about the first EC, but I see no benefit to your app in explaining the absence of something. My kid left additional info blank. Should she have written about stuff she didn’t do anymore? She didn’t think so.
Agree with @Lindagaf If you have no extenuating circumstances to report, then there is no need to use the additional information section of the application. Keep in mind that admission officers are swamped and are not looking for extra things to read. Unless your EC is something so unusual and so complex that it can’t be understood it at all from the description then I don’t think there is a need to describe it in the additional comment section If you do keep the description as succinct as possible (a couple of lines). Certainly you don’t need to explain why you stopped one activity – that happens all the time and is expected.
Thank you! I will condense my explanation of the first extracurricular to avoid getting rambly. It can be understood generally from the description, but there are some awards & recognition I gained through it that I would like to include but had no other room to do so. For the one where I was going to explain why I quit, I only did that because I had a legitimate excuse and left after becoming captain of the team, but thinking about it now, I agree that it draws too much attention to an EC I ranked #9. @Trisherella @Lindagaf @happy1
They won’t even notice you left. They have way too much reading to do.
I’d leave the additional information section blank. There is no reason to explain why you left one activity and joined another – it is normal for HS students to keep exploring different things, to change from one activity to something they find more interesting etc. No reason to explain or bring attention to it.
Thank you for the insight. I submitted my application a few weeks ago, and I didn’t write about the activity I quit. I just briefly expanded on my first EC because it is an organization/project I founded, and I didn’t have any space to be more specific about its significance on the rest of my application. @Living61 @Happy1935