<p>Hey,</p>
<p>First, I'd like to say that I hate the Common App. Its format is awful for describing your extracurriculars. But - it asks for hours per week, and I must oblige.</p>
<p>How can you possibly answer that? For ECs like Student Council, I could work as little as 2 hours per week to almost 20. There really was never an average.</p>
<p>Also, what's a reasonable amount of time spent within clubs? For most of mine, it was about 5 hours a week. Reasonable?</p>
<p>haha, yeah, i hate the ‘average # of hours per week’ thing, too. it makes very little sense, & is not convenient for us at all, lol. but for one of my clubs [of which i am co-president] i put 5 hours/week. & for 2 others i put 2 each. it’s really strange to guesstimate like that, but u just need to keep in mind the total # of hours that they will see for each activity [i.e. # of hours x # of weeks];that helped me make my estimates, as well. hope that helped (:</p>
<p>I think most people will probably stretch the truth a little bit on the hours section 
Estimate how many hours you usually spent on average… if it helps, figure out how many per year and then divide by number of weeks :)</p>
<p>Estimate total hours and divide by the total weeks.</p>
<p>say if you are on a varsity team, do you also count the hours you spend practicing on your own time></p>
<p>^ That’s a good question. Anyone have an answer?</p>
<p>The hours you focus per week on an activity, that you would not
have otherwise spent in that manner if you were not doing that
activity, can be included as legit. time spent per week on that EC
activity.</p>
<p>So if you play music in a special group for 1 hour a week and practice
4 hrs every week you are doing 5 hrs/wk. If you are so inclined
in the additional info section you can lay out the split in a concise
manner (do not have to).</p>
<p>The format is there for a reason. A reader wading through hundreds of
forms has a basis for easily picking someone who stands out. If you
are doing 10+ hours a week the reader could look for some award
or recognition in that activity possibly(…?)</p>
<p>So practice/rehearsal counts?</p>
<p>In my common app, in the activities section, im describing two “stay there” events i did:</p>
<p>one is a semester in israel (10 wks)
and one is a summer program (for a month)</p>
<p>so how many hours a week? 24 x 7 = 168 ??</p>
<p>or like 9 hours a day, the amount i was learning during the summer program?</p>
<p>but even the israel one, should i do hours awake?? so confused!</p>
<p>my dad said it looked bizarre to do 168 hours… I mean i was there the whole time…
HELP !</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>^ i did an away-from-home program too, & i just included the # of hours i was ‘learning’, as u said. so it turned out to be like 7 hours/day. but i think they’re familiar enough with my program to know it’s a night+day thing. hope that helped at all, haha :)</p>
<p>thanks so much…
does anyone else have an opinion, i trust you, theycallme,
but the more consensus the better!</p>
<p>would it be wierd to do the living in israel thing blank?
the summer program, yeah we had programatic times, and “off” time.
but living in israel… i did that while i was asleep.</p>