<p>Posting for DS - he is a junior and starting to put his resume together for fall applications. He is on his high school's forensics team. He competes only sporadically in forensics events, but participates in monthly UDL sanctioned public policy debates. I am not sure if or how to differentiate between forensics and debate, he does want to highlight his debate participate because he wants to join college debate team. But his high school doesn't have a debate team per se, some members of the forensics team participate in UDL debates. So it might be misleading to post member of debate team, even though he has a regular debate partner with whom he debates at UDL events.</p>
<p>Even more fine-tuned, if he competes in these debates monthly and sometimes wins awards at individual meets, how do we list those? If he only places every now and then, does it only draw attention to those meets where he doesn't place? We have looked at the Common App and it is very difficult trying to figure out how to list these victories.</p>
<p>I can almost analogize this to someone being on cross country, only competing in hurdles, and placing a few times in regular meets.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>I’ve said before that the Common Application format is not very user-friendly. It seems to take the picture of what an applicant is about, and scatter it in pieces all over the application. It maybe helpful for him to either 1) write his extra-curricular activity essay about his participation in forensics, making it quite clear what he does and what he’d like to do and/or 2) upload an activities resume, formatted in whatever way brings the pieces back together into a coherent picture, into the “additional information” blank.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t think the colleges can make anything at all out of those lines where you have to list the activity and the position and the hours per week. Consider how many things don’t happen in an “hours per week” basis–theatrical productions (zero when you aren’t doing one, oodles when you are), mission trips, whatever. Whoever designed the form must have had a rather narrow idea of what people do with their time outside the classroom.</p>
<p>I went ahead and made a separate page for the additional info where I wrote off that I competed every two weeks in tournaments ~15 hours long for my events throughout four years, qualled for state, qualled for nats, blahblahblah. I didn’t go ahead and list off how many times I placed in individual tournaments because that would take too long, and I didn’t really think they’d care. But I did say that I final-ed in several tournaments, wrote my level with the NFL, and posted a link to my membership page.
I didn’t want to go overboard and list off every detail, but with forensics there really is SO much involvement that goes into it that I didn’t want to undermine it in my commonapp. Hope this helps.</p>