I know people often exaggerate or change the wording of their ECs a bit to make them seem better but is it too much of an exaggeration if I say that “I catered to the needs of club members” or like “created a collaborative environment” when we kinda just hung out in the classroom??
Are they going to like call the teacher supervisor of my club to check??
pls be honest. it’s ok if this is too much of an embellisment but i don’t want to find out too late lol
I’ll be honest - you’re off to a bad start in life if you’re looking to bend the truth.
If you did something of substance, describe it. If you didn’t, then it’s not worthy of a listing.
I’ve read that the UCs do random audits of applications - they randomly pull some percentage of apps and the selected student must provide verification of every claim made in their application. Not sure if other universities do this, but embellishing the truth is not only unethical but can be quite risky. If you do get caught, your acceptance would almost certainly be rescinded.
Only you can say if this is too much of an embellishment. We don’t know what you did. It is possible you did create a collaborative environment during meetings - did you? What do you mean by “hanging out” - what did you actually do and what was your role?
I don’t see how this is a problem at all. Hanging out, socializing, and creating a fun environment is basically the foundation of creating a “collaborative environment” – how can collaboration occur when people don’t feel like they know/can trust their peers?
Just be honest. Very honest. Embellishing is not what you should be doing. If you need to embellish, perhaps you need to actually be doing more. My opinion.
I see many resumes of high school students. The best ones use plain English to describe specific actions and contributions and avoid “business-speak” like “created a collaborative environment.” I would be more impressed with a resume that said “organized club meetings and led discussions.”
Also remember that what you do is more important than your title or the name of your club. For example, many students tutor other students, and I think that’s wonderful. I recently saw a resume where a student described himself as “Founder and Chief Executive Officer” of an organization with a made-up name (imagine something like “EduCo”). When I asked him what that meant, he told me that he tutors two younger students in his neighborhood. In my view, he should have simply described himself as a tutor.
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I’ll just add at this point I have seen many admissions officers address this in some way, and they pretty much all say something very similar. It isn’t necessarily an ethical violation to use business-speak in these contexts (although it could be), but it is a terrible advocacy strategy! The applications they love are the ones that stand out from the sea of such applications using business-speak. So at a minimum, you should avoid doing that.
That said, there is a real art to writing interesting activity descriptions. It is NOT about making them sound more formal/“impressive” (in the way ambitious but rather inexperienced HS students tend to think of things being “impressive”). It is about packing strong, specific images into the description that the reviewer will actually find interesting, ideally amusing, because that then reflects well on the personality of the applicant.
OK, so this is purely a hypothetical, but suppose your activity involved late evening discussions. So, suppose you could write something like this:
ACTIVITY NAME (served as “pizza king” and made sure we had carb fuel for late-evening bull sessions)
You may think that sounds less than “impressive”, but I think there is a very good chance an admissions officer would actually find that refreshing and charming.
And my final point is their ultimate goal in holistic review is to find applicants the other students in their community will love to be around, as roommates, classmates, in activities, and so on. And you know what college students do a lot? Have late-night bull sessions. And you know who is always popular? The person who happily will go on a pizza run for the group.
So if you are doing this right, you are painting a very specific picture of the various ways in which you will be a valued member of your college community. And that is the actual goal here.
But if you instead wrote:
ACTIVITY NAME (catered to the needs of other members during collaborative meetings)
You will have failed to say something specific and interesting, and lost an opportunity to actually stand out as someone who would truly be valued by other students.
I am not in admissions but I read scholarship applications for a large university. I agree with the statement above. “Led” and “organized” are going to catch my attention over “created” and “catered.” In general, for the scholarships I read, we are looking for students who exhibited leadership and took initiative. Initiative could be starting a club, but could also be something as simple as taking steps to get students, who were used to meeting on zoom, to attend in person meetings. It is about recognizing a problem and taking steps to make a change.
If you are filling out the Common App where you have limited space, words like collaborative and environment take up too many characters.
So everything I have seen said by actual admissions officers at highly selective “holistic review” colleges is that they are definitely not looking for people to “embellish” their activities in the sense of trying to make them look more formal and impressive than they really were. And indeed, to be blunt they generally do not see most activities as competitive qualifications, because they know there are many different activities where various awards are available to reasonably smart kids willing to put in enough effort. And they already know you are smart and capable of effort from your transcript (and test scores if available).
So mostly they are looking to activities to get a sense of the person’s passions, leadership skills, team skills, and so on. And a few activities might indicate special non-academic talents not already demonstrated on a transcript (in athletics, the arts, or so on). But even if not, it is still valuable to them if an activity “only” demonstrates how that applicant would be a good fit for, and valued member of, their college community in ways a transcript or test score cannot address.
But I agree it would be wrong to conclude from that they want modesty instead. This is a self-advocacy exercise, and self-advocacy is an important college and indeed life skill.
So I think applicants really need to think outside of a one-dimensional spectrum that goes from “embellished” to “modest”. Instead, they need to think creatively about how they have demonstrated valuable personal traits in their activities, and not be shy about painting that picture for AOs.
As a final thought, I think there is a latent issue here where not enough kids are getting good advice on these issues long before they are actually filling out applications. Like, if eventually you need your applications to present an honest and compelling picture of you as a person that has been highly valued in many group contexts, including classes, organized activities, informal group activities, and so on, you actually have to BE such a person. Otherwise, you are in the awkward position of trying to figure out how to fool admissions officers into thinking you are someone you are not, and a big part of their jobs is basically to see through such efforts.
And yet so much of the “how to get into good colleges” advice kids get is individualistic, and specifically about competitive achievements. Here is how YOU can get a more impressive transcript. How YOU can get better test scores. How YOU can impress colleges with various awards offered in various activities, or positions/accomplishments that sound impressive to other HS students and parents. And so on.
And then suddenly they find out that whether or not they are a good person and valued member of their school community matters a lot to the most selective holistic review colleges. And they feel like they have done everything right, and yet in truth they have done little or nothing to be such a person. And so they belatedly try to figure out how to make themselves seem like such a person in their essays and such, even though that has never really been a big part of who they were.
And then they are frustrated it often doesn’t work, because admissions officers can often tell they are not in fact really the sort of person they are looking to admit.
So unfortunately, there is only so much helpful advice can be given to, say, a rising senior who has really been devoting themselves to individual accomplishments and not to being a good person and valued member of their community.
But if, say, a rising senior has actually done at least some stuff that reflects well on them as a person, we can maybe help them understand that using that as much as they reasonably can in their applications is not a bad thing. And specifically not something they should be concerned about looking bad compared to an applicant who seems to have a long list of impressive individual accomplishments.
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What was your role in this club? Were you president?
Do you have other activities that have taken up more of your time that you can highlight over the social one?
Social clubs have value, but I get the sense from reading the responses that there are other activities that are valued more. So maybe list it at the bottom and talk more about the other activities you do that are not pure social clubs. Never lie or exaggerate beyond the truth of what it is.
I’d strongly advise being cautious about drawing inferences about what holistic review colleges actually value based on what online discussions seem to imply they value. Not that we are being intentionally misleading, but all of us who are not actually admissions officers are not really authorities on the subject, even if there is value in us sharing what we individually learn from discussions with actual authorities.
In that spirit, while you definitely should not just take my word for it, I will again relate than any time I have seen a holistic review AO talk about this at any length (and it has come up a lot), they have made a point of emphasizing they do NOT have any particular idea in mind about what activities are more or less valuable. Which makes sense, because activities can serve so many different functions in the life of a given individual, and demonstrate so many different things about an applicant that might matter to an AO.
Of course you should definitely generally list your activities by the ones which have mattered most to you. AOs say they expect that and will plan to focus more of their attention on the top of your list.
But I would personally advise against trying to make it sound like a minor activity was more important to you, or a major activity was less important to you, because you are guessing AOs will be more impressed that way. I think your actual best bet, based on what these AOs keep saying, is to give a really strong, specific description of the activities which actually did matter to you the most.
And again, they typically review like 50-100 of these a day, day after day, week after week, in their peak season. It is far more likely to be counterproductive than helpful to intentionally list the same sorts of activities in the same sort of order as almost all the other applicants. If you want to actually stand out, if anything you should be trying to give these AOs something they don’t see dozens of times in a row.
But most importantly, you should be trying to give them a compelling description of who you really are.
Completely agree. Some students seem to think they need to have founded a club or initiative in order to be impressive. Not true at all. I would rather see a student have impact on an existing club than be a founder of a club that is unlikely to continue after they graduate.
So for most colleges they want some activities for a few years. Regardless what you did. One of the best activities is actually a job.
If you just hung out great. What did you talk about? So maybe a weekly discussion group on???
My son had multiple ecs but one was just a group of students every week they went to check out a different activity /club at their school They were weekly exploring different interests, ordered pizza and had fun. This has value on a college campus. Not everything has to be curing cancer. The AOs want to see your active since then it’s a good chance you will be active on their college campus and bring value and worth to their college.
As an aside. I saw a t-shirt from a college kid in my area and it was the “Anti-Social, Social club” .
. Lol. Again, not everything has to be academic.
Non-specific phrases like the above just sound like non-specific contributions. Be specific and honest. And like someone said above, there’s nothing wrong with creating a fun environment for hanging out. Students need that. Humans are gregarious.
The last thing you want to sound like are those LinkedIn fools who refer to themselves as “Thought Leaders”.
I agree with you. My S has a couple of main ECs that take up the bulk of his time but he also has one where I believe the description will be “attended regularly because I enjoyed the people and conversations” He gets to hang out with kids he wouldn’t necessarily overlap with in his other ECs and enjoys it very much. Every once in a while it also nice to go to something where you are not responsible for making it happen.
Exactly. Plus the readers have like 10 minutes tops reading most apps. They aren’t looking that closely. But the application should paint a picture of the student. No one is expected to be in 10 different clubs and activities. So some give the applicant meaning, whether academic or fun. It really just gives the schools a quick snap shot of who the applicant really is. Combined with the stats, rigor, essays… They should have a good clue if the applicant is a fit for their school with some serious luck thrown in. 
