<p>Hello, so I was wondering how CC formatted their activities section on the common app. I feel like I maybe doing this wrong. So the main two sections I'm worried about is:
"Position/Leadership description and organization name, if applicable"
and
"Details, honors won, and accomplishments"</p>
<p>Am I supposed to write in complete sentences? For the first one, do I have to say which positions I held in which grade? For the second one, if the club does not have any "honors won" or "accomplishments", how do I fill it out? Do I just give a general description of the club?</p>
<p>I'd appreciate if you guys could give me some hypothetical ways as to how you would write this. Thanks!</p>
<p>You get a teeny tiny space, right? So complete sentences just don’t work. If you really can’t communicate it in the space (sometimes the case!), you may been say “See Additional Information”, and then have a header for it there with some bullets making your key points. Still don’t need complete sentences in those bullets. Concise and clear is what you are looking for. I think the additional info section is harder to format that it used to be – someone else out here has suggested typing what you want in a plain text editor (not Word) and copy/paste from there to get better formatting.</p>
<p>If you think it is worth telling them, you can tell them something like 10th - Club Secretary, 11th-12th - Club President. They see a lot of apps, they will know what you mean.</p>
<p>I think when my kids had something where they were just a club member they said something like “Club volunteers in school library, club member”.</p>
<p>Don’t do complete sentences. I just listed the highest position I got to (for our lit magazine, I was an editor, then managing publisher, then managing editor (AKA editor-in-chief), so I just wrote “managing editor”. I ave a general description of what we did. So, here’s what I did for our literary magazine:</p>
<p>Activity type: Journalism/Publication
Position/Leadership description and organization name, if applicable: <a href=“literary%20magazine”>title of magazine</a> - managing editor
Details, honors won, and accomplishments: Published two issues of art, short stories, poetry, and creative non-fiction a year. Organized three student coffee houses/open mic nights per year.</p>
<p>Thanks I think I understand now! The thing is, I feel that the space on the common app is not enough for me to fully explain what I did. Dartmouth offers a chance for applicants to upload a resume. Should I do it, or do colleges usually not want these?</p>
<p>Often, we read of students who feel the same. Colleges, feel the opposite. They sift through tens of thousands of apps of mostly similar kids w/a wide but predictable suite of ECs – most are rather indistinguishable from others or from applicants from years past. It’s a shock to the applicants, whose lives and souls are invested in these activities – but a nameless/faceless adult will peruse your app, EC list and/or resume and summarize you in two sentences after 30 seconds of reading your material. That’s the cold fact of distilling you to something useful for them.</p>
<p>Your multi-layered resume/EC list – will be ground down to raw elements. That’s why most colleges discourage the use of a resume.</p>
<p>Luckily, one of my son’s top choices allows a resume to be attached. That is the way to convey more info on the activities.</p>
<p>If they offer you the chance to upload a resume, UPLOAD IT! Either they will not get to it because you are a definite yes or a definite no, or they will want to look at it because you are borderline. Why the heck would they let you upload it if they didn’t want it?</p>
<p>Conversely, Penn specifically says “such as a research abstract” when asking for a supplemental file. So don’t upload a resume for them.</p>
<p>I had three activities that I simply needed to have more detail about than what was allowed in the activities section. I wrote short things in the activities like, “Position/Leadership description and organization name, if applicable: Soloist and Team member at (name) School of Irish Dance. Details, honors won, and accomplishments: Began fall 2008, advanced to highest level by Feb 2011. Competed for solos and teams. Work as assistant teacher and give private lessons”</p>
<p>THEN, in the writing section under “Additional Information” I wrote something like, “a bit of extra necessary information about my activities:” and then had paragraphs with all the time spent and awards won and places traveled and things about teaching and everything else. These still weren’t full sentences because admissions doesn’t want to read all that but everything was there. </p>
<p>Basically, I don’t think you should need a resume if this part of you application isn’t needed for any other writing. Fill it up with all the details you feel will help explain the time and passion you put into your activities. I also used this space to mention two additional activities that didn’t fit within the ten allotted spots.
Good luck!!!</p>
For “Position/Leadership description and organization name, if applicable”, would saying something like
“Debate Team-Vice President” be misleading if you were only VP for lets say one of the 3 years you were in it? Or will colleges understand what you mean?