Daughter is involved in many activities inside and outside of school. She holds senior leadership position in each one of the activities. She won many honors and awards for these activities as they each one depicts her different strengths. She has put lot of hours in each activities. I told her to combine each activity in sub groups so she can fill those in Common app.
Is this a good idea?
You certainly can group activities. To decide which to group together vs. which to list separately, how to group them, and, especially, in which order to list them, consider:
What is the “story” you are telling about yourself by listing these activities? What do you want the activities to reveal about you?
Think, too, about how you write the little blurb about them that you are allowed to write for each activity within the activity list.
Based on your answers and this work, you also can eliminate activities that were less meaningful to your child and focus on highlighting those that held importance.
Just a suggestion but why not just list the top 10 most “important” and “impressive” activities and leave out the more insignificant ones? Quality over quantity.
I remember seeing a video on here that showed an AO reviewing a few apps. When they got to one with a bunch of ECs, the AO said that this was a red flag. Her comment was that nobody could give that many ECs justice. This is especially true when they see the word founder. It can look like resume padding to some AOs. This may not describe your DD, but it could be viewed that way by some. Just something to think about.
We found the EC spot on the Common app limiting because of the lack of space for the description (not because of the 10 count limit). Some things need explanation and there is not a lot of room. For colleges with supplemental essays, this is not an issue, but for a lot of colleges without supplements it’s a problem.
You could add a resume for further description, but I wouldn’t go over 10-12 ECs - as mentioned there are only so many hours in a day. What is your kids “story”? Focus on those ECs
Agree, a student can certainly be involved in 10+ activities, but they aren’t going to be equally significant. The first time one goes through this there is a tendency to just fill the space and think every activity is important. Don’t water down an application with a long list of just stuff done over the years, some activity has helped her grow more than something else, or says more about her. It is easy to make an activity or club title sound like more than it is on the app, but that can be seen from a mile away.
Admissions people get the reality of activities …if you are trying to condense 20 things into 10, you aren’t prioritizing the importance and significance of each activity. A student couldn’t be the equivalent of a Stage Manager at big high school productions and do that same level of activity in 10 different things. Admissions folks know what students are capable of. Try to see the activities for their true significance to who she is and list them as such on the app.
Remember, you only have 25 words or so to describe an activity (or is it 50?). The description space for each activity is very small.
You definitely should try to organize the response to tell a cohesive story about the kid rather than be an exhaustive catalog.
Note that many colleges (but not all) will allow you to submit a resume through the CA. There you can definitely use the flexibility of the format to group and summarize things in a way that will illuminate and explain what the kid has been doing. By consolidating similar things into one category on the resume, you can keep it short (which you have to do or else it won’t get read) but also explain better.
End of the day, the resume, the essays and the CA prompts are all part of telling the story. Use them all.
Whatever the constraints of the application forms, don’t let volume or a simple count of the number of activities overwhelm quality. Being a serial joiner isn’t especially meritorious. “Quality” in my opinion, are activities that gain individual recognition or distinction. For example (not an exhaustive list), one or more of the following: a) award-winning individual or team achievements (e.g., debate, athletics – awards/wins at local, state, national level); (b) leadership (president, captain, editor, etc.); © initiative in activity in the community.
My daughter spent 10 to 20 hours a week on her 2 major ECs. How could you do that for more than 10? There’s not that many hours in the week.
Agree, Vicki. My son spent 20+ hrs a week on his two major EC’s: debate and opinion editor of school newspaper. He won awards in both areas as well as in statewide math competitions. Beyond those activities his spare time went into his hobbies. In his adult life all of those activities – including his major hobbies – contributed to his eventual career.
Why, suddenly this year, is there so much CC emphasis on forming a coherent story? Where’d it come from? When someone has various interests and accomplishments, no way you should assume all activities have to match some one direction.
Some posters might have you, eg, dropping theatre or some vol work from the activities list of a stem kid- not realizing how it matters, what it shows. And how unilateral is not the thing for top holistics.
Instead, what you want is a picture that forms of a kid willing to engage in different ways. Not the mini stuff, the low level filler, decorated coffee mugs for the nursing staff, made a poster, whatever. Rather, the activities adcoms will find relevant in their review for admission. Those that show the traits and attributes they look for.
Quantity is not being a “serial joiner.” Two different animals. You absolutely do not need awards and certainly not empty titles. Instead, responsibilites and some impact, in some of the ECs. Big difference.
@Eeyore123 That bunch of ECs was not the red flag. Not the quantity. I’m convinced. Watch it and it’s the all president titles that raised the eyebrow.
Not that no one could give it justice, but that all president/founder titles sugests a move to title mania, rather than substance. (Note, she only gave the bare list, not how the kid described the work.)
That’s an important difference, when trying to glean what matters.
Are you referencing school awards? My kids never mentioned school awards. In-school leadership awards weren’t that important either.
I think it is mainly important to focus on those areas of interest that a kid really loves. High school is a time to explore so there may be more activities than will actually be pursued later, since focus needs to be a little narrower in college.
It is hard to know without more specifics, how your daughter should proceed. Feel free to PM.
What schools are you applying to, and what major are you considering, and what EC’s and awards does your student have?
If you are applying to top 25 schools, how you approach this issue will matter much more than if you aren’t.
Some things make sense to group. My son was in three different orchestras over the course of high school, but he just put down. Orchestra, and that he’d been concert master freshman year and second chair as a senior. He didn’t list them all separately - if he’d been a prospective music major he might have. He didn’t write about it anywhere else on his application. His other main activity was Science Olympiad and he had a lot of award for that. Interestingly neither of those activities had anything to do with what he thought he’d major in (IR) or his main academic interest (history) or what he wrote about for his main Common Application essay (origami). He did write another essay that conveyed his love of history and his understanding of what it means to be a historian.
You can also use Addl Info, but want to be judicious. I know some high schools in some regions recommend a resume, but that doesn’t mean all colleges want one. (Certainly not one that repeats the Activities section.)
THis is really about not too much, not too little, just right.
I wish we could pin this, as I’m getting tired of typing it. 
But here is what my kids did, and it worked very well. They went to an independent private high school that encouraged kids to do a lot of EC activities, and they were busy in the summers as well. So they had a lot of activities. I don’t think any admissions officers doubted them. Here is what they did:
Examples of the bullets:
This is not another essay. My kids chose to put awards related to the activities in this listing rather than the awards system because they thought it would be easier for admissions to find them, instead of flipping back and forth tp try to match them up. Admissions reads the whole app, so they would see them. The awards sections just had some academic awards in them.
And of course they still listed them with the ones most important to them first.
The problem with the resume is that it tends to be repetitive. You don’t want admissions to have to flip back and forth a lot, and have to think hard to try to match the resume with the rest of the application. There are a tiny number of schools that encourage a resume, but otherwise I would not send one.
RE#10, AOS do want a coherent app, but coherent doesn’t mean focused for all kids. If you have done a million things, explain it. Are you curious about different things? Someone who likes to do things as a way to socialize/connect with others? Looking for a passion? Suffering from serious Fomo?
What it should not look like is that you signed up for a million things because you thought colleges would like it, that you were padding your resume, etc.
Whatever you say should be echoed and evidenced by the rest of your application. Everyone I know who has worked as an AO says that one of the major turnoffs in an app is when the applicant shows poor self-knowledge. “I am a leader” in an essay is a problem when every teacher writes about how spectacularly you have worked on your own and you have no leadership roles.
My D19 and I went to one of those joint info sessions for 5 top schools. A question was asked about EC’s and one of the admissions officers said they were tired of hearing that schools are only looking for students who were “spiked” or had all their EC’s focused in areas where they had significant accomplishments. They said we choose both the well rounded applicant that has a breadth of activities and the focused applicant. That the most important thing is that the EC’s represent the student. I remember thinking it really is hard to interpret how to approach this. What I plan on doing with my daughter is doing a few drafts with different approaches and see what the total application looks like. There might be a good reason to stick in that club that only meets a few times a quarter if it helps to show who a student is…as an example if a student had lots of EC’s in robotics, academic decathlon, computer programming, but also was part of a rock climbing club that only met once a week and they took a few weekend trips a year and one of those experiences were part of an essay. Even though they might not have been an officer in the club or done anything significant other then been a member during high school it might be important to the overall portrait of the student.
If I recall from last year, it says “ten most important” - your strategy looks to me like showing off. It can’t possibly be that she has more than ten of equal importance, right?
Of course, some combining is reasonable (No one cares that my son played soccer for three different teams) but I think they are asking you to cull a little bit.
“most important” is relative to who the student is. It doesn’t say “most impressive”. I think expressing what are the 10 most important activities so that they have a good idea of who the student is as a person and what is important to them in their life so they can determine the best fit.