<p>Will colleges think I am inflating my hours etc. The thing is like for one of my activities it is 4 hours for 25 weeks per years etc. It is mostly spaced out. But I have a job and am an officer in 3 clubs plus volunteer at hospital and mosque. Will they think I am lying and reject me?</p>
<p>Should I delete some activites etc??? What should I do?</p>
<p>I made a typo (27 hrs instead of 17), inflated my hours by 10. That’s not good. I’m gonna call them on Monday 'cause I already sent mine! But you haven’t you lucky… J/k</p>
<p>And, yes, 30+ hrs is ridiculous. Unless you have someone else (your counselor would be good) to back up that information or reassure and confirm with the admissions officer.</p>
<p>Yes. I am literally ALWAYS doing ECs (all day a lot of weekends etc.) and mine is between 15 and 20. I forget now what I put.</p>
<p>yes but in the summer i do alot so should I condense and write like 10 hrs/week in for 10 weeks or so?</p>
<p>His is a summary of my activites</p>
<p>Hospital Volunteer 4 hours/week for 30 weeks/yr
Chess CLub 2 hrs/week for 40 weeks/year
NHS 2 hrs/week for 40 weeks/year
Church 4 hours/week for 25 weeks/year</p>
<p>Work 20hours/week for entire school year.</p>
<p>Is this believeable? I do engage in all these activities. Work afterschool on weekdays and NHS and Chess Club before school 2 or 3 times a week. Then Hospital volunteering and Church involvement on the weekends. And hospital volunteering and church stuff is for all like 40 weeks of the year. This equates to almost 32 hours/week on ECs. In all honesty, I actually do all these activities with a passion. But, I dont know if it will come off as exaggerated to admissions officers.</p>
<p>Are my activities spread too thin? Should I be devoting more time to like 2 activities than all 4???</p>
<p>I need some help please.</p>
<p>Btw, I am applying to Harvard, Princeton etc. to give u a sense of my aims and goals.</p>
<p>omg ur so impressive</p>
<p>Chess Club huh… You said you do all of them with passion. How good are you at chess? Win any big competitions?</p>
<p>tmac - is that sarcastic? I am asking for some advice.</p>
<p>melin- No big competitions besides district chess tournaments and school tournaments. The thing is some of the big ones cost a lot of money and I am and never have been in the financial environment in which I was able to do them</p>
<p>Now, some real advice will be helpful.</p>
<p>32 hours a week of ECs sounds like a lie. It would raise big red flags.</p>
<p>Should i deflate my hours and possibly bring it down to like 28?</p>
<p>This article that I was reading by an admissions officer said 50 hours was the renaissance kid who was rejected. 32 hours is way less than 50. Plus…with a job after school and weekends free, I actually have a lot of time, much more than i expect. </p>
<p>Any reasons why they will question me? To me 30 seems all right. I know a kid who worked 40 hours a week plus school, so why couldnt I spend 30 hours.</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. I work 25 hours a week and volunteer for another 10, plus go to school (although I don’t spend as much time in school as you guys do given the nature of distance learning). But even then, I not only get everything accomplished but have plenty of time left over. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem as far as I’m concerned. I would say this is especially true if you are working as a low-income student, and because not all of your ECs are year round.</p>
<p>^i am a low-income student who works (luckily in my field of interest) but also for money for my family. Then, I try to juggle my other extracurriculars (not all are year around) and it comes to approximately 30 hours per week. Adding that with school etc, it is around 50 hours which is a normal job.</p>
<p>Look at your day/week during the school yr differently than summer work/vol etc…</p>
<p>If even with a full school day, homework, sleep etc…you are doing more than 4 hrs a day of ECs and can prove it…go for it…</p>
<p>But I wonder if you are overestimating your hours…for example, our student has a full school day and then 6 days a week a varsity sport–at about 15 hrs a week…with hw, sleep, etc… He has only Saturday afternoon and Sunday after church to do anything else inc hw over the weekend… We had written down everything he was doing and estimating the time but when we added it up–we knew we had an error because it was more hours than there are in a week…we realized we had overlapped some things and glad the error got caught now.</p>
<p>Add your total hrs and see if you are at 24 in a day and 7 days a week because if you have overestimated and an AdCom looks at it and adds it up…they may think you lied, even if it was an error…
or they may think you are so overinvolved in ECs …</p>
<p>trying to be helpful, hope that helps.
good luck</p>
<p>Yeah, Paki, I think you’ll be fine. I’m in school for about 30 hours per week (less than you guys because of my school) and then am working or volunteering for another 35. Then I have other obligations, but the fact of the matter remains that 65 to 85 hours a week (for everything) isn’t really that bad.</p>
<p>“^i am a low-income student who works (luckily in my field of interest) but also for money for my family”</p>
<p>I’d suggest making sure they know how many hours a week you work, and that you’re including your job’s hours as part of your EC’s hours. I worked 20 hours a week during the school year during my senior year in h.s. I also did ECs, but I don’t think that all of that came to 32 hours a week. I’m thinking it was more like 26 hours a week.</p>
<p>Northstarmom makes a very important point</p>
<p>If some of it is work in your field of interest and brings in income for your family–be sure to include that explanation and consider how to talk about it in essays and interviews. </p>
<p>Thats very impressive because you are shouldering family responsibilities and pursuing your interests!! ;o) Good luck</p>
<p>Your applying undergrad right? not medical school…?</p>
<p>^thanks. any more?</p>
<p>I mean, I put down 35 hours per week (during the school year, it’s 55 or more during the summer) and Stanford didn’t question it. I just don’t see the problem as long as you’re being honest.</p>
<p>If you really do all your activities and you’re not exaggerating, I don’t think you should lower the number to be seem “less suspicious.” Don’t sell yourself short, but don’t exaggerate either. Just be honest.</p>
<p>I have an activity that I am putting down for 20 hours/week. I actually spend that much time on it. Honestly, I don’t care if admissions officers are freaked out by that large number, because it’s the truth, and it’s my passion.</p>
<p>I am being honest; I am usually extremely busy. I go to school an hour earlier every single day to work on the club projects because I cannot stay afterschool. I actualyl do not think 30 hours is too much as long as a person is working diligently. I will admit though that it is cutting into my schoolwork (which I am unhappy about). I will have all A’s in 5APs but I am realizing that I am not actually studying a lot, which I should be.</p>