On the Common App, it tells you to list your activities “in order of importance to you”. Does this really matter? Like, do they only look at the first two you list or something? Also, how many activities is too many? (I’ve got 5 on my list at the moment: music, sport, internship, job, and service)
Thanks!
They look at all of them, but they want to know which ones you felt were most important. It’s a nice opportunity to be able to direct an admissions officer’s focus!
Five activities is fine. People often feel the need to fill up their activities section and end up adding meaningless stuff- it’s good that you’re staying away from that and keeping your activities to-the-point.
Other than LORs, essays and interviews, that’s another way for the AOs to get to know more about you, so it’s significant how you list things. But it’s more than just listing things. Of music, sport, internship, job, and service, if you list it like you did here, it’d be very helpful to be sure that music is your strong interest that you also mention it elsewhere such as in essay, interview, LORs, etc. If you list music at the top but it’s just your hobby and not something you’d consider your passion and you don’t make any meaningful connection elsewhere in your application, then you just wasted your opportunity to make your case well presented. My son’s strongest suit was music. He listed music first, wrote or mentioned it in his essays, talked about it in interviews, submitted videos or audios in Arts Supplement, etc. I’m sure it was quite obvious to any AOs that my son had a profound interest in music. That’s a coherent presentation.