Redundant extracurricular activities?

Applying to College Common and Coalition Application
1

<p>I am going for Computer Science and will be applying to various universities (I know I'm very late, but I'm going for this). Now over the past few years I've done a lot of extracurricular activities in computer science, and more specially in open source software development especially related to websites and web servers and I'm (obviously) filling these in my common application.</p>

<p>Now, one of my activities which probably cover all my activities can be said as "Extremely interested in programming, software development and has experience in web development for 5 years" (better worded, probably). This covers my more specific activities, such as doing development of a paid product that I'm still selling, some open source plugins that I contributed (and still am contributing) to an upcoming forum software, a website that I developed for my dad (Bazaar's</a> Hot Deals) etc (got 5 more listed ATM). Should I still go ahead with the generic activity? As I can easily and rightly expand on this in the writing section's first short answer.</p>

2

<p>I think you should go ahead and list the activities separately. This better demonstrates the exact extent of your involvement. Colleges are actually looking for ECs that demonstrate “passion” in a specific area, so a long list of similar ECs will only help you.</p>

3

<p>Should I go ahead with listing the generic 5 years programming thing as well? Along with all the others.</p>

4

<p>Sure, go ahead and list it, maybe after all the specific things, to show that you might have more involvement and interest that can’t easily be characterized into specific ECs.</p>