<p>Well, it’s water under the bridge for me since my son is already in college, but on his “activities resume” we did include the commuting time. I didn’t occur to me not to, since I interpreted that question to mean “how many hours per week/month/whatever are dedicated to this activity?” The commuting hours were certainly dedicated to that activity. My kid had one major EC, a sport. He addressed the issue of not having any other significant activities because of the time required by his sport. With commuting it was 4 to 5 hours a day (in the summer it upped to 7 to 8 hours a day), 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year.</p>
<p>He didn’t pretend all that time was spent training and even talked about having to commute to another city for practice and how that added a lot of time for him. He (and I) thought of it more as a committment of time that could have been spent on other things. There was not a trace of trying to be duplicitous, it’s just how we both interpreted the question.</p>
<p>So there you go… I guess, contrary to all the other posters, I assumed we should include it. On the other hand, he didn’t include commute time (a few minutes) to his few minor ECs that were right here in town. In the case of his sport, though, that commute was a real investment of time, money, and happened nearly every day for 4 years.</p>
<p>My son has been playing violin at the senior center. He was very surprised when I told him that the time he spent learning new music to play could count. I wouldn’t however count commuting time.</p>
<p>My D works at the planetarium in our city. She takes a train and a bus each way. If she counted time spent it would be 10:30 to 3:30. If she counted commute it would be 8:45 - 5 pm. Nonetheless, she uses commute time to work on other homework so it’s not really volunteer time. I am hopeful that they can figure out that she did commute an appreciable distance though.</p>
Hey, if you’re going to add that in, don’t forget to squeeze in the rest of the time associated with being able to do the activity; showering and getting dressed, eating so she wouldn’t be famished during the activity, brushing her teeth so her breath didn’t drive others away, etc. Give it a little thought and I bet you can pad each day of participation with even more. Maybe you can even figure out what percentage of her day it was and allocate some of her sleeping hours as prep…</p>
<p>Ok, this makes sense mathmom, and so does counting prep time for tutoring. But once you go down that road of including prep. time, where does it end? Do you count the time spent cleaining and maintaining your instrument afterward? Do you count the time required to search for new songs and purchase sheet music? What about any time spent communicating with the senior center regarding scheduling, etc.? Couldn’t this get complicated? Would all that other stuff be assumed by an adcom anyway? </p>
<p>Seems to me that athletes would get the short stick in this economy. Packing up one’s sports bag for games/meets, cleaning and drying muddy cleats after a practice, taking an extra shower because you have double practice sessions morning and evening, etc. are all equally necessary tasks but don’t sound as important or professional as learning new music, lol!</p>
<p>GFG, having had kids in both sports and music, I disagree. For piano, for example, my kids did not put down 1 hr/week. The lesson itself was one hour per week. They put down 1 hr/week for lessons and put down X hrs/week for piano practice. That is not the same as taking showers and packing sports bags. It is equivalent to sports practice for the games. However, I did explain to you that if your D does weight lifting and cross training on a regular basis at a gym, she could list that activity. That is a sports practice, like practicing piano. I would never count commuting time, or phone calls, or other stuff. But doing sports workouts or instrumental practice is time spent doing the EC. Not everything is the game or the recital but there is practice involved. Practice time is not padding. The other stuff mentioned, in my opinion is padding.</p>
<p>No, taking care of his violin is part of his regular EC time. But putting together a program to play for the seniors is volunteer time, including finding the music counts in my book. I don’t think it’s an exact science and I’d be happy to fill out the forms saying I spent x hours at the senior center and y hours preparing for the activities I was involved in. (He also teaches an origami class there.)</p>
<p>Yes, I do think for a musician, that mentioning the hours for the performance or the lesson can be provided and the practice/prep time can be separated and provided too. Being a musician is more practice and prep than actual performance. This is like theater. When listing “theater productions” on a resume, one doesn’t just count the hours for the performances but also the rehearsal time.</p>
<p>This is all quite different, in my opinion, than commuting (the original question posted). Commuting is inherent in any activity or job. Some have to travel further than others, that’s true, but it is not usually considered in the hours devoted to DOING the activity. It is assumed there is travel to do it. It is also somewhat obvious if the activity is not school based…such as at a theater, a dance studio, a ski area, a community center, an internship, a work site, etc.</p>
<p>In my view, some misunderstand that EC must be associated with the school or be some formal organized thing. Working out at a gym would be OK to list IF done on a regular basis…at least weekly, in my opinion. Colleges want to know how a student spends their time outside the academic classroom. If the kid is doing regular gym training, they could list it as such…something like “physical conditioning at gym”, X hrs/wk, Y wks/yr." But this only makes sense if it truly is on a regular basis and more than an hour a week. It should have some substance to it. Another way to include it is in on a resume, I usually have a section at the end called “Additional Interests” and there, one could list “regular workouts at the gym.” but without times given.</p>
<p>This thread comes across as, how do I put it nicely,about as self centered as can be. My daughters would never have considered padding their resume with commute time. Or Prep time. As mikemac posted, you cuold end up counting washing your work out clothes as your EC time. I just can’t imagine. When does working out by yourself just to make yourself better count for your sport. Lets say you got caught in a traffic jam, you add that on? Or you had to go shopping for music, you add in the shopping time, after all its prep time? </p>
<p>It never occured to us to add in sitting in a car or on that bus as part of an activity. Often, that time is spent listening to an Ipod, reading a book, texting firents, doing homework, and is part of daily life. Why would getting to a sports trounement count? Maybe its the sports kids, who do something that is basically a self involved pursuit aren’t getting short shifted at all. If they have the luxuary to work out on their own for several extra hours a day, that seems to me to be a very lucky lifestyle to have. Makes their body stronger. And if your only EC is sports, and that is the reason you have no other ECs, that is a choice you have made and to stuff in commute to justify your choices seems just that, a justification or excuse. </p>
<p>You shouldn’t have to seacrh and stretch for each and every little thing to make your resume may impressive. If you have to resrot to adding in commute hours, think about how that would look in a job interview. Oh, I worked 20 hours a week, well, not not really, 5 of that was getting to work.</p>
<p>Ilovetoquilt…the majority of posters, including myself, agree to NOT include commute time! I don’t believe in any resume padding. </p>
<p>I did say that instrumental music practice is equivalent to sports practice or rehearsals for the play. Normally those things DO count. It is not just about the recital, the game or the theatrical production but the practice time (and no, I don’t count all that other little stuff mentioned, nor the commute!). However, piano is not an EC that is just ONE hour/week. The lesson is one hour per week but the piano practice may be one hour/day, just like an athlete has required practice times or a thespian attends rehearsals. An instrumentalist is required to practice for the lessons.</p>
<p>My impression is most kids now a days are so over booked, there is really no need to “pad” their ECs. D1 only listed top 3 or 5 (I don’t remember), didn’t have enough room to list everything.</p>
<p>oldfort, you’d be surprised. You and many of us are used to kids who are highly involved in ECs and the notion of padding would never enter their minds as they have plenty to document as it is. But I help many kids with resumes and am on the lookout for avoiding padding. I don’t want to get specific but in looking over one student’s resume draft, I had many questions raised because I was seeing things that he had not had on his original background questionnaire when we first started working together and it was obvious that they were padding to fill up the resume…after I questioned certain things…such as one thing was from elementary school or another comes across as formal lessons which I know he does not take. Another activity/club, by its nature, could not possibly be the number of hours the student gave it (as well knowing what else he is involved in). I am definitely having many of these things changed!!</p>
<p>Like I said, we did count commuting time, and Soozievt is right when she points out that I am probably the only person on this thread who did… but still, it’s just a difference of opinion about a small thing and not an occasion to malign the integrity of people with whom one might not share the same perspective. Good heavens.</p>
<p>It never occurred to me to not count the commuting hours, and my son even mentioned them in his resume as part of the time committment. I mean, if an admisssions committee wanted to subtract them from the total, they could do that, but do you think they really care that much? I mean, all those reports of time spent are pretty unverifiable so I imagine they’re not accounted on the same level as grades and test scores and what not. They give a general picture of how a student spent their time outside of class. That’s it.</p>
<p>rentof2…I did forget that you mentioned that your son included commute time, sorry. But I don’t think he did so to pad the resume and it was his interpretation of what the college was asking for. I think most do not include it, however. Obviously your son’s resume did not raise any questions and he made out just fine. No problem. Since someone was asking this legitimate question of how to interpret the hours to record on the resume, I do think the rule of thumb would be not to include commute time and since he asked, that’s my opinion. I imagine you are not the only family, however, who interpreted it to include the commute.</p>
<p>By the way, in your son’s case, he used an annotated resume and so he explained his involvement and how far away it was and so on. I like annotated resumes. The little chart on the application would not allow this to be clarified in such a way.</p>
<p>In any case, I can relate, as my girls traveled long distances every day and weekend too. No, we did not record it on the hours but I think it was kinda obvious (though will never know) how they traveled all over the region regularly to participate in their endeavors. I wish I could submit the number of miles put on my car, LOL!</p>
<p>ilovetoquilt22: We are having a friendly discussion about the purpose of the EC section on the application–is it to indicate hours of direct participation in/contribution to an EC, or hours spent away from studies as a result of doing an EC? The objective of this is not to find ways to pull the wool over some admissions officer’s eyes. (They’re way to sharp for that anyway!) It’s more a question of how best to represent our child fairly to a college.</p>
<p>If you had read the responses carefully, you would have realized that everyone who posted here is advocating honesty; all are strongly opposed to application padding of any kind. Also, all but one poster counseled against counting commuting time. The one poster who did count commuting had a very legitimate reason–their child’s EC required an exceptional number of hours of travel. It was not an ordinary commute. Also, no one thinks the student should count things like packing a bag or doing laundry–we were actually saying that doing that would be ridiculous. So your response was unnecessarily harsh and misrepresents our opinions.</p>
<p>Regardless, I’ll say again that this isn’t black and white. For example, this morning D had to be at the high school at 8 AM for practice. The x-c team took a bus to a park more than about an hour from the school, conducted training there, and returned to the high school at 1 PM. The coach often uses time on the bus to give the kids instructions or debrief after a practice or meet. Sometimes he doesn’t. Still, do you guys honestly think it’s somehow unfair to count the entire time away at practice as hours spent on the EC? We’re not talking about the drive from home to the high school and back, we’re talking about time required by everyone to be a member of the team. So now the kid is supposed to micro-analyze the coach’s practice time and discount the bus ride, water breaks, minutes spent cheering for a teammate, visiting the port-a-potty? If the student is away from home participating in practice for x number of hours, there is nothing unethical about listing those hours in their entirety!</p>
<p>GFG…in my opinion, no matter what your kid was doing at the activity, I would include the hours she was required to be AT the activity. If your kid is warming the bench and not playing, so be it. If your kid is listening to the coach give tips, so be it. The hours are the required hours she had to be there with the team. </p>
<p>I would not count hours commuting to get my kid to the required place where the required hours took place. </p>
<p>Here is an example…my kid was in ski races. The ski race would require one to be there all day. The race run itself might be 45 seconds!</p>