Some colleges don’t like resumes, and that 10 activities are enough. Do most high caliber students attach them anyway? I always see those posts by others with 20 extracurriculars and I wonder if they only pick 10 or add the rest to a word doc and slap it on the app.
Thanks!
I would love to hear thoughts on this too. I have to believe that all the overachievers on CC submit a resume, the activities is so weak- 150 characters is not enough. I’m OK with the 10, just not the 150 characters.
My daughter only attached a resume when this was allowed by the college. In the final section to ‘add anything else’ on the app, she did not post a resume but thoughtfully listed a handful of current important/significant events/experiences. She spent months working out the 150 character allotment for her 10 activities.
@x793n28 How did your daughter do the 150 characters descriptions for the activities? I just found out we can abbreviate and not use full sentences (not sure about word abbreviation for ex. government=gov.)
@penngirlpending she abbreviated where she could, where it was obvious and would make sense to every reader, as you are describing with the government = gov example. It took months to really massage those words to fit into the tiny space. She used vivid descriptors when she could to make the explanations as interesting as possible. For example, she could’ve written “Spent two weeks at an international research station studying marine biology.” But that doesn’t tell the reader anything about her experiences there and it’s fairly dull to read. So instead she wrote (something like) “While diving, captured fish census data at 60’ depths for coral reef ecology research.” This more ‘active’ description shared a few things: 1) she can scuba dive, 2 )she has the skill to safely dive to 60’, 3) she can dive comfortably enough that she can also work on a project while diving, which indicated a level of diving ease and confidence, 4) it’s a visual description, you can picture a teenage girl in dive gear bubbling under the water, 5) she was working as part of a research group, which demonstrated her professional curiosity about the field she wants to join 6) she knows her fish well enough that she can identify them by sight, which also supports what she wanted to share most in her app - that she’s a serious marine science kid.
The point was for as many activity descriptions as possible to do double or triple duty, so that the reader was illuminated about something else while reading each activity. With the description above, she didn’t need to waste another activity space explaining that she scuba dives. By incorporating it into the description about the research station, she got that point across, saving valuable space to list another important activity.