I participated in theater in 9th and 10th grade, and I did spend a lot of my time doing it (6-12 hrs/wk or sometimes more). However, after 10th grade I realized I would rather spend my time doing other things and stopped taking the musical theater class and doing plays. Should I put this in the activities section since it was something I spent a lot of time on and to explain why I didn’t do as many other extracurriculars freshman + sophomore year, or would it look bad that I quit something and didn’t stay committed? I have a bunch of other activities and this would be towards the bottom, so I could really go either way with including it or not.
List it. Dont explain why you quit. People’s interests evolve. It’s expected.
Agree. I’d definitely list it and indicate your years of participation - it shows you were involved during freshman and sophomore years. No explanation is needed as it is common for student’s interests to evolve over time. I agree that you should put your more recent activities at the top of the list with theater further down.
As the other posters on this thread have said, list it if you did it for multiple years/long time, even if you ended up stopping your involvement in it. For example, I was involved with my school’s science competition club for 9-11th grade, but ended up dropping it my senior year for personal reasons. The only indication on my common application of this was that I only selected that I had done it for those three years, and colleges didn’t seem to care because I had other activities that I was still doing (i.e. don’t drop all of your extracurricular activities your junior/senior year, though this advice is more for students applying not in the current circumstances.)
Hope this helps! Good luck with admissions!