My D is applying to several competitive colleges; her stats, essays and extra curriculars (especially leadership) are all very good. The waiting game is difficult for me, so I spend a lot of time here lurking on CC. Today, after reading stats for students accepted/deferred/rejected from a few of the schools, I thought I would take a look at her common app to see how she compared. I was shocked to see that she only listed four activities (instead of using all ten). I asked her if she had done that because she thought it might look like she was spread too thin, but she seemed to think she had listed all her activities. Some of these included leadership and mentoring, so I think she just forgot to go back to that section. I am obviously upset and wondering if it’s too late to add the rest of her activities. Is it out of line for her to write a letter to the universities and explain that it was an oversight and that she has completed that section now?
I just learned from other posts that colleges won’t see updates to the common app, so I will have my daughter call each admissions office to find out what to do. It just makes me sad that she spent so much time juggling all these activities and that she may not get the “credit” for them. What a lesson to learn!
She could send a simple resume with a note that they consider that instead of the activities section since a glitch with the CA meant she omitted the full list.
Thank you. That sounds like a good idea - so much more succinct than the letter we were imagining.
Just have her send her complete resumé to the admissions departments of each of the schools she is applying to. They will print it out and add it to your application like any other supplementary document. (This was very common when I applied to colleges because a lot of students were confused as to how to interpret and enter their activity hours, and because the Common App had a tendency to butcher the formatting of students’ essays.)