Your Activities List Is Doing More Work Than Your Essay
Ten slots, a hundred and fifty characters each, and it is usually the first thing anybody reads about your student.
Leo Cao
Ten slots. A hundred and fifty characters each. No paragraphs, no room to explain, and in most offices it is the first thing anybody reads about your student, ahead of the essay and sometimes ahead of the transcript. Families spend a summer on the personal statement and fill this in during the week it is due.
The first thing that goes wrong is writing the title instead of the work. “Member, Key Club” tells a reader that a club exists. A student who spent two years running the food drive that club is actually known for should say that, with the number of families it reached if she knows it, and there is room for all of it inside a hundred and fifty characters once you cut every word that is not a verb or a fact.
The second is undershooting, which is close to universal and which a parent can fix in a single conversation. Students describe two years of real responsibility as helping out. Ask what happened the week your student was not there. Ask who took it over when they graduated. The answers to those two questions are the entry, and your student will not volunteer them, because at seventeen the thing you do every week does not feel like an accomplishment. It feels like Tuesday.
Order matters more than students expect, since the list is read from the top and a reader has formed an idea of your student well before the fourth line. So the thing your student is actually about goes first, whatever the application’s own categories imply about hierarchy. If the pharmacy job takes forty hours a month, it does not belong at slot nine underneath a debate club they quit.
While we are there. A paid job is not a lesser activity, and the families who assume it is tend to be the families whose student has one. A reader knows exactly what twenty hours a week at a grocery store means for everything else on the page, including the grades. Hiding it to make room for a club is a bad trade and a common one.
Nothing on this list should have started in August of senior year. Readers see hundreds of those a season and they know precisely what they are looking at. A nonprofit with a website, a logo and no activity is worse than an empty slot, because it is the one item in the file a stranger can check in ninety seconds.
Be accurate about hours. An inflated number is the easiest thing in an application to disbelieve, since the person reading it has seen fifty versions of that week already and knows what twelve hours of anything looks like next to five academic courses. One implausible line makes a reader skeptical of the nine underneath it, and you do not get told that it happened.
The parent’s job here is an interview rather than an edit. Twenty minutes, ask what your student actually did in each thing, write down the sentences they say out loud, and hand the page back. The spoken version is almost always better than the written one, because nobody performs while they are simply answering a question.
It costs an evening. It is the highest-return evening in the entire application, and it is available in July, while nobody is busy yet.
If you want somebody reading your student’s file with you this year, that is the work we do. The first call is forty-five minutes and it costs nothing.