Positioning Your Passion and Impact
The Common App activities section is an opportunity to tell the admission officers what matters to you most and how you prefer to spend your time after school. Writing about social service in your common app essay or one of the supplemental essays illustrates that you are passionate about social service and have spent considerable time doing it. Now, if you mention it as the 8th activity in the list then the admission officers will feel there is something ‘off’ about it.
Think carefully about positioning yourself and bringing your story together. List the activities that you are most passionate about and committed to at the beginning to draw attention. You can order activities based on the length of your participation, degree of participation like holding a leadership position and the impact that you have made. List the more trivial activities towards the end.
Emphasizing Quality over Quantity
The Common Application has space for ten activities. This creates anxiety among some students and they start adding non-meaningful activities. It is not necessary to fill each space. Admissions officers usually read the first few activities and skim through the rest. They are particularly interested in activities that you are passionate about. Therefore, prioritizing QUALITY over QUANTITY is strongly recommended. Lafayette College, for example, declared last month that its admissions officers would only be evaluating the first six activities listed.
