How to Write Extracurricular Activities on College Application
Off all the sections of a Common College Application, the trickiest part is always to write about the extracurricular activities. One hardly gets to list 10 activities and a space of about 150-200 words to describe their extracurricular activity. Indian NRI Students, this article will answer all your questions about extracurricular activities. You might have involved yourself in quite a lot of activities, but only a few can become a part of your college application.
Now let us look at the different aspects of Extracurricular Activities, right from how many activities you should list to how to mention those in the application form.
Q#1 – Are Extracurricular Activities Really Required?
Yes, extracurricular activities are a very important part of your college application. Through extracurricular activities, colleges get to know more about students personality. Academic scores give information about students academic performance. However, extracurricular activities show the students three major qualities namely: Leadership; Passion and Impact they create.
And this is a section where students can show their different skills and personality qualities. And extracurricular activities can be anything that you are actively and productively involved in.
Q#2 – How Many Activities Should You List on your College Application?
You’ll find this information on your college application. A general college application will let you enlist 10 activities.
In case, if you do not have 10 activities to list, don’t panic. College Admission officer prefer to see a few activities that you have made significant dedication. Of all the activities you have involved yourself in, if you have only involved yourself dedicatedly in two-three, then it is advisable to just mention those. Putting focus on a few will be better than talking about everything and confusing admission officers.
And in case if you have more than 10 activities, this could be a problem for a few, just keep in mind, admission officers want to only read about the activities you have been significantly engaged in. Accordingly list down the activities basis your involvement and contribution towards it. Then mention the top three in details and then a few of the activities where you low involvement.
There would be also some cases, where a student has more than 10 activities and he has been actively involved in all of them. Now this is usually the case with Indian NRI students, they love to get involved in all the activities they participate in. In such cases, college application one more section called “Additional Information”, you can utilize this space to briefly describe your extracurricular activities in detail.
If you are still confused on which ones to list out in the College Application, have your parents and friends go through the list. They’ll give you their take on the list and accordingly take your call on rearranging the activities based on feedback from them.
At the end your final aim is to understand and narrate your story via your academic and extracurricular activities to your admission officers. As they are the ones who will be segregating you in various different communities of the college.
Q#3 – How to Describe Your Extracurricular Activities in College Application?
Usually, college applications have about 50 character space provided to describe your activity. The key here is to be as detailed as you can within the character limit.
For example: you have spent the past three years playing the guitar. You're part of a very successful church band and you won local awards for your playing, and you've been taking lessons for 12 years.
Now just mentioning, “Guitarist” won’t do justice to your activity. Rather the great way to phrase it would be “Guitarist of an Award-winning Church Band.” Through this, you’re making most of the 50 characters and in the activity description section you can further elaborate on it.
Activity Description section on a college application limits up to 150 characters. You have to describe your activity in very summarized form. For this section, choose the most important things like initiatives you ran, leadership positions, important contributions you made. A key advice here would be, to be specific in your description and do not lie about what you’ve done. Be true to yourself.
In case, you weren’t able to describe in the space provided, you can always use the “Additional Information” Section of the application. Make sure to be brief and link the description to the section or activity you are writing about.
When you’re done, review all the information you have mentioned, read through it to make sure that you have no mistakes and it says everything you want it to say. Repeat the steps with other activities.
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