THE ACTIVITY LIST I find it incredible that one of the most important components of the application is the one that many applicants don’t bother with. Overall, colleges judge students roughly 60 to 80 percent on their academic record and 20 to 40 percent on their record of extracurricular accomplishments. Unfortunately, most school counselors don’t know their students well enough to summarize a student’s on-campus leadership (not to mention any off-campus leadership that they would not know about at all) so it just doesn’t get mentioned. Students usually content themselves with the bare bones activity list required on the common application. The problem is that many activities are unusual or require additional explanation—it is simply impossible to fit any descriptive or explanatory notes into those tiny boxes on the provided grid. Granted, some activities and roles don’t need much explanation, but what happens if you founded an organization to raise money for bone marrow transplants? Naturally the admissions office would want to know how you became interested in your activity and what your role was in it. What happens if your most important activities (say music, dance, art, or karate) are done completely out of school? How can you communicate your involvement to the admissions office? Enter, stage right, the activity list.

No matter what admissions officers tell you about the importance of leadership, keep in mind that academics are weighted more in the admissions process than extracurricular leadership. No matter how strong you are in leadership, you will still need at least a solid academic record for selective and highly selective schools. As a general rule, the less selective a college is, the more likely it is to give more weight to your extracurricular record. For the most selective schools, academics rule the day with extras a distant second. To put it another way, strong academics open the door while substantial talents may get you inside.

Given the bias toward academics, why is the activity list so important? Basically, it helps to differentiate between the thousands of generally strong students who apply to the top colleges. Between two solid students of roughly equal academic merit, doesn’t it make sense that a master oboe player would be accepted over someone who has only participated in a few clubs or activities? For students who have become highly involved with their high school (or outside of their high school as we will discuss shortly), the activity list is the place to showcase how their free time is spent.

Colleges want high impact recruits. The college gets much more mileage out of a student who is either a sport’s star, a great musician, a campus activist, or a published writer than it does out of someone who goes back to the dorm after class and channel surfs. You represent an investment for the college. Like any investor, colleges seek an aggressive return on their investment. Therefore, they look for students who are active, show leadership, have demonstrable skills in a specific area like sports or music—in short, those who will make a difference, those who will be remembered years later. That’s why colleges also like a few celebrities if they can attract them since their mere presence brings positive press to the college. We all know that Chelsea Clinton chose Stanford and Amy Carter chose Brown and both schools have benefited tremendously from the association with presidents. Brooke Shields’s tenure at Princeton probably did more for Princeton’s endowment and academic ranking than all other efforts combined.

Initiative and Passion

Colleges look for students who show initiative and passion. These are the two mantras you should repeat to you