10 Tips For Activity Resumes

Are you planning to attach an activity resume to your application? Here are ten tips on activity resumes from college admissions officers. The tips were posted on the counselor listserv of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC). You can find more great tips for students, as well as information about your rights and responsibilities as a college applicant, on the NACAC website.

1. If the club, group or organization is regional or local to your school, attach a brief explanation so that the reader can understand what the organization does, and what membership entails. On the other hand, there's no need to explain what national organizations like the National Honors Society are all about. We know.

2. Let us know if you are a founder or co-founder of a club or organization. Give us an idea of what went into the process of getting it off the ground.

3. Be sure to tell us about part-time work or anything that has prevented you from participating in extracurricular activities. This includes things such as having to care for younger siblings because your parents work, having to work to help support your family, or that you have a very long commute to and from school.

4. Tell us about your more unusual activities that might not fit neatly in the boxes of the application. You may think that it doesn't matter that you spend your free time taking photographs of the people in your neighborhood, but the person reading your application may be an amateur photographer and find it very interesting.

5. Don't use acronyms for organizations! We don't know what they mean, and therefore we don't have a clue how you've been spending 15 hours of your time each week.

6. If several of your activities are somehow related, group them together on the activity sheet. For example, group all of your theater related activities in one section, your community service in another, etc. This helps us get a better sense of how deep your commitment and involvement in a particular area might be.

7. Any supplements like a resume should be short and add important information. Many colleges dislike extra pieces of paper, others are more lenient, but no admissions officer has time to wade through five pages of supplemental material. Any extra you send should be brief and to the point (i.e., it should not list every debate tournament, or every show you've sold tickets to). Don't just re-list what's already on your application. If you must attach an activity sheet, keep it to no more than two pages (one is better!) and copy it front and back so it is only one sheet.

8. Admissions officers look at the extracurricular section and student activity lists as a way to see how the student has made choices about how to spend their time and energy. A few things done well and in depth are more important than a long laundry list of everything you've ever done.

9. The best activity sheets tell us how the student's participation in an activity helped them better understand themselves, helped them better understand others, or opened up their world to new possibilities. We don't need another essay, but let us know why your activities mattered to you if possible.

10. Remember, anything you attach is part of your application. Proofread, proofread, proofread. There's nothing worse than seeing an optional activity sheet that is littered with typo's and errors attached to a perfect application. It makes us wonder which is the "real you."