What counts as an extracurricular on the Common App?

RReaders in Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, told students that the activities page could hold far more than most of them put on it. Ask a student to list activities and you will usually get the school's version: teams, clubs, honor societies, service hours.

Everything that happened outside a building with a bell schedule gets quietly dropped. That instinct costs applicants some of their most persuasive material, including the lines that show academic energy living outside school and the human detail that makes a reader remember a file and want to argue for it. The Common App's own activity menu, read slowly, tells a different story from the one students assume, and so do the lines they leave off.