How to fill out the UC activities list

UUC Berkeley's readers once answered a single summary question about an applicant's activities page, recorded on the coding sheet described in the university's Hout report: was it strong or light, relative to the Berkeley pool? Strong meant sustained participation in a number of activities with significant leadership and honors, while light meant sparse or intermittent involvement without either.

The UC application gives every student twenty entries and room for a real description in each, more space than the Common App offers, and several former Berkeley readers describe how students use that room in one word: badly. The cost is easy to miss, because a page that reads as light rarely looks wrong to the family who wrote it. What follows is what those readers say separates the two verdicts.