Activities
Do you need 10 activities on the Common App?
The Common App allows ten activities, but you need not fill every slot. How to judge what each commitment adds and cut weak entries from your activities list.
SourceBased on what we at Aristo learned from the Stanford admissions office.
The Common App gives every applicant ten activity slots, and readers at selective colleges see almost every applicant treat ten as the target. The result is a page of near-identical density across the whole pool: ten lines, ten descriptions, most of them filler written to keep a slot from sitting empty.
Families fill them out of fear, on the theory that a blank line looks like a missing achievement, and the weakest entries end up beside the strongest. In the office we learned from, one reader had a favorite move for a confident student, and it surprises most families who hear it. To see why it works, consider the page from where the reader sits.
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