Can family responsibilities go on the UC activities list?

FFormer UCLA and UC admissions readers say some of the hardest-working students in any applicant pool look, on paper, as though they did very little. Their afternoons went to picking up younger siblings, cooking dinner, translating at a grandparent's appointments or working shifts at a family store, and none of it felt like an activity, so none of it went on the application.

The cost is larger than a few empty lines. The UC review was built to read achievement against circumstance, and a student whose circumstances never reach the page is read as one who simply had free afternoons. What former readers say about this kind of undercounting is direct.