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Writing a college essay about an extracurricular activity is an opportunity to showcase your personal growth, skills, and passions. By focusing on a meaningful activity and reflecting on its impact, you can create an engaging narrative that shows admissions officers who you are beyond academics. This guide is here to help you craft a compelling and insightful essay based on your extracurricular activities!
How To Discuss Extracurricular Activities In Your Common App Essay
Choosing An Extracurricular Activity
Focus on one activity: If you participated in many extracurricular activities in high school as most students often do, choose the activity that you feel helped you grow the most as a person. Focusing on one activity helps you discuss it in depth rather than discussing multiple extracurricular activities superficially. You can always mention the other activities in the "Activities List" section of the Common App. For more tips regarding the Common App activities list, see this post here.
Choose something meaningful: Choose an extracurricular activity that had a significant impact on your life where you were able to learn meaningful skills or make helpful contributions. Writing about something meaningful to you helps make it easier for admissions officers to connect to your story.
Unique perspective: Try to avoid writing generic descriptions of what you did in your extracurricular activities. Many students write about participating in clubs, sports teams, playing instruments, etc. which are all generic topics and won't help you stand out. If you choose to discuss these topics, make sure there is something unique about your experience rather than just the fact that you participated in the activity. A good example can be found here.
Explain Your Role and Personal Growth
Be specific: Describe what you had to do as part of the extracurricular activity. How did the duties and roles assigned to you help you develop your skills and grow as a person?
Personal impact: Explain how participating in this activity impacted you as a person. Did you meet someone interesting that introduced you to a new way of thinking? Did you face a challenge that made you think of a creative solution? Was there a time when you improved your collaboration skills and learned to work as a team?
Personal development: Explain how the activity shaped your character, values, or future aspirations. What values did it teach you? Some examples include patience, leadership, time management, empathy, resilience, innovation, etc.
Growth over time: If you took part in this activity over multiple years, highlight your growth over the years. For example, some students start off as club members but go on to take leadership roles in their upper years. Did you have any such experience? Explain how you took on more responsibility and what this taught you.
Highlight transferable skills: Show how the skills you learned as part of this activity will help you in college life as well as your future aspirations. This shows long-term thinking and how you plan on using your skills from the past to improve your future.
We hope that this post has helped give you some tips on how to discuss extracurricular activities in your Common App essay. Good luck with your college applications!
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