One of the most time-consuming application parts is the Activities section, so this is a great place to start. Students can include up to 10 activities and give a description of their involvement in 150 characters (not words) or less. For many students, reducing the crux of their involvement in an activity to 150 characters is a huge challenge and takes some time. This is why you don’t want to wait until you fill out the application to prepare these descriptions. 

Planning out the order of your activities ahead of time and writing each description makes completing the application much easier since you can copy and paste each description, knowing it is the correct number of characters. 

Here are 4 Steps to Create effective common application activity descriptions 

1. If you haven’t yet created your college resume, stop and do this first. Add in which years you did each activity and the hours per week and weeks per year. If you are applying to colleges such as UT that prefer a long resume, check out our blog post on the UT expanded resume.

2. Choose the order of activities. Any leadership or activities with a higher level of involvement, such as more hours or longer periods of time, should go further up on the list. You may also want to include those activities related to your major in one of the higher spots.

3. Use a Google doc to plan out each activity description. Number them 1-10 to plan out how you will order them. Don’t worry, you can always change your mind about the order on the Common Application and easily reorder them. Use the Word Count feature under Tools but look at Character Count instead of Word Count to make sure your descriptions are 150 characters or fewer. Save the document under a name you will easily remember when you need to access it while filling out your application.

4. Copy and paste your descriptions into the Activities section of the Common Application as you fill it out.

Pro Tips: 

Include any specific accomplishments or what you learned from an experience rather than details that are obvious, such as that you attended daily practice and played games in your sport.

You can use characters such as “&” and “w/” as well as numerals to give you more room if you need it and you don’t need to add a period at the end. 

Effective Common Application Activity Descriptions - See The Difference

Good example activity description for varsity soccer (remember, you have a maximum 150 characters):

Recorded most assists on team (11); mentored younger players to build cohesiveness; Improved team communication on field by being vocal & encouraging (149 characters)

Why it’s effective: 

We learn that this is a selfless teammate who uplifts other people and leads by example.

Poor example activity description for varsity soccer:

Attended practice three times a week and played in weekly games (64 characters)

Why it’s not effective:

We don’t learn anything about the student other than they showed up for practice and games. There’s a lot of space left to fill so it’s a missed opportunity to show colleges who you are. Take advantage of as many characters as possible!