Guide to the Activity Admissions Essays Sarah O’Neill Chester County

 

Guide to Activity Essays

Elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences.
This prompt is straightforward: colleges want to know more about what you’ve done outside of school. This is a great place to talk about an activity you’re deeply involved in!

Example Prompts

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work
experiences that was particularly meaningful to you. –Princeton

During high school, what is the most enriching long-term or ongoing activity in which you have participated outside of the classroom? Tell us about it — Why is it enriching to you? What have you gained or learned by participating in it? How do you plan to continue this type of activity in the future? –University of Florida

What They’re Actually Asking

● How is this activity meaningful to you?
● How have you demonstrated leadership and collaboration?
● What skills or life lessons have you learned from this activity?
● Will you continue to participate in similar activities in college?
● Is there anything important you want to write about this activity that you didn’t have space for in the Activities section of your application?

Example Essay

I joined my school’s computerization club because I was curious about the
complex concepts they claimed to teach, though I knew nothing about computer and data science except some knowledge of basic coding. Students from more senior grades introduced me to advanced mathematics models and algorithms in our weekly meetings. As fellow students, my mentors weren’t the best teachers, and we suffered from obscure terminology and intimidating lines of code. Many first-year members left.
However, our mentors improved their teaching bit by bit, and the rest of us started to become friends with them. With their superior experience, our mentors often offered us freshmen a lot of advice, not just on computerization but on things like schoolwork and college applications.
As new club members joined and many of our mentors graduated, my fellow club members and I took over the responsibility of holding lectures and tutoring newcomers.

Just like our predecessors, we started with little experience in teaching. In our very first lecture, we bombarded our students with arcane computer science concepts, a terrible decision: though a couple of students tried hard to follow our train of thought, others were dozing off in their seats. We were worried that some of them might quit the club. I started reflecting on our and our mentor’s teaching styles, and suggested that we try a
different approach and start teaching basic programming, which can more easily attract students. It turned out to be a success, with more students getting interested in what we do. We were changing the club’s reputation from a hub for geeks to one where everyone could get a taste of computer science.

In our little community, I’m not just a mentor: I’m also someone who is always reflecting, thinking about the bigger picture, and ready to make change.

What Should I Write About?

First of all, pick a recent activity (one that you’ve done in the past four years, ideally one you did while you were in high school). Colleges want to know what kind of person you are now, not what kind of person you were when you were ten! The best activities to write about are recognized achievements — extracurriculars where your excellence has been officially recognized by other people. Maybe you’ve held a leadership position, won an award or been invited to speak at a conference.

I couldn’t believe it: the announcer had called out my name. I had just received the IvyMind Film Festival’s Best Young Filmmaker Award! After months of filming, researching, writing, and editing my documentary about migratory birds, my hard work had finally been recognized.

The second best activities to write about are passion projects. Maybe you haven’t received any official recognition, but you love this activity and have put a lot of time into it. In fact, a really cool passion project with no official recognition can often be a lot more interesting to read about than a less cool activity that won a small award.

I’ve always spent my spare time building things, but last summer I completed my biggest project yet — building a go-kart in my garage, from scratch. Every Tuesday and Thursday after school, I spend two hours volunteering at my local animal shelter.

You should avoid writing about extracurricular projects that you hated doing, or that you don’t care much about. I’m not really interested in playing the violin, but my mom has made me do it for the past five years.

You should also avoid writing about extracurricular projects that you only did for a short period of time.

On my mission trip to Jamaica, I spent three days helping build houses for
people in need. We may have only spent a short time there, but I learned a lot about the value of hard work. As part of a school project, I spent four hours soliciting donations from the community for my local food bank. I also designed a poster.

Essays like this don’t tell us anything about your long-term interests or goals — they just tell us that you had t mandatory service hours. Articles about mission trips specifically can also be problematic, since most mission trip essays involve students describing their privilege without engaging with it in a truly meaningful way.

Brainstorming

1. List all the extracurriculars you’ve done in high school. Some examples of extracurriculars: jobs, internships, volunteering, clubs (in or outside of school), sports, music groups, competitions, research projects, personal projects, family responsibilities, and hobbies.
2. Look at your list and pick your most impressive recognized achievement. If you don’t have one of those, pick your most impressive passion project. If
you’ve already written about your most impressive extracurricular for another
prompt, write about your second most impressive extracurricular!
3. In a few sentences, write down the most memorable moment of your time spent doing this activity. Maybe it’s the time you helped a dog get adopted at the animal shelter… or the time you forgot your lines during the school play.

The most memorable moment of my time as an engineering tutor was when my student, Ariel, finally completed her solar oven project. In our earlier meetings, it had been hard to get her interested in the abstract concepts we were talking about. However, when she sent me a picture of the s’more she had toasted in her newly completed solar oven, I could see her getting excited about engineering for the first time.

4. Write down everything you’ve achieved while doing this activity.

● Co-founded a mentoring program to teach engineering to middle school
students
● Hosted one-on-one tutoring meetings with students
● Worked with other program volunteers to design a STEM summer camp
curriculum
● Purchased essential parts for students to build 2 science projects: a solar
oven and a popsicle bridge

5. Finally, write down the lessons that you’ve learned from your participation in this extracurricular.

● Learned to be more patient with students and think about different ways
to teach them difficult concepts
● Became more confident with teaching one-on-one
● Learned how to plan a complex team project
● Improved my teamwork and communication skills
● Learned more about engineering concepts in order to teach them to my
students

Example Outline (Long Essay)

Part 1: Open with your memorable anecdote. Maybe it was the moment you got second place at the fencing competition, or the moment the computer you built in your garage finally started to work. Grab the reader’s attention with a strong image!

Though I wanted to sprint through the shelter, I took deep breaths and slowed down my steps so I wouldn’t excite the animal residents. Many of the dogs I passed wagged their tails when they spotted me, hoping for food or playtime. Each kennel had a whiteboard attached to the door with a number written on it in dry-erase marker. Stopping beside the very last kennel on the left, I was greeted by a wiggly, brown-and-white pitbull, whose whiteboard read 342.

“Hi, Gus,” I said, holding up a whiteboard eraser for him to sniff through the bars.
“It’s your lucky day!” Then, I wiped his whiteboard clean. Gus had been in the shelter for 342 days, but today, he was finally getting adopted!

Part 2: “Zoom out” and tell us about the bigger picture. What is the larger context for your anecdote? How or why did you get involved in this activity?

I had been volunteering at Helping Paws Los Angeles for three years, and Gus was by far my favorite resident. Whether I was teaching new tricks at playtime, taking him on walks or even just cleaning his food and water bowls, Gus always greeted me with an excited bark and tail wag. When he came into the shelter, I was sure that he would get adopted immediately. However, because he was a pitbull — a breed that was considered “aggressive” — very few people even gave him a chance.

Part 3: Tell us what you accomplished or achieved during this activity.

Three months after Gus arrived, I decided that it would be my mission as a
volunteer to get him adopted. I asked one of my friends, who was great at
photography, to take good-quality pictures of Gus to replace the blurry snapshots on the shelter website. Then, I created several posts about Gus on the Helping Paws Instagram account. Though the posts got many encouraging comments, Gus still didn’t get any adoption applications.
That was when I got the idea to organize a pit bull adoption event: I knew that if people could just meet Gus, they would fall in love with him just like I did. I contacted my local brewery asking for them to host the event. When they agreed, I made posts on social media, wrote a message for the shelter email newsletter, and designed posters to put up around town. At the adoption event, Gus was a hit, and suddenly we had not one but three adoption applications for Gus — as well as applications for each of the other four pitbulls at the shelter!

Part 4: Finally, tell us about the lessons you learned from your experience.

In the end, it took nearly eight months of effort to get Gus adopted, but I don’t regret a single second. My time as a volunteer had taught me that perseverance is necessary to do the right thing, even when my efforts might feel unappreciated at first. However, I learned an even more important lesson when I met Gus for the first time.
The truth is, I also used to be intimidated by Gus. I didn’t have any experience with his breed, and I had heard lots of scary stories about pitbull attacks. But when I actually gathered my courage and agreed to a supervised playtime with him, Gus won me over. During my time at Helping Paws, I learned to look past someone’s reputation and see them for who they really were. Even though Gus’s breed had a bad rap, he was a wonderful dog who deserved a loving home — and I knew that with
enough hard work, I could change people’s minds about him, just like Gus
changed mine.

Suggested Outline (Short Essay)

A short Activity essay is structured the same as a long Activity essay, but you should dramatically shorten your opening anecdote or get rid of it altogether. If you’re cutting down a longer essay to use for a prompt with a shorter word count, condense your emotional journey or sensory details but keep all of your achievements, unless all those achievements are already somewhere in the Activities section of your application.
I’ve cut this essay to 1/4 of the original length, but I’ve kept all the details about how this student worked hard to publicize and promote this shelter event.

I’ve been volunteering at an animal shelter for the past three years, and my favorite dogs to work with are the pit bulls. When one doggy resident, Gus, hit the three-month mark on his shelter stay, I decided it would be my mission to get him adopted. I got a friend to take good-quality pictures of Gus, created several posts about Gus on the Helping Paws Instagram account, and finally organized a pitbull adoption event at my local brewery.

To promote the event, I made posts on social media, wrote a message for the shelter email newsletter, and pleads with friends to design posters to put up around town. At the adoption event, Gus was a hit, and suddenly we had not one but three adoption applications for Gus — as well as applications for each of the other four pitbulls at the shelter! The experience taught me that with enough determination and hard work, I could plead and change minds about a misunderstood breed.

Thank you for reading!

Sarah O’Neill Teacher Chester County Editor Supreme Editing Coatesville