Quantify your extracurricular impact
Whether you're crafting your extracurriculars (ECs) list for college applications or writing a resume, it’s crucial to quantify your impact. That means you need to include numbers wherever you can so that admissions officers understand the significance of your experience.
Ask yourself questions
Asking yourself questions can help you figure out how and where you can quantify your impact. Let’s say you organized a canned food drive. To help you determine what to write, ask yourselves these types of questions:
How many other people were you working with? Did you lead the whole group?
How many cans/pounds of food did you collect?
How much money did you raise?
How many people did this effort support?
Be concise
If you use the Common App, you only have up to 150 characters to describe each activity and your impact. Do not use full sentences; write all of your contributions and accomplishments in phrases separated by commas or semicolons.
Bad example:
Here’s a bad example of an extracurricular listing:
Position/leadership description and organization name, if applicable: Leader of Community Service Project
Description: collected canned food for food bank
Better example:
Here’s a better example of an extracurricular listing:
Position/leadership description and organization name, if applicable: Leader of Individual Community Service Project
Description: Led team of 8 volunteers across 5 schools to collect over 250 cans of food for our local food bank
Best example:
Here’s an even better example of an extracurricular listing:
Position/leadership description and organization name, if applicable: Leader of Individual Community Service Project
Description: Led 8 volunteers across 5 schools; collected 250+ cans of food for a food bank; coordinated all 5 live events, marketing, and emails with food bank
Conclusion
There are plenty of more things we can mention about building your extracurricular list, but remember to always quantify your impact where you can. It’s a very simple way to level up your activities, though it can be easy to forget to do!
