A student asked me last week if she could put her barista job on her activities list.
I nearly laughed. Because that job might be the strongest thing she can put on it. Yet she almost completely discounted her experience.
With the entries students do include, most start with writing a job description. And most don't go any further. That’s a huge missed opportunity.
Here’s why.
The adult reading their list, even if it’s only their second day working in admissions, already knows exactly what a 16-year-old barista does. Which is exactly why a job description is the wrong thing to drop in that box.
Here’s the teen’s real job: Do NOT tell them the tasks. Do tell them who you are while you do them.
The goal of the list isn’t to be “impressive.” It’s to let yourself be seen for the contribution only you can make.
Why the activities list matters so much
Over the years, I’ve noticed a trap many parents (and teens) fall into. Parents measure their teen — and teens measure themselves — against the small pool they can see: the handful of kids they know well, or the few hundred in their graduating class, especially when there’s a class rank.
A few years ago, I worked with a young woman who was class president, homecoming queen, and top-10 in a graduating class of 150. In her world, she was royalty. She applied to a stack of highly competitive schools, didn’t bother with a single safety, and got a clean sweep of rejection letters — then scrambled at the last minute to find a school still taking applications for the fall.
Competitive schools — which include flagship state universities — pull a huge pool of applicants. A teen who’s always stood out assumes they’ll stand out here too. But thousands of other students in that pool look just like them on paper. The big fish from a small pond can become an average fish (or even a small one) in these new waters.
Which is exactly why the list matters so much.
No teen — big fish, middle, or small — gets to coast on who they were back home, where teachers, band directors, and coaches knew them and their reputation. All that’s wiped away, and they have one brief, typewritten page to represent hours and hours of effort and experience.
Now, imagine the admissions reader.
They’re on their 37th list of the day, and 80 to 90% of them read the same: “Member, Key Club.” “Lifeguard, community pool.” One list of tasks after another, blurring together — even for the potentially interesting kids. The reader won’t slow down, consider, and try to piece together who’s behind each one.
It needs to be obvious.
And saying “Raised $5,379” isn’t boastful (as so many teens fear). It’s a measurable fact.
So show the colleges the contribution, the result, and the heart of the person who did it. Done right, the list is proof of who the teen is — and a hint of what they’ll bring to their future campus.
Getting it clearly written is the student’s job. And it’s not easy.
What doesn’t matter
Filling all 10. You don’t need to. A half-dozen strong entries beat 10 padded ones. Filler’s great in a turkey, but not here.
The club you joined but didn’t drive. National Honor Society isn’t a standout; nearly every top-of-the-class applicant has it. “I went to meetings” is barely an entry worth sharing.
The thing you tried to start and then didn’t build. Launching a nonprofit isn’t worth including. So is starting a club. The only question that matters: what did you do with it? Tutor 17 underserved middle school students in the first year? Recruit 30 people to the first meeting? Now we’re talking.
Dabbling to look “well-rounded.” Every half-hearted membership steals time from something your teen could go actually deep on. Colleges don’t reward the kid who was a member of five clubs. They reward depth…
What matters
Depth, and the things your teen actually led. The deciding question for every entry: did they lead here, or is it genuinely remarkable? A real roster of babysitting clients served for years beats a minimum-wage shift clocked for 3 months. A kid who shadowed at 7 different doctors’ offices shows initiative no club membership can.
One of my students took every AI class he could find, even at the community college, and wanted more. The trouble was, at 15, he didn’t know how to run real research on his own. So he emailed 20 professors across the state and asked to help with their projects. One said yes. That student is now listed as a contributing author on some groundbreaking work. That’s an entry.
A list that points at one thing. My favorite lists have a theme. One student landed a month-long shadowing internship at the Cleveland Clinic, then helped lead a blood-cancer fundraiser: thousands raised, a boardroom talk, even a corporate sponsor. Medicine and the business of medicine, lined up behind the major he’s pursuing. That’s what depth looks like, and it puts an exclamation point behind what your teen says they want. They’re rare, and they’re powerful.
The ordinary, true things. Yes, list the job. Yes, share the babysitting, mowing neighbors’ lawns, caring for a sibling. Even a two-hour volunteer gig can earn a spot if there’s something real to say about it. These are the places where character can show.
Proof. Anytime we can show what your teen did and the dent they made — a result, a new idea they brought forward, a dollar figure — that’s the good stuff. Numbers are proof.
One word on leadership
Every teen knows colleges want this thing called “leadership,” and most picture one kind: the person out front, giving the speech, running the big team. But that’s just one kind. There are at least a half-dozen.
When our six kids were little, my husband’s version of leadership was standing at the door yelling, “Get in the van!” (results varied). Mine looked more like herding cats — making sure we all got there, and that everyone had shoes on. Both count.
So before your teen decides they’ve never led anything — just because they weren’t named Captain or voted President — look again. Most often, their way of leading is hiding in the details. Go smaller, and there’s almost always something there.
Order matters
Once it’s all drafted, the student and I rank their list, from most important to least — the first three carry the most weight. The question that sets the order is simple: was this adult-organized, or did the student drive it? The ones they drove go up top.
I had a student who’d played baseball on every team he could find, all through high school. His first three entries were all baseball. Except he wasn’t playing in college. So we moved them down — which felt a little traumatizing to a kid who’d put thousands of hours in and LOVED the sport.
Instead, his lawn-mowing business and the week-long shadowing experience related to his major went to the top. Then came the baseball.
You can love a thing with your whole heart and still not lead with it. This isn’t a “Favorite Things” list. It’s a strategic tool — one that helps the human reading your application recognize, right away, why you’re a great match for their college.
How to write each entry
Draft the whole list in a Google Doc first, not in the Common App.
Here’s why:
Room to work. Each Common App entry caps at 150 characters — about one long sentence. Here’s a full one (144 characters) as an example:
“Grew a dog-walking business on Rover to 12 weekly clients; hired two friends, handled all scheduling and pay; profited $3,200 across two summers.”
There’s no room in that little box to write long and then refine. A Doc gives them space to get it all out first, then decide what to keep.
A backup. I started insisting on this after a student’s entries vanished when the Common App didn’t save, and we had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. The Doc is insurance.
It outlasts the app. A year or two from now, when your now-college student has to write their first résumé as a freshman, access to their Common App will be gone. And they’ll still have everything in the Doc.
Then, for each one:
Skip the job description. The reader knows it. Spend the characters on the contribution.
Lead with action verbs: built, produced, raised, coded, wrote, designed, recruited.
Use numbers. How many, how much, how often. Give that proof, whenever possible.
Drop in a short quote if there is one. The reader believes what a manager says about your teen more than what your teen says about themselves. And yes, you can shorten what they actually said, keeping the heart of it.
Say the manager told your teen: “You’re the only one on the team I trust to close the store alone and train the new kids.” On the list, that becomes: …trained 4 new hires; “the one I trust to close solo” — my manager
Don’t repeat the title (team captain) or organization (volleyball) in the description — those have their own fields.
No full sentences. Three tight points, strung with semicolons. Abbreviations are fine.
Now, how to complete the hours and weeks sections.
Count the hours in the busiest week. The Common App now asks for your busiest stretch, not an average. Planning the homecoming pep rally might run five weeks — but the first four only require a couple of hours each for planning and marketing, and nearly all the work happens in the final week. That's the number you report.
Don’t undersell. Most students underestimate the time they put in. More often than not, I’m talking a student up, not down.
Count the full season. A sport with summer practices run through the team is a year-round activity, not an 8-week “during the school year” one. Count it all.
Be specific. A year has 52 weeks, but almost nothing runs all 52 — “49” reads specific, “50” sounds like an estimate. The school year is only 36 weeks, and most clubs don’t fill that; the exception is the student leaders who plan over the summer.
Your move this week
Sit down with your teen and help them list out their activities — high school only; middle school doesn’t count. There’s a good chance they’ll miss half of it: the job, the hours with Grandma, the little business, the thing they do every week without being asked. But you were there for all of it, and that list is probably already running in the back of your mind, even if it’s never hit paper.
To make it easy, I built a free High School Activity Tracker — a place to get it all down and keep notes about each entry. I give it to my own students to fill out before we ever sit down together.
But even with that Tracker in hand, there’s no real replacement for doing this with someone who’s done it hundreds of times. After all these years, I’ve got a kind of spidey sense for the entry that’s missing, or the spot where we can pull out more of who a student is inside what they did — the thing that’s almost impossible for them to see in themselves. That’s what the Activities List Lab is for.
With love, a semicolon, and real respect for everything your kid brings to their list,
Christy
Your go-to college essay + admissions mentor
