How to Rank Your Extracurricular Activities

Numerous factors define a good activity list: how long have you been in the activity? How cool does the activity sound? What achievements have you made in the activity? What leadership skills did you employ? What soft skills? etc.

However, one overlooked factor that also contributes to how admissions officers judge your activities list is the ranking of your activities. How do you decide which one should go first?

The answer to that question is simple: whichever activity is YOUR favorite. The order of your activities should reflect what's personally important to YOU, not to what you think sounds good to an admissions officer.

Why? Because admissions officers can tell when you're trying to sound impressive in a disingenuous manner. Now you might be thinking, isn't this an application, so shouldn't you tell admissions officers what they want to hear? Yes and no, but mostly no.

The reason why you should avoid trying to manufacture an air of impressiveness is that your activities are meant to add a personality component to your application. What interests you? What motivates you? How do you like to spend your time? What's important to you?

Those are the questions that admissions officers are looking for when trying to get a sense of who you are as a person and who you might be as a student on their campus. That said, admissions officers are looking for authenticity in your activities list over flashiness.

What does this mean?

The best way to explain this is a side-by-side example of the same activities list, but one that's ranked in order of "impressiveness" or perhaps, an insecurity that you have about your application versus one that's ranked by passion.

List 1:

Yale Young Global Scholars, 2 weeks, No awards

Google Internship, 1 week, No awards

Student Council 2 yrs, Secretary, 2 awards

Model UN, 4 yrs, President, 1 award

Soccer, 4 yrs + participated in soccer since childhood, 1 championship

Debate 4 yrs , Vice President, No awards

Starbucks Barista, 4 yrs

List 2

Model UN, 4 yrs, President, 1 award

Debate 4 yrs , Vice President, No awards

Student Council 2 yrs, Secretary, 2 awards

Yale Young Global Scholars, 2 weeks, No awards

Starbucks Barista, 4 yrs

Google Internship, 1 week, No awards

Soccer, 4 yrs + participated in soccer since childhood, 1 championship

Before I continue, I want to contextualize two of the phrases that I've used in this blog post:

• Ranking by impressiveness- when you put an activity very high on your list because it has an element of prestige, like being associated with a high-caliber university or a very coveted position, like an intern at a well-known company.

  
  

• Ranking by insecurity - you put an activity very low on your list because you think it's too common, like a part-time job or a popular extracurricular like debate. The main way to avoid this ranking method is to not compare your ranking to what you think other students' lists might look like.

The order of the list should always reflect the individual. It's up to you to do the self-reflection and introspection to create an order that accurately reflects your passions, drive, and hobbies.

In regard to List 1 vs List 2, I hope you could notice that List 1 attempts to rank by both impressiveness and insecurity, and lacks authenticity. It tells us that the student knows which brands and institutions are popular, but beyond that, we don't know much about the student themselves. Do they really enjoy the activities that they've been in for 4+ years? Or were they doing it just for the application?

In CommonApp's guide to organizing the activities list, they recommend that you organize your activities in order of most meaningful. That word choice is specific in that the list will be interpreted in terms of what's meaningful to you as an individual. They're asking you to internally analyze yourself as opposed to portraying yourself by external definitions, like what your teachers, parents, or society might tell you.

The story that List 1 tells is that the student found 1 week of their life to be more influential than 4 years of other activities and leadership experiences. This could be true, but it's unlikely. Especially because the other activities set the student up to be well-positioned for that internship position. We don't generally get a sense of what the student values because it appears that what they were "most involved in" is ranked lower. It's also strange to value a club that you're directly responsible for (President or Vice President), lower than other experiences. It begs the question: Do you really care about the clubs, or do you just enjoy having the title of that position? Finally, List 1 ranks all the activities signaling specific awards as more valuable than other contributions. All this does is reiterate the external definitions of prestige and accolades and doesn't share any perspectives on what the student believes was most valuable to them.

On the flipside, List 2 is consistent with the level of involvement the student has demonstrated over time. This direct relationship between dedicated time, position level, and meaningful ranking on the activities communicates that the choices the student made to become involved in certain activities reflect their genuine passion for those activities. Regardless of awards or rankings, the student can show the why behind which activities they participate in. In this order, it's a lot easier to glean a narrative that student 2 likely enjoys civic leadership, diplomacy, and community engagement. Even though they were only involved in the student council for two years, it's very possible that they gained rewarding skills, opportunities, and initiatives that they found personally fulfilling above soccer, which could be more of a hobby for them. Finally, even though the Google and Yale summer internships are ranked lowest, that doesn't mean that they were not meaningful, but that the meaning and inherent value of those activities are well-communicated in the status of the names. It's also possible that one of the two does end up ranked higher than a hobby or less-involved activity or family responsibility. The important takeaway is that the activity does not need to be ranked highly just because it's prestigious.

While your list needs to reflect your profound internal sense of self, there are some caveats. For example, if you've been the President of a club for 3+ years, whether you love that club or not, it would probably be responsible to rank it highly and express that you enjoy the club beyond just the title of the position. Additionally, if you've been involved in something for an extremely long time and your activities description shows that you've contributed and gained a lot from that activity. Then it would also benefit you to rank that activity highly. While I noted that prestige alone should not be ranked highly, if you have been involved in a prestigious activity for an extended period (i.e., many months) and it was a very novel experience for you, like research or study abroad, then it could make sense to see that activity higher up.

For some people who are involved in a lot of similar activities, it could be helpful to group those activities by topic because then it's easier to interpret the list in terms of which fields of interest are most intriguing to you. For example, if you enjoy debate, sports, and music and have 2-3 activities in each of your activities, first group the activities by those topics and then rank in order of most meaningful internally.

The final takeaway for your activities list ranking is that no matter how prestigious and impressive any given activity is, wherever it's ranked on your activities list, it will still look impressive.