Rank your top 10 activities

Rank your top 10 activities

The Common App gives you ten activity slots and shows them in the order you choose. Readers move fast, and the first three slots carry most of the impression. Ranking is a real decision, not data entry: make it before you write a single description.

Step 1: inventory everything

From your four-year activity log, list everything: clubs, jobs, family responsibilities, independent projects, sports, arts, volunteering. Include the unglamorous ones. Caring for a sibling after school and a 15-hour-a-week job are activities, and strong ones.

Step 2: rank by depth, not prestige

Order by this, top first:

1. Commitment and growth. Years involved, hours per week, and whether your role grew. Four years rising to section leader beats one year of six clubs.
2. Initiative. Anything you started, built or ran yourself outranks anything you attended.
3. Impact you can count. Money raised, students tutored, events run, users served.
4. Connection to your story. An activity that backs up your essay or intended major earns a boost.

Prestige alone ranks last. A famous program you coasted through belongs below a job you held for two years.

Step 3: sanity checks

• Would a stranger reading only slots 1 to 3 understand what you care about?
• Is anything in your top five there because a parent likes it rather than because it earned it?
• If you have more than ten, the cuts come from the bottom of the ranking, not the most recent additions.

What comes next

Descriptions are their own task, next week. Ranking first means you spend your best 150-character writing on the activities that will actually be read.