The activities list is up to ten rows, a few short text fields each, and two numbers per row. It takes an afternoon, and it goes to every college on your list, alongside whatever writing each one requires.

Here is what goes in it. The limits, as Common App documents them: ten entries maximum, 50 characters for the position or leadership description, 100 for the organization name, 150 for the activity details. For each activity you give hours spent per week and weeks spent per year.

Ten is a maximum, not a target

Common App allows up to ten. Filling all ten is not a requirement, and a short list of things you can describe is stronger than ten rows padded to look full.

Two questions cut the list faster than ranking things by prestige.

Can you write a specific sentence about it? If the only honest description is "attended meetings", it is taking a slot.

Did it take real time, or leave something behind? Either counts on its own. A job that ate fifteen hours a week qualifies on time. A one-week project that produced something real qualifies on what remains.

Students routinely leave out paid work, caring for siblings or family members, and anything done at home. Those belong on the list. A reader learns a great deal about someone from twenty hours a week at a supermarket.

The order they sit in is the order they are read

Common App shows activities in the order they sit in your list, so the sequence is doing work whether you intend it or not. You are not stuck with the order you typed them in: the activities section lets you move rows up and down, so fixing this costs a minute.

Put the two or three that define you at the top, whatever their category. Grouping by type or sorting by how many years you did each thing buries the important ones. If a reader stopped after your first three rows, those three should be the ones you would pick.

Making hours per week and weeks per year agree

This is where most people get stuck, because few activities run at the same intensity all year.

Common App asks for hours spent per week and weeks spent per year, and says that if you cannot remember the exact details, a best guess is acceptable. That is the wording in its own published Activities resource, dated June 2025, which gives no other basis for the two numbers.

Read the instruction printed next to those two fields on your own form before you use anything below, including anything we say. Applicants this cycle report in-form wording that asks about the time you typically spend during the busiest parts of the year, which is a different question from a yearly average. That wording appears nowhere in Common App's published resource, and only the live form shows what you are actually being asked. So treat your own form as the authority: if it asks about your busy period, answer about your busy period.

The principle that survives either wording: both numbers should describe the same stretch of time. Report hours for a typical week of the period you are counting, and set the weeks number to that same period. A peak week paired with fifty-two weeks is the combination that does not hold up, whichever way the instruction is worded.

A sport with a three-month season, four practices a week plus Saturday games. Around twelve hours a week, around fourteen weeks a year. Not fifty-two, because you were not playing in April.

A job that is two shifts a week in term time and full days over the summer. Those are two different intensities, and one number blended out of both describes neither. Either split them into separate rows, or let the hours describe one of the two periods and set the weeks to that same period. Do not report summer hours against term-time weeks or the reverse.

A club that meets an hour a week and runs one large event a year. Spreading the event across the quiet weeks produces an average that matches no week you actually lived, so report the meeting at the rate it ran, an hour a week across the weeks it met, and put the event in your 150 characters where you can say what it was and how long it took. One pair of numbers cannot carry both, and the text field is there for exactly this.

Research or a competition with a long build and a short deadline. Count the months it actually ran rather than the final fortnight, and let the hours describe a typical week inside that stretch.

The way this goes wrong is not modesty. It is a list where every row says ten hours a week and fifty-two weeks a year, which adds up to more hours than a school year contains. Anyone who reads applications for a living does that arithmetic without meaning to, and it costs you the credibility of the rows that were accurate.

The 150 characters carry the row

The activity details field carries most of what a reader learns about what you actually did. The position and organisation fields do some of that work too, but they are short and mostly identify the role rather than describe it.

Lead with a verb and include a number where you have one. "Taught weekly coding classes to 12 primary students, wrote the lesson plans" does more work than "Volunteer responsible for teaching and curriculum development".

Cut the words that carry nothing: responsible for, participated in, various, dedicated, passionate. Drop articles if you need the room. Fragments are fine, since this is a form rather than an essay.

What nobody can tell you

Whether a particular activity helps at a particular college is not knowable, by us or by anyone selling a ranked list of what admissions officers want. Colleges do not publish it, readers change, and it differs by school and by year.

The mechanics above are knowable. Enter the true version of what you did, make the two numbers agree with each other, then spend the rest of your time on the essay, which is where you explain why any of it mattered.