CommonApp - Extracurricular Activities (Hours Spent per Week/Weeks Spent per Year)
Hi. I'm a senior applying to an EA through CommonApp.
I participated in MUN since 9th grade. I was never in a significant position/role but I did participate several times.
However, I have no idea how to put the time (hours spent per week and weeks spent per year. For example, our school has two MUNs per year and sometimes I participated two times, sometimes once per year.
Additionally, MUN is like a one time thing, so it's not like I can say "1 day per year" or something like that.
Also, for the leadership/position description, I'm not sure if I should just put "Delegate/Competitor."
Last question, for HSK (Chinese proficiency test), what would be leadership/position description be? I was a student, and I never led anything.
Thank you.
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1 answer
MUN- Just put 'delegate/participant' and 1 or 2 days per year.
HSK is not an Extracurricular Activity. It's a test. You can not hold a leadership position taking a test. If you scored incredibly high on the test, and received some sort of honor or award for your score, you can call it an award. But if you just took the test and passed, that is neither an EC nor an Award/Honor. Similarly, if you took the ACT and got a 35 on it, that wouldn't be an EC, Award nor Honor, it's just a test score. However, if you took the PSAT and scored 1500, you might qualify to be National Merit Finalist if you also took the SAT and got an equally impressive score. Less than than 1% of SAT test-takers get this award because you have to both a.)score in the 99% percentile on the PSAT and b.)99% percentile on the SAT. Your score is based on the NMS test index chart. Or if you have say 5 APs and your average AP score is like a 4, you will get something called the AP Scholar of Distinction Award. But you have to check collegeboard.org and see if you won anything on your college board portal. If you do qualify for an AP scholar award you can mention that in your common app and print out the award certificate for yourself.
Keep in mind, that it's more important to be accurate, correct, and honest on your common app than feel you have to be creative and come up with impressive things to add to your file. If you add too much fluff, an admissions officer will see right through that and ding you for exaggerating your academic accomplishments.
Also, keep in mind that all of them will do a mental math assessment of how much time you are spending on activities in your free time. There are only 24 hours in a day, if you attend online school for 7 hours and sleep 7 hours and eat meals and self-care for 2 hours, there are only 8 hours to do your homework, sports, ECs, and work on college applications. If write down you spend 10 hours a day on your ECs that's a red flag okay. No one will believe that.
Good luck.
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Yeah, I agree that I shouldn't put HSK as under 'Extracurricular Activities.' However, I was thinking of titling it 'Chinese Study' or something like that to make it more like an activity, and then talk about receiving the HSK Level 5 award/certificate. Would that be fine?