The Critical Activities List

In the near future you are very likely to be faced with a very blank form labeled: “Activities List.” Today we’re going to talk about what you need to be doing now to prepare to fill that list in. This is a long discussion because it basically spans 4 years, so get yourself a cup of tea and settle in.

TLDR:

1. Do not sacrifice your academic standing for over-demanding extracurriculars. Extracurriculars are relevant only after academic qualifications are met.
2. Prefer depth to breadth. Colleges want you to show them the intentionality of your choices and your ability to get results. You only need a few (4-6) impactful activities to accomplish this.
3. Anything that demonstrates your initiative in engaging with others to make your community a better place, exercise your intellectual curiosity, or demonstrate your mature responsibility is suitable for your activities list. School sponsorship and faculty advisors are not required.
4. In your Junior year, focus on the extracurriculars that have a strong affinity for who you want to be, how you show up, where you can take initiative to make a positive change in the world for the people around you. Do not spread yourself thin.
5. In your senior year, add two considerations: how will you do this again in a new location (university) and what will become of the good things you did when you’re not there to sustain them (at home)? Focus on long-term impact. Prepare yourself to tell those stories.

Preamble From the President of the Virtue Ethics Club

Aristotle presaged modern neuroscience when he asserted that virtue could not be judged in a single virtuous act but was instead intentionally practiced and cultivated habitual actions (manifesting as reliably good judgment) that could be called upon in subsequently similar situations or crises—nerds like me refer to this as “Virtue Ethics.” Modern neuroscience more physiologically describes this as “neurons that fire together wire together” (see also: Wu & Zenke, 2021) and have more physical resources supporting and defending their growth unlike their superfluous neighbors, especially as your body is physically transforming into its adult form.

For you this means that the activities that you participate in and over time to get baked in to who you are. Choose the activities that will help you to “become what you are” (Nietzsche & Large, 2009).

You then reduce your real-world activities into an Activities List that, when combined with your transcript and personal statement, should make it clear of what you expect from a college and what sort of college should be excited about the prospect of somebody like…

👉✨You✨👈

To summarize the timeline before we move on:

• Yesterday-You was doing literally everything to figure out what you could do
• Today-You is focusing that down to do things that reify who you are, get you engaged with the world around you, and make a positive impact on your community.
• Tomorrow-You will be weaving the results of Today-You’s actions into a story to pitch to college admissions committee(s) with that “Activities List” I mentioned above.
• And Future-You will be doing amazing things that Tomorrow-You hadn’t thought to think of yet.

Preview of the Future: The Target We’ll Be Aiming For

The folks in admissions come right out and tell us: “Activities can demonstrate Leadership, Creativity, Love of learning, Concern for others/altruism, Maturity, Entrepreneurial spirit.” They show what you are interested in, what you care about, and indicate how likely you are “to be an active member of the campus community.” (Armato et al, 2025).

The “campus community” is especially important to the admissions officers because their job is to make a durable, cohesive class cohort. They do not settle for admitting students who want to get in, they are trying to admit the students who want to graduate. And the students who actively participate and proactively include others in a variety of ways improve the cohesiveness of the class cohort such that each person is more likely to stick around and eventually graduate.

The college admissions panel were also looking for virtues of “Leadership, Creativity, Love of learning, Concern for others/altruism, Maturity, Entrepreneurial spirit.” The meta-analysis of university statements run by the College Essay Guy (2025) team produced “Intellectual curiosity, Service to others / Community impact, Leadership or initiative, Collaboration, Consistent engagement.” You can see how much they overlap, only diverging at the end on whether to be more individualistic or socially-aware.

How many activities should you include on your list? Opinions vary.

• The Common App gives you 10 activities slots.
• Admissions folks say they stop believing that you were really dedicated to any activities after 6.
• MIT only allows their applicants to list 4.
• University of Oregon takes the top 3.
• Admissions folks say they stop reading very closely after 3.

I generally recommend listing 4-6 activities.

Beyond that, Pioneer Academics (2025) found that their clients were most successful with college admissions when they spent 200-500 hours per year on extracurriculars. While, yes, there is selection-bias there (these are the kids who spend more than the typical 10-15 hours per week on homework 🤓), having a guideline does press the question: if you spend more time than that, are you using your time wisely?

Conscious De-Prioritization: The #1 Skill of Autonomous Adulting

To this point in your life adults have likely been telling you to both “just try it” and “always do your best” because unless you did your best across the spectrum of things you were trying you wouldn’t truly be able to tell if you had an aptitude for that thing.

That advice is no longer valid: you do not have to “always do your best” any more. Once you know what is important to you, what is a priority for you, you should commit your best effort to that thing (or those things), leaving just enough of your time and energy to meet the minimal obligations and duties imposed on you by social and physical necessities.

This has three theoretical backings which are true-enough as heuristics for now: the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule), which implies the Law of Diminishing Returns, that in turn should be making us think of Opportunity Costs.

• The Pareto Principle is derived from a distribution tendency that found that 80% of a good was attributable to 20% of the people. It’s not strictly valid anymore but it is a simple heuristic and what it means for you, as a future-former-Talented-and-Gifted student, is that you are probably able to get 80% of the success expected from you by merely doing the first 20% of the work (if you’ve got a sensible means of production). The flip side of this is that you’ll have to do the other 80% of the work—4 times as much work as you’ve already done!—to get that last 20% of benefit. This reveals…
• The Law of Diminishing Returns [which] simply says that past an optimal point of investment, the marginal utility of investing more goes down until you’re putting in more than you can possibly get back: if you can barely work at all and get a B-, or put in a moderate effort to get an A, or be a sweaty try-hard to get an A+ then you can see the diminishing returns of your ever-increasing effort in your GPA. While it’s almost certainly worth putting in some effort to go from a B- to an A, doubling that effort to go from an A to an A+ is likely a misallocation of your limited resources. There’s a term for this (mis)allocation:
• Opportunity Cost is what we call it when you spend a limited resource (typically money or time) on one opportunity instead of another. As legendary manager Andy Grove explained: ““Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else” (Doerr, 2018, p. 56). This shows up in your life when you give equal time to math where you have a solid A and chemistry where you have a B+ even though you have a distinct opportunity to improve your chemistry grade more. (Let’s be real: what you actually did was watch a video on Stanford admissions even though you’re not even applying to Stanford. Use your time better! ⏰) Today-You’s suboptimal choice is costing Tomorrow-You the benefits Tomorrow-You won’t be getting because of Today-You passing up that better opportunity.

All this said: you should also be living your life in the present. Get more sleep as both Dr. Damour and Dr. Barr recommend. Spend in-person time with friends. Make your parents tell you stories about when they were preparing to leave home. Drink that tea I told you to brew at the top of the post, it’s getting cold.

While it is true that as a student you are still generally obligated to do your homework, pass your tests, and not bring shame and dishonor upon your house and ancestors, the truth beyond that is: You’ll need to quit a lot of things to make time for what you’re going to stay committed to throughout your life. If this is a surprise to you, then I invite you to take a short break to watch this Dan Pink video to listen in on what adults are telling each other.

Consciously Prioritizing Activities: What Makes a Good Activity?

First of all, anything can count as an activity: school sponsorship and faculty advising is convenient but not required; the too-long list of Activity Types includes “Family Responsibilities,” “Work (Paid),” and “Religious” as for-examples of non-school attached activities. We want to focus on the activities that promote your virtues, specifically the previously-discussed virtues that align to college admissions officers’ interests. Here’s how we guesstimate how relevant or valuable an activity is likely to be when talking to college admissions folks:

• A low-value activity is something that you’re doing by yourself and for yourself showing that you have personality and also coping mechanisms. Nice, but hardly sufficient.
• A medium-value activity is an activity with social proof, such as engaging in a competitive endeavor or regularly engaging with a group or team. This shows that you’re willing to engage with the world around you and suggests you will “be an active member of the campus community” as is hugely important to the college admissions folks trying to assemble the class.
• A high-value activity is an activity with competitive success or positive social impact like what the admissions folks include in their glossy marketing materials. This is where the specific desired virtues start showing up.
• A ✨Sparkle-Magic✨ activity is one where you take initiative to go beyond yourself to provide a durable benefit to your community that persists even though you have left for college.

Remember the last step of the hero’s journey is “the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons” (Campbell, 2020, p. 52): your best activities end with you proactively sharing the benefits with other people.

Not doing a high-value activity? Not a problem! You can augment the activity to move it up the scale. As Malibu High School college counselor Linh Snyder learned in the wake of devastating 2025 wildfires, “leadership starts with showing up, not perfection.” Here’s how some example activities can value-up as they’re given more effort and attention:

Low-Value	Medium-Value	High-Value	✨Sparkle-Magic✨
Painting for the joy of it	Entering your painting in a local art contest	Win that painting contest by combining technical skill with artistic meaning	…And then sell prints on Etsy and donate the original to your local library.
Baking your favorite comfort food	Sharing your fresh crumpets with friends at monthly Tea	Teach your friends the joy of baking crumpets at a monthly club	… And then deliver those 12 dozen crumpets to a local retirement home.
Bowling alone as meditation	Join a bowling league	Be a ranked bowler in your state championship	… But not as good as the friend who you recruited because you knew he’d be good if he just tried.

Recall College Essay Guy’s College Admission Nutrients (their virtue list) which includes: Intellectual curiosity, Service to others / Community impact, Leadership or initiative, Collaboration, and Consistent engagement. So if you’re doing something that’s relevant to what you (may) want to study in college ✅ for multiple years ✅ with friends ✅ in a way that makes a distinctive improvement ✅ in the lives of other people around you ✅, you just checked every box. 💯

For an alternate formulation, check the Girl Scouts of America’s “Gold Award” guidance. They list the key elements on page 4, benchmark 80 cumulative hours on page 9, and remind you to “Stay focused on unique solutions with long-term relief” to distinguish your work from the transitive efforts your peers are more likely to produce–that’s the ✨Sparkle-Magic✨ difference.

⚠️ Special note: While the structure of the hero’s journey is a useful template and your application should be about you, you should not always be the lone hero of your story. As Brené Brown (2025) discusses, the hero complex and “I’ll do it myself!”-ism can be a symptom of being afraid to trust in or delegate to your teammates. Make a point to highlight the qualities you catalyze in your peers. ⚠️

Common App Prep: Sequencing the Activities

When you look at the Common App you’ll see that the activities list is linear, starting at the top and going down the line. This causes some kids to worry about how to sequence their activities. Don’t Panic: this is easy.

1. Lead with the 1-2 High-Value or ✨Sparkle-Magic✨ activities that you did and are willing to do more of, preferring the the top one that aligns to the stated interests or predictable needs of the college you are applying to — you are leading your activities list with a tacit “Here’s what you want me to do for you, I just want you to say Yes.”
   • 👉 You can re-sequence your activities for every college application if it helps you align your top activity to a university’s known or stated interests! 👈
2. Next, put in the 1-2 High-Value activities you did with your hometown friends but are ambivalent about doing somewhere else with other people in the future: you are proud of your success and willing to move on. (Spoiler alert: you will be surprised at what your future will conjure up from your past.)
3. Third, put in the 1-2 Medium-Value activities that you’d like to pursue or develop further even though they were resource-limited for you in High School, like if you took a summer enrichment program that specifically demonstrates your intellectual curiosity and love of learning with respect to your initial/top choice of college major.
4. Fourth, put in the 1-2 Medium-Value activities that felt sort of compulsory like “Honor Society” or “Key Club” or “Dutch Bros Barista.” These activities will get the boring descriptions to match your relatively neutral feelings towards them. These are good to convey completeness of your character and your adulting skills.
5. Finally, optionally, feel free to close it out with an intentionally weird activity to hint at your introvert mystique that spices things back up. You will never know when your trombone skills might earn you a place in a university cohort (i.e.: “We need just one more slide-trombonist to make our symphony viable, where ever can we find one?”).

That should give you roughly 4-7 activities with the best ones for your college admissions reader to know about helpfully at the top of the list where they are paying the most attention.

🛑 Important: Do not list any activity that you hated and refuse to ever do again, no matter how good you were at it. Those activities do not reflect who you are or who you are becoming. Bury them. 🛑

“I Don’t Have Enough Activities!” 🙀

I have not yet met a student who did not quantitatively have enough activities after we talked through them, but habitually half-assing low-value activities is common so let’s fix that first.

1. Expand what you are already doing to increase its value. I wrote the example activities table above to demonstrate how you can scale up something you’re already doing for yourself if you’re willing to socially engage with it. And if you’re stuck on how to step that up to high-value, review a list of social awareness points (see also: College Essay Guy’s “Firestarters” list) you can test for what resonates with something you’re already doing.
2. Augment your skills with a specific one-off enrichment, like a summer research institute (I can help dig these up) or a targeted community education course that will give you a new value-expanding capability for your activity going forward. Documenting your work on social media is a thing so Instagram skills are a thing. Intentional community-building and inclusivity is a thing so Dungeons and Dragons skills are a thing.
   • Related: Consider joining your school’s speech team just to give a speech on your favorite fixation and then add “did speech & debate to learn how to advocate for & teach about <Your Big Thing>” to your activity list. I go into details here. 👍
3. If you have put all of your time into a single activity where you are fulfilling many roles, consider splitting that listing in half so you’ve got an entry for each of your top two roles. The competitive skills you exercise on a league-affiliated team are different from the leadership skills you use when you are fundraising for it as a local club.

I work with my Junior-year clients (💰) to provide personalized and specific recommendations in this space. But generally: the more you talk about the things you’re doing, the more likely it is somebody is going to have an idea to help you step one of them up to pique the interest of your college admissions reader(s).

Telling Little Stories

It is not enough to be a high-value activity, we have to convey its value in our description to our reader. On the Common App you will have only 150 characters per activity to accomplish this daunting task. You should at least mention the outputs you got for your inputs: “Qualified to National competition in 3 events in 2 years,” for example. But it’s better if you can include a bit of personality and flavor: the recommendation from the admissions folks was “say what it was to you” rather than just what it was. So here are some example descriptions using the example activities from above:

👈 Swipe Left: Rolled ball at pins. 4th best in state.
👉 Swipe Right: 4th-place bowler in state w/average 243; recruited my friend to the team and coached him to be 1st in state. (Yes we are still friends.)

👈 Swipe Left: Made baked goods for old folks with friends.
👉 Swipe Right: Regular monthly baking and delivering crumpets to local retirement home with my friends. Our visits were appreciated despite lack of red riding hoods.

👈 Swipe Left: Won 1st in local art competition for painting a flower.
👉 Swipe Right: Painted an impossible flower to critique AI generated images; won 1st in local art competition. Selling prints on Etsy, donated original to library.

Contrary to our usual simplicity-first writing advice, each of these descriptions puts a bit of friction on the reader so they have a moment of space to consider the impact of your actions as they sift through hundreds of other applications.

The tiny little stories you can recount about what you’ve been doing with your life will stitch together into the grander quilt of who you intend to be for the university you choose to attend.

Going Meta: Who Are You?

“I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

You can work backwards from the stories that you tell about your activities to figure out who you are and develop a unifying perspective to put on your overall college application.

1. Get your activities list with everything you might want to represent you, even the things you know you need to work harder at.
2. Get a Roles and Identities list. I have a custom list for my clients.💰
3. Review the Roles and Identities list so you see what all is on it. This will make the next step go much faster.
4. For each of your activities, write down 1-3 roles or identities that you embody, either generally in that activity or in your favorite story about that activity. (You can use the same roles across multiple activities, this is normal and expected.)
5. Now do a quick word cloud of the Roles and Identities you used and track:
   • How do you usually show up,
   • how do you sometimes show up, and
   • are there any opposite-polarities in your list?
6. Having reflected on the Roles and Identities terms you chose,
   • Are you comfortable with how you usually show up? Are you confident in your common role when approaching a new group or situation?
   • How do you relate to each of your less-common roles/identities? Do they support you and give you options in how to address changing situations, or do they leave you feeling confused about what people expect from you?
   • If you have contradictions in your roles/identities, does thinking about the activities they are associated with at the same time cause you discomfort? Can you think of how you might adjust your behavior to avoid this dissonance?
7. Write down the following things:
   • Your default (dominant) roles/identities that you are confident in and can use more,
   • Your supplemental roles/identities that you want to develop for growth and contingencies,
   • And plans to change how you approach situations where you are taking on roles/identities that contradict who you are becoming.

Repeat this whole process whenever you feel it is necessary, perhaps because that line from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland suddenly started nagging at you from the back of your skull. While it helps to have a solid perspective on your preferred short-list of roles and identities, you only really need them to be briefly pinned down when writing your college application. It’s okay if they come loose after that; that is normal and accounted for in our process.

Pause. If you’re having a minor panic attack about not knowing who you are, here’s a nicely reassuring video from Morgan, an entirely-Portland person of some renown who still mostly remembers what it was like to be your age. (Here’s the written version.) You are not expected to be an adult, only to be starting on the process of becoming one — and we’re here to help.

Taking Notes: Forming Your Sumbolon Between Now and The Future

Remember how we talked about the dramatic structure of bringing claims and evidence together to form a complete truth using the Sumbolon structure (as seen in Oedipus, Ion, and The Importance of Being Earnest)? The last thing we’re going to do with our activities right now is document them so that we’ve got the real-time evidence of having done them. You can use any clean social media account — like that LinkedIn account you should have started — for this work, or a digital portfolio/scrapbook service like https://lifestreamdigital.com (worth looking into if you or your close peer group have privacy concerns with respect to common social media).

The intent here is: whenever an activity yields a new story to tell, post a photo and briefly tell the story from your role-framed perspective as the caption. Don’t worry about it being polished; authenticity is more important. But more important still is that Tomorrow-You will have plenty of notes and evidence to use when, as mentioned, they are “weaving the results of Today-You’s actions into a story to pitch to college admissions committee(s) with that ‘Activities List’.”

References

Armato, A., Hipp, E., Joustra, S., & Penman, R. (2025, September 18-20). Character counts: Making your personality shine in 150 characters [Conference presentation]. NACAC 2025 Convention, Columbus, OH, United States.

Birhane, A. (2017). Descartes was wrong: ‘A person is a person through other persons’ | Aeon Ideas. https://aeon.co/ideas/descartes-was-wrong-a-person-is-a-person-through-other-persons

Brown, B. (2025). Strong ground: The lessons of daring leadership, the tenacity of paradox, and the wisdom of the human spirit. Random House.

Campbell, J. (2020). The hero with a thousand faces (30th Anniversary Special edition). Joseph Campbell Foundation.

College Essay Guy. (2025). “CEG’s College Admission Nutrients (aka The Great College Application Test).” https://www.collegeessayguy.com/blog/college-admission-nutrients 

Doerr, J. (2018). Measure what matters: OKRs: the simple idea that drives 10x growth. Portfolio Penguin.

Nietzsche, F. W., & Large, D. (2009). Ecce homo: How to become what you are. Oxford University Press.

Pioneer Academics. (2025). “The 4-Hour Rule: A Data-Backed Framework for Pre-College Planning.” https://pioneeracademics.com/extracurricular-whitepaper-2/ [Gated]

Wu, Y. K., & Zenke, F. (2021). Nonlinear transient amplification in recurrent neural networks with short-term plasticity. eLife, 10, e71263. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71263