Activities Section - College Apps

Seniors, how are you doing with your college applications?  Are you making steady progress?  I know that there are so many things in your lives right now that it can be easy to think that those deadlines are far away, but I'd like to remind you that time is passing quickly and you need to be working on your applications.

One of the struggles that a lot of students face when working on the Activities Section in the Common App is trying to figure out how to word your involvement in the very limited space allowed.  You want to be sure that you are fully highlighting your involvement in the activity and not just saying something like: "Activity: Cross Country/ Description: I ran as a member of the team."  While yes, that is certainly true, you are missing out on the opportunity to share with the college reader what this involvement meant to you and what you achieved as a result of your engagement.

The College Essay Guy came up with an activity that he calls BEABIES (which stands for Best Extracurricular Activities Brainstorm I've Ever Seen).  You can access information and the questions to help guide you through the BEABIES process at this link.

But I know that it can be hard to put that into action.  And so another college admissions leader in AI who uses the phrase Tech-Neill-ogy has transitioned the BEABIES prompts over into a prompt that students can use with ChatGPT that will walk you step by step through the BEABIES process to help you use AI to craft your activities section descriptions.  We have this AI Prompt linked here and you can also find it on the counselor website on the Common App page.

My guess is that after you have walked through the process with one or two of your activities it will help you get a good feeling for what your descriptions should ideally look like which will help you craft the rest without all of the steps, but if not, the steps are always there for you.