The Common App gives you 150 characters per activity.
Most students waste them.
A title. A number of hours. A brief description of duties performed.
That's what most Common App activity entries look like — and that's exactly what they sound like to an admissions reader who has seen ten thousand of them.
Competent. Forgettable. Indistinguishable from the next applicant with similar credentials.
What is the Toolkit?
The Activity List Toolkit is a self-guided PDF that shows students how to use those 150 characters differently.
Not to describe what they did, but to show who they are — what they initiated, what they sustained, what they changed, and what it cost them.
That's the information an admissions reader is actually looking for when they read this section.
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The toolkit walks through every type of activity students typically list — sports, arts, volunteering, research, work, leadership — with before and after examples for each, an explanation of what makes the difference, and a rewriting framework students can apply to their own entries.
I'm Kristie Schmidt. Twenty years coaching college applications. Degrees from Smith College and Harvard University. I write literary memoir, which means I think seriously about how language reveals a person — and that's exactly what the activities section has to do in very little space.
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The Activity List Toolkit won't fill in the entries for your student. It will show them how to stop writing like an applicant and start writing like a person.
01
Descriptions
Stop guessing how to fit your impact into 150 characters. Use our tried-and-tested formulas to lead with action and end with results.
What’s Included in the Toolkit
Everything you need to turn a scattered list of extracurriculars into a powerful, cohesive data story that admissions readers remember.
02
Tonal Variants
Learn how to pivot your tone based on the school's culture—from highly professional to creative and personality-forward.
03
Before & After Examples
See real-world transformations of static lists into dynamic narratives that highlight leadership, intellectual curiosity, and community impact.