No single extracurricular activity impresses all colleges. Here’s what actually makes any activity compelling — and why how you write about it matters most.
What Extracurricular Activities Look Best on College Applications?
Every year, a version of this question finds its way into my inbox. Sometimes it comes from a student. More often it comes from a parent.
“What activities should my teen be doing to look good to colleges?”
There is no such list. And believing there is one tends to backfire.
I understand why people ask. College admissions can feel like a code to crack, and if there’s a list of activities that reliably impress admissions readers, it would be useful to have it.
The Myth of the Magic Activity
Every few years, a new activity gets crowned as the thing that looks impressive. Research. Entrepreneurship. Service abroad. Debate. The specific activity changes; the belief underneath it doesn’t.
Admissions readers notice when everyone is doing the same thing for the same strategic reason. An activity chosen because it looks good on an application, pursued without genuine interest, tends to produce thin descriptions: vague verbs, generic outcomes, nothing specific that only this particular student could have written.
And thin descriptions, more than anything else, are what make an activities section forgettable.
The activities that actually look best are not the ones with the most prestigious names. They’re the ones described most honestly and specifically. I’ve seen a student who babysat neighborhood kids write a description that stopped me cold. I’ve seen students who did NASA internships write descriptions that said almost nothing. The activity didn’t determine the outcome. The description did.
What Makes Any Activity Compelling
If there’s no magic activity, there is a set of qualities that make any activity worth including. They apply to debate team and dishwashing equally.
**Depth over time.** A student who did one thing for four years looks different from a student who did four things for one year each. Multi-year commitment signals that the student stuck with something, got better at it, and chose it again each year. That choice, repeated, tells a reader something real.
**Increasing responsibility.** Did your role grow? Did you start as a participant and become someone others relied on? That arc, visible across a description, shows growth in a way that a single snapshot can’t. You don’t need a formal leadership title. Teaching a new member, running a session, being the person who made a decision when no one else would — these are leadership moments, and they belong in your description.
**Something you can describe specifically.** This is the one that separates most strong activities sections from weak ones. Can you say what you specifically did? Not “participated in” or “helped with” but the actual work: the number of people, the concrete tasks, the outcome you contributed to. If you can be specific, you have a compelling entry regardless of what the activity is.
**Genuine connection.** Admissions readers have good instincts for whether a student actually cared about what they were doing. Genuine interest produces better descriptions — not because the student is trying harder, but because they noticed more. They remember what changed, what was hard, what they built. A student who worked at a restaurant because they needed the income and found themselves genuinely proud of learning to handle a rush service often writes a better description than a student who did a selective summer program because it looked good.
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A Few Activities Worth Knowing About
I said there’s no magic activity, and I mean it. But there are a few categories worth knowing about, not because they impress colleges, but because students often don’t realize they qualify.
Jobs. Paid work is one of the most undersold activity types on college applications. A student who worked 15 hours a week during the school year held down a real responsibility while managing school full time. That’s worth naming. The job title doesn’t need to be impressive. The description does.
Family responsibilities. Caregiving, household management, interpreting for parents: these belong on your application and are specifically welcomed by both the Common App and UC Application. Students who’ve been doing this work for years often leave it off because it doesn’t feel like an activity. It is.
Self-directed projects. Something you built, taught yourself, published, or produced over time. An app, a blog, a YouTube channel with a real topic and a real record, a creative practice that produced a portfolio. These belong on your application, even if they never happened inside a school or organization.
Community and cultural participation. Religious youth groups, cultural performance ensembles, martial arts with real training commitment, informal neighborhood initiatives. These don’t need an official sponsor to count.
For Students Who Still Have Time
If you’re in 9th or 10th grade and reading this, the single best thing you can do is pursue what you’re actually interested in, document it as you go, and stay with it long enough to have something real to say.
Don’t join things to build a résumé. Don’t calculate which activities will look best in two years. Those calculations usually produce the exact profile admissions readers have learned to discount: a collection of strategic choices that don’t add up to a real person.
Join things because you want to see what they’re like. Then stick with the ones you care about. Get better at them. Take on more responsibility when it’s available. And write down what you’re doing as you go — the specific things, the numbers, the small accomplishments — so that when applications open you have something real to work from.
That’s the whole strategy. It works.
Keeping Track While You Still Have Time
If you’re early enough in high school to be thinking about this, there’s one practical thing I’d recommend: keep a running log of what you’re doing and what’s happening. Two sentences after any activity. The specific things, not just the names.
By the time you’re sitting down to fill out applications, the details will be gone. The log keeps them.
I made a free High School Activity Tracker for exactly this purpose: a simple template to record what you’re doing, when, for how long, and what happened. Five minutes to set up. It pays off in hours saved when applications open.
Get Your Free Activity Tracker →
And when you’re ready to turn that record into polished descriptions for both the Common App and the UC Application, the Dazzling Activities course walks through every step.
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*Robert Powers (M.A. Johns Hopkins) is the college consultant at College Torch. He is an expert in colleges and the college admissions process.*
