How to handle the 2 Major Changes to the College Application Activities Section

this year, there are two major changes happening to the activity section of the college application. So let's talk about what that means for you, especially if you're trying to get into a college that is not that easy to get into. First of all, we already heard about this one before, but they renamed the activity section to Activities and Experiences. This one should not surprise anybody. I have been saying this for a very long time, but your activities should include more than just extracurriculars that you do in and outside of school, if you have space. For example, you can and should include, if you have space, family responsibilities, part-time jobs, full-time jobs, independent projects, and even hobbies. However, the second change that truly shocked me this year. Up until last year, students were required to report the average hours per week of every activity on their college application. I made a whole video completing about how I think that the hour count is truly absurd, but this year they changed it. They are asking students to report the busiest hour count per week. The first thing I did when I heard this is I emailed admissions officers that I interviewed about four years ago as part of my masters at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. I have already heard back from a handful of them, talked to them about it, they told me, this change also caught them by surprise, when they heard about it from Common App a few months ago. And as such, they are not planning on giving it too much weight for the very first application cycle in which the change was made until they can form a good baseline for what they think students are interpreting this to mean. Just for this year, I have already heard a lot of students on interpreting this in different ways. Some students are truly just looking at the busiest week throughout an entire extracurricular and putting in the hour count for that week, whereas other students are saying, okay, on average, what are the busiest weeks look like? And putting an average of the busiest weeks. All of this to say that you should not be panicking too much about what the exact number that you put into that box.