I’ve been working with a lot of people finishing up applications for early November deadlines, and the same question has come up a few times: how am I supposed to estimate the time I spent on an activity? The Common Application itself gives very little guidance: “For each activity you’ll hours spent per week on the activity, and then the weeks spent per year. If you can’t remember the exact details, like the time spent on the activity, it’s alright to give your best guess.”

Here’s why the hours per week of the activity section is difficult: very few people, including high school students, consistently spend the same number of hours per week on any activity. If you were to ask me how many hours a week I work, I would have a very hard time answering you. Some weeks I work a lot; some weeks I work little. Some years I take more clients, some fewer. There’s no “typical” week for me, and a lot of students are in the same situation, with few typical weeks.

Let’s take a simple example. If you tutor from four to six in the afternoon every Tuesday from September to December, then that seems easy. Two hours per week, 16 weeks. Except you probably don’t actually tutor every Tuesday—there are holidays and other schedule conflicts. And you also covered a friend’s shift on a few Thursdays. And there was that four-hour Saturday session. And some of the sessions went longer than two hours, but a few were shorter, but you’re not sure they balance out.

Even that simple one is weird, and most activities aren’t that simple. What if you’re in school plays? In the run-up to the play, you have rehearsals every day, four days a week, for two hours. But the two weeks before the show, you’re at the school for five hours a day. You spend 16 hours the weekend before the show working your butt off, and the show weekend itself involves being at school for six hours after school on Friday and six hours on Saturday. There’s a wrap-up for two hours the Monday after the show completes, and then there’s three weeks off before you begin rehearsals for the next show. How do you accurately capture that? You’re trying to estimate the hours per week of being in the theater club for three years, with its wild ups and downs of time spent.

First I want to point out that good descriptions of your activities will help minimize this problem. If you don’t just say that you are in the theater club, but also mention how many plays you part of, what jobs you did as an actor, director, and/or technical crew, and any awards or recognition you received, then the number of hours won’t be as big a deal.

The approach that I recommend is focused on honesty and consistency. I don’t want the people I work with spending too much of their limited time and energy going through their calendars and memories trying to come up with some sort of typical week for an activity that has no typical week. That time and energy can be spent on the writing portions of the application, or studying to keep their grades up, or spending more time with their friends and family.

So give a quick and honest estimate and move on. For the tutoring example, I’d say to the student “it’s basically two hours per week, right? There were a few weeks with more, but also a few weeks with none. Just put two hours per week for 15 weeks (because you didn’t tutor the last week of December) and move on.” If that feels honest to the student, then they can use that estimate and move on. To the theater student I’d say “you start with eight hours a week. There are a few weeks off here and there, but they don’t compare in intensity and growth to the few weeks and weekends where you spend a lot more. So how about 10 hours a week—does that feel honest?” If they feel that’s honest, then they can go with that. If they feel it needs adjusting, then we can talk through how much to adjust. The discussion for each activity, whether with someone else or just yourself, need not be more than a few minutes per activity. Get an estimate that’s honest—don’t only count the busiest weeks and multiply those as if every week were that busy, but don’t sell yourself short—and make sure you’re being consistent with how you estimate. Then let it go. If you’re honest and consistent, then you can explain your method to anyone who asks you how you got to that number.

This approach may not work for everyone. You may think that with some extra time you can come up with something that’s not just honest but also more accurate. Maybe you don’t trust yourself to be either honest or accurate without doing some more work. My approach may feel too fluid or lazy for you. I understand. If that’s the case, then let me point you to my friend Admission Mom and her formula for getting accurate hour reports (scroll down to section 8). Even better, her example involves zombie hunting!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.
Read this related post:
Choosing, and explaining, your extracurricular activities
Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

Photo by Zoe Herring