Sharing Your Passions
In your freshman and sophomore years, you probably said yes to everything — the school musical, the chess club, debate team, maybe even the knitting club. That instinct to explore is exactly right at fourteen and fifteen, when you don’t yet know what you love until you’ve tried a little of everything. But as a rising junior, especially one with a serious interest in a visual or performing art, the calculus changes. Admissions committees at conservatories, BFA and BM programs, and even liberal arts colleges with strong arts departments aren’t looking for the longest activities list. They’re looking for a coherent story about who you are as an artist and as a person.
This is the moment to shift from quantity to quality, from breadth to depth. College admission teams read your extracurriculars to fill out your story beyond grades and test scores: Are you the kind of student who handles pressure with grace? Do you seek out challenges or avoid them? How do you show up for the people around you? For an arts applicant, these questions carry extra weight because your activities list is often the first place an admissions reader sees evidence of your artistic identity outside the audition room or portfolio review.
From Breadth to Depth: What This Looks Like
Start by making a complete list of everything you’re involved in — every club, team, lesson, gig, volunteer commitment, and side project, no matter how small it feels. Don’t edit yet. The goal is to see the whole picture before you start deciding where your time and energy should go for the next two years. Most students are surprised by how much is actually on the page once they write it all down, and that full picture is exactly what makes the next step — cutting and consolidating — so much easier.
Take Inventory: Questions to Ask About Every Activity
Once your list is complete, go activity by activity and ask:
Is this something you’re genuinely passionate about, or something you started because a friend did?
What’s your role — are you a participant, or do you hold (or could you grow into) a leadership position?
How long have you been doing this, and has your commitment grown or stayed flat over time?
Does this activity sharpen or showcase your dedication to your art form?
If you stopped tomorrow, would your application be noticeably weaker — or would no one notice?
Be honest with yourself, especially on that last question. There’s no shame in stepping away from something that gave you a soft place to land freshman year. The goal isn’t to do less — it’s to redirect that time toward the things that build your story as an artist.
Making the Hard Choices
Say you’re a violinist who has decided, after years of lessons and youth orchestra, that you want to pursue performance at the conservatory level. That might mean trading the time you used to spend in chess club for serious competition prep — your state’s solo and ensemble festival, a regional MTNA competition, or an audition for a more competitive ensemble such as an All-State or regional youth orchestra. It could also mean applying to a summer pre-college program, like those offered by Interlochen, Tanglewood, or a conservatory’s pre-college division, where you’ll study with faculty who can later write you a meaningful letter of recommendation.
Or maybe you’re a budding actor who started the knitting club and became its president — and honestly, it’s been a great stress reliever. But you also landed the lead in this year’s musical, and realistically, it’s time to step back from the knitting club presidency. Instead, channel that organizational energy into something connected to your craft: stage managing a one-act festival, founding a student-run theater company, or competing at your state Thespian festival through the Educational Theatre Association. That transition shows the same initiative and dedication — just refocused on acting.
Or perhaps you love your school’s community service club and also love painting. Rather than treating these as two separate commitments, combine them: organize an art show at a local senior center, partner with a nonprofit to design materials for a fundraiser, or submit a body of work to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. This kind of project shows both artistic skill and the initiative to create opportunities, rather than simply showing up to ones that already exist.
Build a Through-Line, Not a Checklist
The Common Application gives you ten slots for activities, each with just 150 characters to describe what you did. That constraint is actually a gift: it forces you to be selective. For an arts applicant, most of those ten slots should reinforce your artistic identity — your private lessons and the years you’ve studied, your ensemble or company involvement, your competitions and festivals, your independent creative projects. But one or two slots showing a different side of you — a part-time job, a sport, a role caring for siblings, a STEM-related club — can round out the picture and show you’re a well-rounded person, even as your artistic focus is clear.
Admissions readers see thousands of activity lists every season, and they can tell the difference between a checklist assembled to look impressive and a list that tells a story. A violinist whose entries connect — youth orchestra concertmaster, chamber music coaching, a summer festival, a self-organized recital for a local charity — reads as someone who has built a life around music. That coherence is far more persuasive than ten unrelated activities, no matter how prestigious each one sounds on its own.
Why This Matters Even More for Auditions and Portfolios
If you’re applying to programs accredited by organizations like NASM (music), NAST (theater), or NASAD (art and design), you’ll likely submit a resume or activities sheet alongside your prescreen recording, audition, or portfolio. Faculty reviewers read these documents together. A dance applicant whose portfolio shows strong technique and whose resume shows years of training, summer intensives at recognized programs, and choreography credits tells a far more complete story than technique alone. The same is true at National Portfolio Day events, where reviewers often ask about your activities and projects as a way to understand your artistic process, not just judge your finished work.
Practical Steps to Take This Summer
Update your resume or activities list now, while the details of this past year are fresh.
Identify your “signature project” for senior year — a recital, a curated portfolio series, a directing or choreography credit, or a community arts event you organize yourself.
Reach out early to teachers, directors, or mentors connected to your depth activities — they’ll be your strongest letter writers, and giving them lead time helps.
Step back from low-impact commitments now, while there’s still time to fill that space with something that matters more.
Imagine how each in-school or out-of-school activity rounds out, or builds on, your personal story — and contributes depth to your application as a whole. The students who stand out aren’t the ones who did the most things. They’re the ones whose activities, taken together, make a reader feel like they already know exactly who this person is.
Contact Best Fit Education for help building your personal story to help your application stand out.
