Every year, some version of this conversation happens at a kitchen table in August.
A parent asks what should go in the activities section. The student lists the obvious things — band, a sport, the honor society, the summer internship, the club they joined in tenth grade. The list comes to six items. Everyone agrees it looks a little thin, and they start hunting for something to pad it with.
Meanwhile the student has spent the last four years, and several thousand hours, doing something neither of them mentioned. Not because they decided it did not belong. Because it genuinely never occurred to either of them that it might.
The Question Families Actually Ask
The question is almost never "how do I describe this well." It is:
Does this even count?
And families answer that question themselves, silently, before anyone with admissions experience ever sees the list. The filtering happens at home, in about four seconds, and whatever gets filtered out is gone for good.
The filter is usually some version of: did an adult organize it, and does it have a name I could say out loud at a school meeting?
School club, yes. Varsity sport, yes. Church youth group, yes. The thing you do alone in your room for twenty hours a week that you have gotten genuinely, unusually good at? That one gets cut without discussion.
Common App Answered This Years Ago
Here is the part that surprises most families: Common App has been telling applicants that hobbies belong in this section for years.
Its own guide to approaching the section asks students to think about whether they had family responsibilities, a job, an internship, or volunteer work — and then asks, in as many words, "What about hobbies or sports?" That sentence appears in Common App's applicant resource for this section going back to at least 2023.
The same guide is equally direct about the ten slots. You can add up to ten activities, it says, but that does not mean you need to enter ten. The point is what makes you unique — your pursuits, interests, and passions — not the number you report.
So the permission has been sitting there in writing, on Common App's own site, the whole time.
What the 2026–27 rename adds
For the 2026–27 cycle, Common App renamed the section from Activities to Activities and Experiences.
That is not a new rule. Paid work, caregiving, and independent projects were always eligible. What changed is that the scope is now stated in the name of the section instead of being left for students to infer from a guidance PDF they were never going to read.
The category list moved the same direction — "Work (paid)" became "Employment or work (paid)," and "Junior ROTC" became "ROTC and Military." And if nothing in the dropdown fits, there has always been an "other club/activity" option, which is a quiet acknowledgment that the list was never meant to be exhaustive.
Read together, it is Common App saying the same thing louder, because saying it quietly did not work.
So Why Does Everyone Still Leave Them Off?
Because permission was never the bottleneck.
A student who has never once considered that their four-year obsession might belong on a college application does not go looking for a rule about whether it is allowed. They are not blocked. They are not even asking.
You cannot fix that with a policy change. You fix it by asking a different question.
"What clubs, sports, or activities are you in?" only ever returns things the student already files under activities. It is a question that can only give back what was already sorted into the right box — which means the entire category of experiences that never got sorted stays invisible, no matter how many times you ask.
What Gets Left Off
In no particular order, the things students routinely do not mention:
- Gaming, competitive play, and online communities
- Building, making, and repairing things
- Coding and personal tech projects
- Art, music, writing, and fan communities
- Content creation of any kind
- Collecting and trading
- Family responsibilities and caregiving
- Paid work, and informal work like babysitting or yard work
- Fitness and independent training
- Cars and mechanics
- Cooking and baking
- Animals, from a single horse to a rescue operation
- Hiking, fishing, and other outdoor pursuits
- Independent learning — a language, an instrument, a subject nobody assigned
- Moderating or organizing an online community
- Long-running personal projects with no external deadline
Not all of these belong on a final list of ten. That is not the point. The point is that you cannot make a good decision about what to include until the thing is on the table, and most of these never make it that far.
What this looks like in practice
Consider a student who says, when asked, "I play video games."
A résumé-shaped process hears that and stops. Not an activity. Move on.
A better process asks a second question. Do you mostly play, or do you compete, build things, or run something?
And a third. Have you ever made something other players actually use?
And a fourth. How long have you been at this?
Sometimes the answer is that they play a couple hours a week to unwind, and that is a genuinely fine answer — not everything has to be an accomplishment. But sometimes what comes back is that they spent two years failing at one absurdly difficult level before finally clearing it, then started designing their own levels, and the ones they published have been played and rated by thousands of strangers.
That second student is not describing a pastime. They are describing sustained effort against repeated failure, self-directed mastery of a complex system, a shift from consuming to creating, and work that an audience independently judged to be good.
None of that reaches the application if the first question was "what clubs are you in," and nobody asked a second one.
Five Questions That Surface the Real List
If you want the things that got filtered out at the kitchen table, stop asking what clubs they are in. Ask these instead.
1. What do you spend a ridiculous amount of time doing?
Not "what are you involved in." Time is the giveaway, and students are usually honest about it because the question does not sound like a test.
2. What have you gotten really good at just because you wanted to?
This separates competence from enrollment. Plenty of students are enrolled in things they are not good at, and good at things they never enrolled in.
3. What have you built, created, mastered, collected, repaired, designed, moderated, taught, or competed in?
The long verb list is the point. Each one unlocks a different memory, and students answer the specific verb that fits them when "what are your activities" would have gotten a shrug.
4. What do your friends ask you for help with?
An outside view of the same question. Students underrate their own expertise constantly, but they can usually tell you what people come to them for.
5. What have you stuck with even though nobody was giving you a grade, an award, or a title?
This is the most useful question on the list. "Nobody made me do this" is one of the clearest available signals of genuine curiosity and intrinsic motivation — and it is exactly the category that a question about clubs will never return.
Ask follow-ups on whatever comes back. The first answer is almost never the whole story; "I play video games" and "I have spent two years building things that thousands of people have played" are the same student on two different questions.
What Makes an Experience Worth Including
Once something is on the table, judging it is the easier part. Useful things to weigh:
- Duration — how long has this been going on?
- Depth — hours, difficulty, and how far past beginner they have gotten
- Creation — did they make something, or only participate?
- Contribution — did anyone else benefit, use it, or rely on it?
- Growth — is there a visible arc from where they started?
- Responsibility — what happens if they do not show up?
- Fit — does it help explain the rest of the application, or contradict it?
Notice that none of those criteria mention whether an adult organized it, whether it happened at school, or whether it has a title.
One more thing worth weighing, which does not fit neatly in a list: nobody made them do it. An experience sustained for years with no grade, no award, and no title attached is often the single most informative item on an application, precisely because nothing external was propping it up.
And No, You Still Do Not Need a Title
This is where the other 2026–27 change fits in.
The Position/Leadership field is no longer shown by default. Common App now asks first whether you have a position or leadership role to report, and only shows the 50-character field if you answer Yes.
Which means the student who spent four years building things a community uses does not have to call themselves Founder, Lead Designer, or Independent Creative Director to make it fit. They answer No, describe what they actually did, and move on.
The form now separates two questions that were never the same question:
Was this meaningful? — and — Were you in charge of it?
For a full walkthrough of that mechanic, including what to re-check on entries that rolled over from a previous year, see Where Did the Position/Leadership Field Go on the 2026–27 Common App?
The Takeaway
The 2026–27 Common App did not start allowing hobbies. It has said so plainly for years. What it did was put the word Experiences in the name of the section, so students stop having to guess.
The work that is left is not a rules problem. It is a discovery problem, and it belongs to families and to the tools they use.
Before your student decides their list is finished, ask the question that actually finds things:
What have you stuck with even though nobody gave you a grade, an award, or a title for it?
Then keep asking follow-ups until you understand what they really did. The answer is frequently the most interesting thing on the entire application — and it is almost always the item that was about to be left off.
Once you have the full list, How to Fill Out the Activities Section the Right Way covers how to describe each one in the space you get.