Extra Curricular Awards, PE, and Common App Confusion

[Chanley]

This really is not that hard but I am so scared of royally screwing up my kid's future that I think I am overthinking everything. 

 

I did not add PE to the transcript because my daughter has been on a competitive dance team for the last 8 years and has conditioning 2-3 times a week on top of dancing several hours a week. None of the PS girls on her team have dance on their PS transcript. Am I making a mistake? I considered her hours at the studio to fill the PE requirement in her education. 

 

Also, dance...she has received several awards and scholarships at competitions. Her dance solos typically score very well. Do I add a list of her awards by year under activities? I had her type them out on a document and it is long. How do I deal with that? I do want colleges to understand that this kid has devoted a HUGE chunk of her life to dance, so much that it has excluded many other opportunities and activities and that she has excelled at it. 

[Sebastian (a lady)]

My kids did not have pe on their transcript. I did have a comment in one of the counselor docs that we did not do a pe class but that they were active in many athletic activities and I listed some of them.

[MerryAtHope]

With regard to the awards, if you don't want to include all of them, what if you highlighted the most prominent ones? "Student earned X number of awards for competitive dance including...." or something like that?

 

I wonder if the schools note anywhere on a transcript when a student is exempt from PE, that their extra curricular fulfills that requirement? 

[Dmmetler]

In my area, kids who do a school sports team do get their PE credit from sports, with a notation that their PE class is JV football or whatever. They don't get extra PE credits, only the ones required, although many of the kids will do sports both fall and Spring all four years. And some kids do dance as a fine and performing arts credit if a school offers it.

 

Having said that, while PE is a PS grad requirement, I can't imagine a college rejecting someone due to lack of formal PE credits!

[daijobu]

If you think all of her dance awards are important to include, you might consider formatting it nicely and uploading it into additional information.  But you might contact an experienced dance mom who can help you decide which ones are impressive enough to include which ones are more redundant that can be left off.  I'm guessing this will be depend on whether your dd is applying to dance conservatory or a regular college.  

 

As for PE, I've seen both situations:  at my high school, it didn't matter if you were the star quarterback, everyone did PE.  At my dd's current school, doing a sport qualifies for a certain amount of PE credit.  At another high school, you can do PE however you like off campus: zumba, tennis lessons, whatever, as long as you got the teacher to sign off on the number of hours of participation.  

 

You may consider including a statement in your school profile indicating that PE credit was awarded for participation in the dance activity.  

[Corraleno]

I did not put PE on DS's transcript; he trains 15-20 hrs/wk for his sport and there is plenty of info in various parts of his application (Activities, Honors, Additional Info) highlighting that. IMO, adding PE to the transcript would just dilute the rigorous coursework without adding any additional information.

 

As for activities, there are only 10 slots on the Common App, so you need to narrow it down to 10. You can combine similar things in one slot, but they don't give you a lot of space so you really can't write more than a couple of sentences for each activity. They specifically tell you to list them in order of priority (how meaningful they are to you), so they won't be in chronological order, but there are boxes to check for each year you did those activities, as well as places to list how many hours x how many weeks. You can always provide more details in the Additional Information section.

[Mabelen]

I am trying to think how our district handles this. They have an alternative to school P.E., called OCIS P.E. (Off Campus Independent Study). The requirements are that the student participates for a weekly minimum of 15 hours, that they are training under a qualified trainer and that they are competing at the state, regional, national or international level. For dancers, they have requirements about rehearsal time and also solo dances etc. They require proof of all those requirements. As far as how it is presented in the transcript, I am not sure. I have seen a middle school transcript with the legend OCIS P.E. I don't believe they get grades.

[katilac]

We do not do formal PE so it's obviously not put on transcripts, and zero colleges asked about it. That's a requirement of the public school system and particular private schools, it is not a requirement of the colleges. 

 

Are you asking if you should put awards and activities on the transcript itself? ime, no, that goes on the application.  Awards are listed one by one, and I don't think I would list them all. You would put dance under "activities" and there is almost always a space that asks you to describe your involvement. That is where you can put how many hours per week, total number of awards, and so on. If they don't have this, you can certainly send a separate document along with your transcript. 

 

Every online application I have seen has the option to save and finish later. That means you can look at the entire application to see the format and what is needed, and also double-check everything before hitting submit. 

[TravelingChris]

We did have PE on our transcripts because it was required somewhere with at least one of the kids (state homeschool requirement or something like that).  As to colleges requiring it, the only college I have seen require it was a community college and it had basic requirements that you had to have fulfilled the state high school requirements.  Partly because of that idiocy, and the much easier for us to fulfill requirements at the local university, my youngest took her DE classes at the university and not the CC.  

[FLHomeschool2000]

This really is not that hard but I am so scared of royally screwing up my kid's future that I think I am overthinking everything. 

 

I did not add PE to the transcript because my daughter has been on a competitive dance team for the last 8 years and has conditioning 2-3 times a week on top of dancing several hours a week. None of the PS girls on her team have dance on their PS transcript. Am I making a mistake? I considered her hours at the studio to fill the PE requirement in her education. 

 

Also, dance...she has received several awards and scholarships at competitions. Her dance solos typically score very well. Do I add a list of her awards by year under activities? I had her type them out on a document and it is long. How do I deal with that? I do want colleges to understand that this kid has devoted a HUGE chunk of her life to dance, so much that it has excluded many other opportunities and activities and that she has excelled at it. 

 

We don't have formal PE on our transcript, but I did list a credit of dance and gymnastics.  But I don't think it was needed. 

 

I have another daughter on dance team and quite honestly--unless it was a solo award or something, I don't know it is worth listing independent team awards.  There is a character limit with each addition--so I might play around with wording.  I would also try and tally the hours dedicated to the sport...8 years won't matter since high school is only 4.  The app will ask if this is a whole year or partial year activity and the number of weeks.  So if she dances 20 hours per week for 52 weeks of the year that is 1000+ hours per year....4000 hours of dance training and competition sounds quite impressive.  I would format a nice "resume" to use an an attachment to the transcript in the same file--so that when the transcript is uploaded, it's all there.

 

Common app wants you to be concise and not wordy.  And PE is only 1 year, 5 hours a week during a 40 week school year. So anything in excess of 200 hours if you want to list dance as a class on her transcript--would be extra-curricular.

 

My daughter, who is in 9th grade, has a performance resume for theater/dance. I will consider that as an attachment to her transcript for uploading.   I will have her comp team for all 4 years be listed as one activity in the common app.  I will have each theater show performance listed independently by role.  But she is considering a performance major.