The Prompt
"Briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are, or share any additional information you'd like us to know."
Word limit: 150 words. About one tight paragraph.
What Harvard Is Actually Asking
The key word is shaped. This is not a "tell us about your activities" prompt. Harvard already has your activities list with ten entries, hours per week, and descriptions. They can see what you did.
This prompt asks a harder question: what did doing it change about how you think or act? The committee is looking for a cause-and-effect arc, not a recap.
The Four Categories — And Which Ones Applicants Skip
- Extracurriculars. Overused. If you write about your #1 activity here, you're duplicating the activities list.
- Employment. Underused by strong applicants. A summer at a deli, a landscaping crew, a tutoring job often beats a second robotics paragraph.
- Travel. Risky. A "service trip to [country]" reads badly. A specific, non-tourist relationship to a place can work.
- Family responsibilities. The most underused category, and often the strongest. Translating for parents, caring for younger siblings, running a household during a parent's illness, managing a family business.
Why Family Responsibilities Win
Harvard reads thousands of activities lists. They rarely see the work students do at home. If you've been the translator, the caregiver, or the reliable adult in your household since you were twelve, this is the one prompt where that belongs.
Don't sanitize it. Don't make it inspirational. Describe the specifics — the phone call to the insurance company, the younger brother's bedtime, the Saturday shift at the register — and let the shaping come through.
The 150-Word Structure That Works
Use three beats, with rough word counts:
- Specific scene (40 words). Drop the reader into one concrete moment. A smell, a task, a sentence someone said.
- What it changed (80 words). The shift in how you think, act, or see the world. Past self vs. current self, with evidence.
- What it left you with (30 words). A habit, a question, a way you now handle something unrelated.
An Example That Works
"Every Sunday since I was eleven, I've translated my mother's phone calls with her oncologist. I learned the words for 'benign' and 'margins' before I learned them in biology. What the job actually taught me wasn't medical vocabulary — it was pacing. My mother needed time to absorb each sentence, so I'd stop the doctor mid-word and ask her to repeat. I now do it everywhere: interrupting a teacher when a classmate looks lost, slowing down group chats when the argument has moved past someone. I've become the person who notices when the room has left someone behind. It's the habit I'll bring to any seminar — and the one I most hope Harvard keeps."
Why it works: one specific weekly scene, a clear shift from the literal task to a transferable habit, and a final sentence that ties it to college without flattery. 148 words.
Common Mistakes
- Restating the activities list. "I served as captain of the debate team and treasurer of student government." Harvard already has this. Use the 150 words for what the activities list can't show.
- Writing about three activities. At 150 words, three activities means fifty words each — not enough to show shaping. Pick one.
- The mission-trip paragraph. "The children taught me more than I taught them." Skip.
- Generic family-responsibility language. "I helped take care of my siblings and it taught me responsibility." Name the bedtime, the meal, the exact errand.
- Using the "additional information" framing as an excuse to pile on. If you have a real gap to explain (a grade, a transfer, a medical year), use a separate Additional Info field. Don't bury it here.
Self-Test
Cover the first 40 words of your draft. Read only the middle section — the "what it changed" part. Can the reader tell what activity you're writing about from the shaping alone? If yes, you've written the right thing. If the middle could apply to any activity in any student's life, rewrite it with specifics from the one you picked.
Run your draft through our AI essay review tool for voice and specificity. For Harvard's other supplements, see our "Intellectual Experience" guide, Roommate essay guide, and "How Use Education" guide.