UBC Personal Profile Activities Section: What to Write
The hardest part of the UBC Personal Profile is often not the essays. It is the grid: the five activities you list before the long answers, where you have to decide what counts, how to state hours that changed every year, and whether to write in sentences at all. Here is what UBC asks for, how to fill each slot, and three entries you can copy the shape of.
What UBC actually asks for
On UBC’s Personal Profile page the activities question reads: describe up to five activities that you have pursued or accomplishments achieved, in one or more of these areas, and outline the nature of your responsibilities within them. The areas are club, family/community responsibilities, creative or performing arts, work/employment, athletics, volunteer, service to others, and other. That sentence does more work than students give it credit for. Read it three times.
- “Up to five.” Five is a ceiling, not a quota. UBC reads two strong entries the same way it reads five; it does not dock you for empty slots.
- “Activities pursued or accomplishments achieved.” Both. An award is an accomplishment. A thing you did alone in your bedroom for three years is an activity pursued.
- “The nature of your responsibilities.” What you did, not what the club did. This is the whole test for each slot.
- “Family/community responsibilities” is a named category. Picking up a sibling every day, translating at your parents’ appointments, working the till in the family shop: UBC put those on the list on purpose.
The grid is followed by Question 4, which asks you to expand on one or two of the activities you listed, and says you will be asked for a reference who can speak to that response. So the grid is not standalone. It is the table of contents for the essay that follows, and one row of it has to be something a real adult can vouch for.
The questions the grid raises
What counts as an activity?
Anything you did repeatedly, over time, that had responsibilities attached. The test is not whether it has a name or a supervisor. The test is whether you can finish the sentence “I was responsible for…” without lying. Yearbook, yes. A part-time job at a car wash, yes. Cooking dinner for three younger siblings four nights a week since Grade 10, yes, and it belongs under family responsibilities. Attending a club without doing anything in it, no, and reviewers can tell because the responsibility line comes out empty.
Can I list an award?
Yes. The question says “accomplishments achieved,” so a regional science fair medal or a music exam grade is a legitimate entry. But an award on its own is a result without a story. Write the entry about the work that produced it: the project, the hours, the thing you were responsible for. “Silver, BC Regional Science Fair, 2026, for a six-month project testing whether coffee grounds change soil pH; designed the trials, ran 40 samples, wrote the poster” is an activity with a medal at the front. “Science fair silver medal” is a line on a fridge.
Can I list a self-taught hobby?
Yes, under “other” or “creative or performing arts,” and often it is the strongest thing on the grid, because nobody made you do it. The bar is the same: responsibility and evidence. Teaching yourself guitar and playing at two open mics is an activity. Teaching yourself to code and shipping an app that 30 classmates used to check the bus is a better one, because there is a number in it. Three years of drawing with nothing to show a stranger is real, but harder to write, so write it about the discipline: how often, for how long, what you can do now that you could not do then.
How do I state hours when my involvement changed every year?
This one causes more agonising than anything else on the page. The frequency field asks for one answer and your honest answer is “it depends which year.” Three rules:
- Choose the band that describes your typical week during the period you claim. If you did 2 hours a week in Grade 10 and 12 hours a week in Grades 11 and 12, the honest band is the 11 and 12 one, and you say the years were 11 and 12 in the description if the form does not ask separately.
- Put the change in the words, not the dropdown. “Member 2024; section leader 2025 to 2026, 10 hrs/week in season” tells the reader exactly what happened. The dropdown cannot.
- Never average up. A referee may be asked about it. UBC says it may contact references to verify your activities and achievements, and the person you name for Question 4 will know what you actually did.
Do I write “I” or résumé-style?
Résumé-style, in the grid. The role box is short and the reader is scanning five of them; every “I was responsible for” spends characters on words that carry nothing. Start each entry with a verb or a title, keep it to fragments, put a number in it. Save “I” for Question 4, where you have up to 2,100 characters and the reader wants a voice. The two sections are read differently on purpose: the grid is evidence, the long answer is reflection. Writing the grid as prose wastes the grid; writing the long answer as a list wastes the long answer.
What if I only have two real activities?
List two. Do not invent a third. A reviewer who sees two full entries followed by “Netflix club, member” learns something about your judgement, not your interests. UBC says it is not looking for a long list of achievements, and its own page says disruptions outside your control are taken into account across multiple years. Two deep activities and a Question 4 that explains what you actually did in one of them beats five shallow ones. If the honest reason you have two is a job or a family responsibility that took the rest of your time, that job or responsibility is your third entry and probably your best one.
Three worked entries
These are written to a form with a short role description and a frequency field. Adjust to the exact boxes in your application, but keep the shape: title, what you were responsible for, one number, one change over time.
Model UN, Grades 10 to 12. Delegate for two years, then head delegate and trainer in Grade 12: ran six Tuesday prep sessions for 14 first-year members, wrote the position-paper template the club still uses, coordinated a 3-conference season. Best delegate, VMUN 2026. Weekly, about 4 hrs/week, 8 to 10 in conference weeks.
Part-time cashier, then shift lead, at a family-run produce store in Burnaby, May 2025 to present. Open and close the till, count the float, train new hires (three so far), handle the Saturday-morning rush alone when the owner is at the wholesale market. 12 to 15 hrs/week in term, 30 in summer. Earnings go to my own phone and bus pass.
Self-taught 3D printing and repair, since Grade 10. Bought a used printer with $180 of birthday money, learned to calibrate and fix it from online tutorials, now print replacement parts for neighbours (a dishwasher latch, 11 board-game pieces, a wheelchair armrest clip). About 20 jobs completed, all free. 3 to 5 hrs/week, mostly weekends.
Notice that none of the three says “I learned” or “this taught me.” That is what Question 4 is for. The grid entry earns its place with a responsibility and a number, and the reflection happens once, in the long answer, about the one entry you choose to expand.
One weak entry, rewritten
I have been a member of the environmental club since Grade 10. I am very passionate about the environment and I have participated in many events and initiatives that have helped make our school more sustainable. This has taught me a lot about leadership and teamwork.
Every sentence is true and none of it is evidence. “Many events and initiatives” could be one bake sale. “Taught me a lot about leadership” is the conclusion of a story the reader was not told. And it is prose, in a box that wants fragments.
Environmental club, Grades 10 to 12; events coordinator in Grade 12. Ran the term-two paper audit (weighed recycling from 22 classrooms for four weeks), presented the numbers to admin, got double-sided printing set as the default on school printers. Organised two campus clean-ups, 40 and 55 volunteers. 2 hrs/week, more in audit month.
Same student, same club. The rewrite is shorter and says four checkable things. If the reviewer wants to know what it taught them, that is a Question 4 they will now actually want to read.
Choosing which entry to expand in Question 4
Pick the row where you can name a decision you made and a result you can measure, and where there is an adult who watched you do it. That last part matters because the reference for Question 4 has to be able to speak to that response, and UBC says one of your two referees must be able to do so. The club supervisor, the store owner, the neighbour whose wheelchair clip you printed: any of them qualifies. The friend who was also in the club does not.
Do not automatically pick the most impressive-sounding row. Pick the one with the best story. The Personal Profile questions guide has a full worked Question 4 built on a church breakfast program, which is about as unglamorous as an activity gets and is the strongest sample answer on this site.
Mistakes specific to the grid
- The club’s achievements instead of yours. “The team won provincials” is about the team. What position did you play, and what did you do in the semi-final?
- Padding to five. An entry you cannot attach a responsibility to lowers the average of the other four.
- Hours that a referee would not recognise. Round down, not up. The person you name for Question 4 knows.
- Repeating the grid in the long answer. Question 4 is not a longer version of the row. It is one moment from it.
- Adult vocabulary in a student’s grid. “Spearheaded,” “facilitated” and “fostered” are résumé-writer words. “Ran,” “built,” “trained” are yours.
Before you close this tab
If you are drafting the grid in a phone note and the long answers in a Google Doc, the character limits and references guide shows how to count characters the way UBC does, walks a 1,900-character answer down to 1,500 without losing a fact, and explains what UBC actually does with the two referees you name. If it is still summer and you have not started, the summer drafting plan lays out four weeks that get the whole profile finished before school does, with a sample of what week two should look like. If you are wondering whether your two activities are enough for UBC at all, the no-extracurriculars guide is written for exactly that fear. Then bank each of your rows as a story: AcceptMe’s Story Bank stores every activity as a tagged competency story, so when Sauder or a scholarship panel asks about leadership, the 3D-printing entry is already a two-minute answer.
Keep reading
- UBC Personal Profile Questions: How to Answer Each One UBC's Personal Profile questions as published, the four things UBC says it reads for, how to answer within 2,100 characters, and a worked example.
- UBC Personal Profile Character Limits and References The character limits that cut answers off mid-sentence, and how the reference-verification question on the Personal Profile actually works.
- How to Start Your UBC Personal Profile Over the Summer A four-week drafting plan for the Personal Profile, built for students starting in July or August before the December early round.