Some Supplemental Essay Help

Supplemental essays are a necessary evil of the college application process. A school you’re applying to could have anywhere from none to the high single digits. Typically, more selective schools will have more essays and more challenging prompts in order to really sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were. There are a few types of prompts you will encounter over and over again though. Here are a handful of them and some tips on how to best approach them:

• The “Why Us?” essay. One of the most common prompts you will face, this is simply your way to demonstrate to a college your familiarity with the school! Did you actually do your homework, or is your knowledge of the school limited to the fact that it’s large, urban, and has a great football team? To nail this essay, it’s useful to go back to your research (and to the school’s website itself) to remind yourself of what appealed to you about the school and how it would align with your priorities! How would the social and academic environments meet what you are looking for? What opportunities would you have access to? Keep your essay focused on you though and what you stand to gain from attending. Avoid reciting the school’s Wikipedia page back to them; they work there, they know!

• The “Why Major?” essay. This essay should serve not only to justify why you want to study what you want to study, but oftentimes why you want to study it at that particular college. Hopefully you already have a strong sense about the first part and can show a narrative arc of how you first became interested in [insert major here], how you sought out opportunities to develop that interest, and how you see devoting yourself to studying it in college as the logical next step. If a college wants to know why you want to pursue that particular major at that particular school, make sure to cite specific examples of: 1. the strength of that school’s program 2. the courses and professors you’d have access to and 3. the opportunities that that program would open up to you. If you are undecided about what you want to study, pinpoint multiple potential areas of interest or highlight your desire to be exposed to a wide range of different subjects!

• The “Activity” essay. Schools will often want you to expand beyond the 150 characters in your Common App description of an activity and give a little more insight into its meaningfulness for you. Start the essay by describing the activity and the length and breadth of your involvement with it. Then spend most of the essay speaking to its importance to you: Why do you enjoy it? How has it pushed you? How have you grown? How has it shaped in some way the person you are?

• The “Community/Identity” essay. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to bar race being used as a factor in college admissions, this essay has become WAY more prevalent. If you are a student of color, this is your chance to lean into that and speak to how that has shaped your experience growing up. If this doesn’t apply to you, think of other “communities” you are a part of: a sports team, a school organization, a religious group, even your own family are all communities!

Ultimately, my number one piece of advice in approaching these essays is: READ THE PROMPT CAREFULLY! Make sure you are actually answering the question(s) being posed to you! This is the number one biggest pitfall I see, and is easily avoidable.