But wait, there’s more: a guide to supplemental essays

First — and most importantly — if you’re reading this right before an application deadline: welcome, fellow member of the procrastination nation. I respect your hustle.

I imagine this will be a lengthy piece, so I’m not going to waste your time with an overly-drawn out intro. Let’s talk about supplemental essays. I’ve found that there are tons of resources online to help with the personal essay, but not nearly as many for the shorter supplemental prompts that individual schools may ask you to respond to.

Supplementals from an admissions officer’s perspective

Before we get into how to approach these essays, we should establish that the vast majority of “optional” supplemental essays aren’t really optional. An exception to this rule would be Duke’s prompt about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. (I would also make the case that unless a school requires or recommends you attach a résumé, you can probably do without wasting your admissions officer’s time on something that likely just repeats what they saw elsewhere on your application.) In general, though, if a school is asking you to write a supplemental essay, it’s because they see value in the question they’re asking. Yale admissions officers discussed the importance of supplemental essays in an episode of their “Inside the Yale Admissions Office” podcast.

“I think of [supplemental essays] as the process of gradually zeroing in on the student as we’re trying to get some specific insights for the two big questions that we’re always trying to answer about every applicant: what will the student bring to Yale and what will the student take away? These questions are the most direct opportunity we have to get some specific answers to those questions. So as you’re thinking about them, keep those two big parts of the equation in mind.”

Before you dive headfirst into an essay prompt, you should stop to think about what exactly the school is asking and why they’re asking it.

“We use these questions as a way to tell our applicants what makes our school unique and what we value. Keep in mind that this idea of ‘fit’ goes both ways,” the aforementioned Yale podcast explains. “Our process isn’t just about recognizing the most accomplished and deserving students, but finding the students who are going to fit the best into our community, who are going to really take advantage of the experience and bring something to Yale as well.”

Case in point: many colleges will ask applicants to write an essay about why they applied, but the specific wording of an otherwise identical prompt can give you a sneak peek into how an admissions office thinks. Some schools might craft their prompt in a way that encourages students to focus solely on their academic work, while others might emphasize the community aspect of college or how you will use college as a springboard beyond getting a bachelor’s degree. Yale’s admissions officers talked about how much time they spend each year debating every last word of their supplemental essay prompts. When you hear them repeatedly praise students who can both “reflect and analyze,” the wording of their “why Yale?” prompt gives you a clue for how to write your essay. 

The podcast continues, “I want to draw your attention to the fact that the question is phrased in the past tense: ‘what has led you to apply [to Yale]?’ I find that really good responses to this [prompt] point to specific experiences in a student’s past, hopefully their recent past, that led them to decide, ‘yeah, I want to apply here.’”

TLDR: “Thinking like an admissions officer” can be a valuable exercise. Take advantage of whatever breadcrumbs they give you.

Topic selection

Once you’ve started to put together a list of colleges you want to apply to, look through their supplemental prompts. If you’re applying to a bunch of schools, there will likely be some overlap. Not including “rapid fire” questions (e.g. USC’s “describe yourself in three words” prompt), I wrote a total of 25 supplemental essays. That might seem draining, but 18 of them fell into one of four categories that I’ll cover later on in this piece. This allowed me to develop a smaller group of essay topics that I could plug into my application for different schools. Of course, you don’t want to cut too many corners with this process; each version of that essay should be tailored to the specific school and prompt. If you’re going to use this strategy, it’s especially important to take some time to reflect on what your best essay topics truly are. If there’s one thing I could have done better in the summer/fall of my senior year, it would probably be this step right here.

Remember the underlying goal with anything related to college admissions: make your admissions officer want to fight for you in committee. There is no right or wrong essay topic so long as you convince a school they couldn’t afford to leave you off their campus. Your essays should write your admissions officer’s “sales pitch” for them by contributing something new and insightful to the narrative of your application. So if you wrote about chess in your personal essay, you should generally steer clear of chess in your supplementals.

There is no universally optimal subject or format for a supplemental essay. Thus, it’s important to identify what you want to tell your admissions officer. I wanted to highlight my introspective nature, which is why several of my essays played up my love of thinking about how different concepts, institutions, etc. interact with one another. These are some of the actual essay topics that (I assume) helped me gain acceptance to four T30s:

• An MTV interview with Kendrick Lamar
• Watching TV coverage of U.S. troops leaving Iraq as a kid
• Sitting outside at lunch with friends even in the middle of winter
• The “where did you go to high school?” icebreaker question
• Checkout lines at the grocery store

Yes, I wrote about grocery stores to demonstrate intellectual vitality to one of the most prestigious universities in the country. That said, I should caution against being quirky solely for the sake of being quirky. I’m also not saying that you need to write about super random things. I chose the topics I did because I thought they revealed something about who I am, how I think and what I would bring to these schools. When I say I wrote about grocery stories, what I should really say is that I wrote about my thinking about grocery stores — my depth of thought is what I wanted an admissions officer to take away from that essay.

At the expense of coming off as redundant, take time to seriously think about these prompts. For example, many colleges will ask you to discuss a community that you are a part of. This is a spot where you can probably turn one essay idea into a supplemental for multiple schools, but you still need to think critically about what your various communities mean to you, say about you, etc.

Writing tips

Supplemental essays are often short. Very short. The fewer words a school is giving you, the more they want you to be straight to the point. A 150-word essay simply doesn’t have room for flowery language and details that do nothing but eat into your word count. That doesn’t mean you revert back to writing with a bland, lifeless voice — most of my tips about writing style from my personal essay guide also apply here — but the substance of your essay has to be presented in a succinct manner.

I think it’s especially important to map out supplemental essays in advance. Once you start turning your outline into a draft, you’ll naturally pick up on spots where you’re being unnecessarily wordy or rambling on about information that isn’t directly relevant to your essay. Personally, I liked to get all of my thoughts down in writing first, then go through and highlight anything that I thought could be rephrased for brevity or cut altogether.

I should also note that many supplemental essays read like the word count snuck up on the writer. Even if it’s just a sentence or two, you should still do something to tie your ideas together and wrap up the essay. Like with the personal essay, I find that some students waste too many words describing the subject of their essay and run out of space to discuss whatever the applicant is supposed to be showing us about themself.

Before I move on to some of the most common types of supplemental prompts, I want to mention example essays. Over the past several years, tons of students have been posting videos titled “Reading my essays that got me into [School X].” First off, nobody but the admissions officers in that room know if the essays are what got that person into a certain school. In fact, I would venture to guess that some of these people got accepted despite their essays. These videos are a resource if you want to get an idea of what supplemental essays can look like, but what worked for one applicant very well might not work for another. And if I’m being completely honest, a lot of college admissions essays on YouTube aren’t that good. 

The “why us?” essay

Example: Why are you interested in attending Columbia University?

This is probably the single most common supplemental essay prompt. It’s also one of the most difficult to pull off — and, to be completely honest, responsible for some of my worst essays. If you find yourself in similar shoes, know that you’re not alone. In fact, Stanford stopped asking this question altogether because, to quote a former admissions officer of theirs, “The answers were so bad. It’s such a hard, terrible prompt.”

Why does such a seemingly straightforward prompt trip so many people up? I have a couple theories: the question can be misleading and most of us can’t actually explain why we’re applying to a certain school. Regarding my first point, “why us?” has become this prompt’s unofficial title, but I’d assert that this is a bit of a misnomer.

“The secret to this essay is that it’s actually about you. Why are you a good fit for this school?” college admissions consultant ScholarGrade explains. “Don’t just spew a list of great things about the school — everyone does that, and they already know they’re a good school. You need to stand out from the stack.”

The same ScholarGrade post outlines what admissions officers are looking for in these essays:

1. “What does [your essay] reveal about you, the applicant? (Note that they look for this in every essay.) They want to see depth of thought, intellectual vitality, engagement, leadership, individuality, creativity, etc. Do you have what it takes to be successful at that school?
2. How interested are you in their school? If they admit you, will you attend? Have you done your research and are applying because you think this is the best school for you, or are you just shotgunning them or applying aimlessly based on impersonal factors like rankings and prestige? Do you actually want to go here or did someone else make you apply? Are you treating them as a backup or safety option?
3. Are you a good fit for their school and culture (and vice versa)? Will you benefit by going there, and will the school benefit by having you in their student body?
4. Do you have a real plan for what you want? Are you building toward something? Do you have goals, dreams and a vision for your future?”

To hit this essay out of the park, you might want to start by considering what you hope to get out of your college experience. If you did some soul searching prior to writing your personal essay (see this section for my advice on that front), chances are you’ve already done this. Then think about why you and School X are the perfect match given your aspirations. Notice how everything still ties back to you.

Next is the part where you have to do your homework. Explore the school’s general website in addition to the department website for your intended major. (See the “why major” section below for my thoughts on applying as undecided.) As you go, I would recommend jotting down notes (with hyperlinks to where you found that info) on a Google Doc. This will be very helpful when it comes time to actually write your essay. Copy down any and everything that sticks out to you. What programs and research opportunities does this school offer that you couldn’t get elsewhere? What classes in their course catalog excite you the most? Go down the digital rabbit hole and see where it takes you. When I was researching Rice, I stumbled upon random articles and podcast episodes published by students in their history department.

Beyond academics, most schools have a website with a list of active clubs and student organizations. Discussing these can be another way to help admissions officers visualize you contributing to their school. You might find it beneficial to peruse social media as well to get a feel for the “vibe” of the student body and life on campus. Pages like a school’s subreddit are also a good place to pick current students’ brains. Take it from someone who wasn’t able to make in-person visits before applying: most of these schools look and feel the same from afar. The more you can do to understand their nuances, the easier this essay will be.

The “why major?” essay

Example: Why are you interested in the major you indicated as your first-choice major? (University of Texas at Austin)

The first thing I should say about the “why major?” question is that you’ll sometimes see it embedded within a school’s “why us?” prompt rather than as a standalone essay. For example, “Tell us why you decided to apply to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition, please include why you are interested in studying the major(s) you have selected.”

Whether the two prompts are combined or not, I would recommend getting school-specific with your response. The more you can do to help admissions officers understand how you would be a valuable member of their institution, the better. This post from a college admissions consultant provides a useful outline for what this type of essay can look like.

1. Explaining how you discovered your interests, and why it matters to you personally. Most people start off with a moment or an activity that piqued your interest in a certain topic, and then briefly explain why they were interested in that topic — the more specific, the better. For example, I mentioned my tinkering and problem-solving skills in my Why Engineering essay, which covered both how I became interested in engineering as well as why I liked it.
2. Showing what you’ve done to further those interests in high school. This part is a little tricky. Ideally, you should have some extracurriculars related to your major that you can talk about, and also pull some lessons from. If you don’t, it’s a little harder to do this section. You could instead talk about other extracurriculars where the lessons you’ve learned apply to said major. For example, if you were applying for something like international relations, you could talk about how your experiences in debate allowed you to synthesize ideas and make arguments.
3. Tying your interests to the major/school and explaining why your interests align with the offerings that the school has. This is the most straightforward part. Usually, people do this by researching the school’s offerings and seeing what they like. You can look up course catalogs for your specific major and find classes that you are excited to take (and explain why). If you Google ‘X University Y Department,’ you can usually find professors and their publications, and could also talk about how you’re excited to conduct research if a particular field fascinates you. Lastly, most schools also offer a list of clubs, so you can browse through those to see what you like. Again, you not only want to name these offerings, but also specifically explain why YOU are interested in them.
4. Bonus points for: keeping your voice (I know, Why X essays are dry), clearly demonstrating your passion for something (following a formula means you tend to sound dry) and being very specific with your answers for each school/major (in other words, if you can change the school name/major and the essay works fine, it’s probably not specific enough).”

Finally, I want to discuss the idea of applying “undecided” and not selecting a major. In most circumstances, I would advise against doing this because schools like to know that you have at least some sense of direction. Establishing good continuity between your extracurricular activities, high school classes and intended major can also help connect the dots to create a more cohesive application narrative as opposed to your application being a hodgepodge of accomplishments. Besides, most colleges won’t actually require you to declare a major until your sophomore or junior year, and switching majors is usually pretty easy. Be sure to research the specific policy at each school; some are more stringent than others in this regard and some might have different rules for hyper-competitive majors like computer science.

The community/diversity essay

Community example: Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it. (University of Michigan)

Diversity example: Rice is lauded for creating a collaborative atmosphere that enhances the quality of life for all members of our campus community. The Residential College System and undergraduate life are heavily influenced by the unique life experiences and cultural tradition each student brings. What life perspectives would you contribute to the Rice community? (Rice University)

You could definitely separate the community and diversity essays into two categories, but there’s enough overlap that I grouped them for the sake of this article. Both prompts get at the fact that colleges want to create a diverse student body that engages with their community. When deciding what to write about, I think a lot of students box themselves in with regards to how they define a diverse community. There’s nothing wrong with discussing your race, religion, etc. if you have something meaningful to say about those components of your identity, but know that you can approach this essay from a variety of angles. When I answered the above Rice prompt, I framed myself as someone who would bring ideological diversity to educational spaces that are increasingly emphasizing efficiency.

Likewise, a community can be defined more broadly as any group of people that share a connection. When formulating a response to either of these prompts, I would once again take time to self-reflect. Depending on the specific wording of the prompt, you might need to focus on what that community has taught you, what impact you’ve made, etc. Writing about our identity or the background we come from can be an abstract task, so I’d recommend tethering your overarching idea to a more concrete essay subject. This doesn’t automatically have to be you telling a story per se, but you’ll likely want some sort of vessel to carry the message of your essay. Remember that colleges are ultimately asking these questions because they want to get a better sense of how you would contribute to their campus. To that end, using your essay to provide specific evidence of your engagement with your community, whatever that may look like, is beneficial.

The activities/work essay

Example: Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (Vanderbilt University)

This essay prompt seems incredibly vague at first glance, but it’s actually quite straightforward: describe something meaningful that you learned or experienced through an activity. Schools typically ask this question because they want to learn more about what you would bring to the table both in and out of the classroom. When deciding what you want to write about, this admissions consulting advice is worth considering:

“​You’ve already filled out your main activities section, so the reader knows what extracurriculars you do. They know what awards you’ve won and what your role is in that community/group/team. Don’t reiterate that here. Instead, use the space to:

• Talk about why you do this activity; how it has changed you; what about it you found the most meaningful.
• Tell them what this activity says about your personality, goals or values.
• Think of something you want them to know about you that they don’t know already.”

If a college was going to admit you simply because you were captain of the math team, they wouldn’t need you to write this essay. What do you want to tell colleges about yourself that the activities section of the Common Application doesn’t? That might be something related to your most “impressive” activity, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

Keep in mind that admissions offices receive thousands of essays about popular extracurriculars (e.g. sports, music, etc.) every year. If your time in one of these activities is what speaks to you the most, then go for it, but be sure to put your own unique spin on things. Don’t be the gazillionth theatre kid to write a vanilla essay about overcoming stage fright. The more you can personalize the activity to you, the better. Ideally, this essay — like all supplementals — should culminate in something that makes it clear what type of person you are and what type of impact you would make in that school’s community.