College Essays ApplyTexas Essays: How Long Should They Be? Written by Tova Javetzon August 17th, 2016 I began my career as both a tour guide and senior interviewer at my alma mater, Barnard, where I later joined the admissions team and read and reviewed applications from students applying from the northeastern, midwestern, and western regions of the United States, as well as Canada. A few years later, while pursuing my master’s degree, I briefly left admissions to be the director of student life at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Realizing I missed working closely with students on the high school side of college counseling, I joined the admissions team at Fordham University where I recruited and reviewed applicants applying to Fordham’s liberal arts and business colleges. My most recent experience at Montclair State helped me understand what the application process looks like outside of highly selective colleges and how to help students who may not be fully prepared for college-level work. One of my favorite past experiences was managing the athletic recruitment process at Fordham as well as a number of sports at Barnard. Understanding the inner workings of both the Ivy and Patriot athletic leagues meant I was able to guide students to find the best athletic matches as part of their college search. Learn More About Tova applytexas, essay prompts, essays, How Long Should the ApplyTexas Essay Be? This question comes up a lot. Mainly because the application allows for up to 120 eighty-character lines of text. What's that? You're not up on your character count layout for a standard page? A typical single-spaced page of average size font is about 50 lines of text. ApplyTexas allows you to enter something more than twice that long; but, I beg of you, do not take them up on that! As the ApplyTexas application becomes more and more popular (more than 1.4 million applications were submitted this past year with about 300,000 of those applications coming from students outside of Texas), the ApplyTexas folks seem to be working to simplify and clarify their process a bit more each year. When the 2016-2017 application opened a few days ago, I noticed they added some guiding text on the essay page directly answering this question: ApplyTexas recommends that you keep your essay to between 350 and 500 words in length, with no more than 650 words.I recommend heeding their advice, especially if you're applying to a school requiring more than one of their prompts. For example, if Texas A&M is on your list, they require a response to Topic A and Topic B, but they also encourage you to submit Topic C if you don't qualify for automatic admission. That's three major essays! Now think of the admission officer reading all those essays. I promise, no matter how good of a writer you are, your admission officer does not want to read three 1000 word essays when she has a pile of other applications to get through that day. If you haven't yet, check out the new prompts for the 2016-2017 application cycle. ApplyTexas has mixed things up quite a bit this year and the prompts are a lot of fun—especially Topic C. Make sure you're looking at current information, as some of the schools have changed their requirements to reflect the new prompt choices (namely UT-Austin!). For years University of Texas at Austin required Topic C and a second of your choice. This year they have changed to requiring topic A along with a second of your choice. While the ApplyTexas platform isn't the prettiest and might be a bit clunky (if I'm being kind), they do have an incredibly helpful set of FAQs posted on their site. Be sure to check out what they say about submitting their essays. Happy writing! Find out what you can expect from our partnership and view our variety of flexible services. Learn More about Our Services Related Resources Read | Posted on November 17th, 2023 Are Optional College Essays Really Optional? Read | Posted on November 6th, 2023 4 Tips for Writing the University of California Essays Read | Posted on September 21st, 2023 Speak Your Truth: Sharing Your Identity in College Essays
