From where you sit, basking in the glow of your computer in the comfort of your desk chair, college essay supplements are just another item to be checked off on your to-do list. For colleges, the supplemental question is a way to communicate their values to you—a sort of last-ditch recruiting effort meant to both attract students to the institution and communicate some element of its social or academic experience. Santa Clara asks students to comment on their “strategic vision”; the University of Chicago is infamous for off-the-wall intellectual essay prompts (reminiscent of their off-the-wall intellectual experience); Reed College asks you to write all about Paideia, a unique week of self-taught courses on any subject under the sun. And Amherst College, in Amherst, Massachusetts uses its supplemental essay as a way of introducing both the intellectuality of their community and the impressiveness of their alumni and faculty. While your job isn’t to measure up to that pedigree, your response should be delivered in the spirit of intellectualism.

The college application essay is many high school students’ first real effort at writing not about an academic subject, but about themselves.  Taking a close look at and discussing oneself analytically can be a challenging task for even the most adept high school writers, but fear not, college applicants (and their worried parents)!

Sometimes a university’s essay prompts can reveal as much about the school’s values as an applicant’s personal statement can divulge what the student will bring to the university. If you’ve ever wondered what you should share in your application essay, fear not; some schools break down their personal statement into a few short responses and give you instructions for each solicited paragraph. MIT, for example, not only tells you what they deem important—how they aspire to positively impact the world—they tell students exactly what MIT is hoping to hear from its applicants: ideals and dreams that match up to theirs. So let’s try hunting for the clues MIT is dropping, prompt by prompt.

If you were to ask an admissions officer if there are any truly “bad” topics to avoid on your college application, chances are you’ll be advised to steer clear from essays about:

• winning (or losing) the “big game,”
• that horrible breakup with your girlfriend or boyfriend,
• your eyes being opened after volunteering in a third-world country, and
• the tragic loss or grave illness of a close family member.

Back when I served as an admissions officer at Barnard, I probably would have agreed.

As a former college admissions officer who read over 3,000 essays every admissions cycle, I can’t stress enough that students should consider quality over quantity when drafting college essays. My colleagues have previously written blog posts encouraging students to draft essays in their everyday voice, and to avoid replacing normal words with cousins from the thesaurus. The bigger picture here is to tell your own story as clearly and concisely as you can. The same goes for the length of your personal statement—hone in on the specific message you want to convey and deliver it as succinctly as you can.

“Have you started your college essay yet?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I have no idea what I should write about.”

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!

Beginning in the fall of 2016, students applying to any institution within the UC system will be required to choose four “personal insight questions” from among eight options, responding to each of their chosen prompts in no more than 350 words. This new requirement gives students the opportunity to share more about themselves—1400 words compared to the 1000 previously allowed—and offers greater flexibility in what they choose to share with the admissions committee.

When news of a new Coalition application was introduced last fall, admissions counselors knew they would have to learn an entirely new application platform in order to help their students apply to college the following fall. As a college counselor, I was perhaps most interested in the way that the new application—and its essay requirements—might change the way my seniors were able to approach their work over the application season. Would students be able to engage in brainstorming in the same ways they had in the past? What sorts of essays would they need to produce? How much extra work would a new application require of them?

When I worked at Reed, my colleagues and I had a saying that we loved to share with applicants summing up the best personal statements: “Neither analytical nor creative, the personal essay is a combination of both that reveals who the student is.”

As stated by Fitzpatrick and Constantini, the personal essay can’t be entirely creative, but it also can’t rely on the DBQ-style that earns you a five on the AP US History exam, either. Further, the writer has to set aside the immense pressure they’re putting on themselves to write the “perfect” essay, which they imagine is going to win over the hearts and minds of their application reader. There’s truly no “one” thing that admissions officers are looking for; in fact, the more expected, formal, or trite a topic is, the likelier the essay is to fail.