How on earth do you make your essay stand out from the crowd at the most selective universities?  What exactly is it that Ivy League admissions officers are looking for in a college application essay?

A little while ago, I spent two years living in North Carolina, just a few miles away from UNC Chapel Hill. Like you may have been, I was instantly smitten with the stately brick buildings, the charming tradition of the Old Well, and the outstanding food surrounding the campus. What took me by surprise, however, was just how truly dynamic and impressive the academic and community experience was in real life. Carolina is a special place, in part because it is the oldest public university in the US, but also because it is one of the best examples of the ingenuity of public higher education.

Identity. How do you define it, describe it, put it down on paper? And for seniors applying to colleges and universities, what does a school want to see when they ask about your identity on a college application?

Take Duke’s optional essay prompt, for example. I’ve met many a student who’s hit a mental snag when trying to tackle it:

Who doesn’t want to attend a school where you can dress like a candy cane all year? Or attend classes surrounded by a neat downtown with lots of options and a gorgeous lake? Where when the weather is just right, it seems you’re bound to have your best day? Exactly. These are just a few of the reasons why people have been flocking to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in droves.

Here are the supplemental prompts for the Pomona College application this year:

1. Most Pomona students enter the College undecided about a major, or they change their minds about their prospective major by the time they graduate. Certainly we aren’t going to hold you to any of the choices you’ve made above. But please do tell us why you’ve chosen the major or majors (or Undecided!) that you have (in no more than 250 words).
2. Please respond to one of the following three prompts:

You’ve imagined yourself in front of the golden dome; you’ve plotted out a prospective Social Concerns Seminar; you can even recite scenes from Rudy word for word. It’s now time to apply to Notre Dame, and drat, you realize their application requires written responses above and beyond a simple personal statement. But before you dramatically resign yourself to a hospital bed and plead with others to “win just one for the Gipper,” let’s try unpacking those supplemental essay prompts—a little clarity might just be the impetus you need to wrap up these little gems:

It’s a year for changes in big public university admissions systems. The University of California introduced their all-new Personal Insight Questions—which we discussed on our radio show, Getting In: A College Conversation, last week—and way down south, Apply Texas has introduced new prompts for students applying to the University of Texas system and most other institutions in the state. Back in August, my colleague gave advice on essay length for Apply Texas, which doesn’t place rigid constraints on word count. Today, we’re going to talk about the three main essay prompts, Topics A, B, and C, and how you should think about your responses to them.

No idea what a teenager could possibly have in common with a Pennsylvania university? Wondering what the heck a “Bazinga” moment is? Never fear—the latest in our ongoing series on colleges’ individual essay prompts is all about Lehigh University’s Common Application Supplement.

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)!