The Insider: College Admissions Advice from the Experts

By Abigail Anderson

Last week we began the discussion of Stanford’s 11-part supplement. We covered the seven questions requiring answers in the form of either a list or 50 words and how to answer the activities essay.

By Abigail Anderson

Stanford University has one of the longest and most time-intensive supplements in American college admissions and, if their application numbers are any indication, this has done nothing to dissuade nearly 50,000 students from applying just last year. Stanford’s reputation as an intellectual, competitive, entrepreneurial, quirky California powerhouse—in academics and athletics—can make these essays feel even more challenging than they ought to be. The short and sweet version of our advice? Be yourself. You’ll find that an open, honest response bears much more fruit than a manufactured answer that targets what you think the reader wants to see.

The University of Virginia has always provided some of my favorite supplemental essay prompts (and not just because it’s where I went to grad school). They are short (250 words max) and they are personal.  Both of these mean that a student is forced to get to their point quickly, something I find students struggle with when they have a longer word count, and they are forced to really think about what makes them tick.

Today, we continue with the third post in our College Essay Prompts series.

Colleges that accept the Common App don’t pick the essays it offers. They do, however, carefully choose each of their supplemental essays, which is why these are often considered as important, if not more important, than the Common App essay.  What they ask can also tell you a bit about the college’s personality; think of off-the-wall creative topics like those the University of Chicago releases every year. How you choose to answer these essays also says a lot about you.

I work with a lot of students who apply to Wake Forest, and the Wake Forest app is one of my favorites. This may surprise you considering there are six (yes six!) supplemental short essay prompts. I like the prompts because they aren’t unnecessarily long and they are mostly very specific, which I find students usually prefer. Let’s take a look at two of them, identify the goal of the essay, and discuss some of the common pitfalls.

The Common Application Reveals New Essay Prompts for 2015-16

Some students choose to write about sports. Or their love of helping others. Or even about their unusual hobby of collecting those kitschy plastic-domed snow globes. Whatever the topic, the college admissions essay is meant to reveal a glimpse of a student’s character, one that – ideally – will help set that student apart from the thousands of other applicants vying for a spot at that same institution.