supplemental essay tips

supplemental essay tips

Effective Strategies for Writing Supplemental Essays

1. Introduction to Supplemental Essays

Because there are so many applications and each receives a limited amount of time, you cannot afford to overload your essays with mere words. Every word should count, and each sentence should stand on its merits. Quantify all your experiences. This can mean placing everything online. It also means that you should specify everything you have done that relates to your college work, including your extracurricular activities and your paid work. Your resume, should you create one, should be more than a compendium of raw data. Make sure that you present a coherent “story” about yourself to the college admissions personnel. Each activity should tell a story. Only then will the numerical data come alive and tell the complete story of your life.

When you supplement the personal statement with college-specific or scholarship-specific essays, your goal must be to meet the individual application requirements of each college to which you apply. The points you make must fit the question. Whether you describe your talents or discuss your background or goals, stay focused and make sure that you deal with the question that is asked.

2. Understanding the Purpose of Supplemental Essays

However, some colleges and universities have supplemental essay topics that allow you to answer a more personal, specific question that can influence your application’s chances of success or allow you to make a stronger or more focused statement. These colleges go beyond the basics and they are ones that should first be on your priority list for interest in applying and should also become your priority for careful consideration in your persuasive and perceptive response to such supplementary essay questions. Prestigious colleges such as those of the Ivy League, Stanford, or other prestigious colleges that have very high selectivity use these supplemental essays to further weed out your candidacy and allow applicants who can respond with original essays reflecting that student’s achievement, motivation, personality, community service, sense of humor, individuality, or nothing special at all… whatever you are or believe you are, write that response.

Think about supplemental essays as “a little extra cherry on top of the cake” in the application process. Often, the Personal Statement is not long enough for you to say everything you want to say, answer every question you might have raised, or you may feel the need to write a statement on an additional topic to ensure that the college or university is aware of all aspects of your application, personality, or interest in their institution. Colleges often ask for supplemental essays on topics ranging from your specific academic interests at the college to your experiences. Some colleges ask for a general supplemental essay or several. Generally speaking, those supplemental essays mean very little and are neither weighted heavily into the decision on whether to admit you nor do they cost a lot of stress and hatred in terms of the process.

3. Crafting a Compelling Narrative

When you set out to write about the student you are and the student you expect to become, you want to show your application readers that indeed, you are both. A great college essay that tells the story of an applicant who is aggressively focused on a single vision always gets the attention of application readers. They want to find students like you—that’s the advantage of an applicant pool that is that big. Every year, colleges who really care about the kinds of students they admit glean from the application a deep knowledge of a student who has a clear vision that allows the college to know how best to educate that student, to benefit him, and to benefit from him.

Figuring out a compelling narrative strategy is, at heart, what makes crafting a great supplemental essay different from writing an assignment for class. You must think about a focused story you want to tell and look for ways to unify the many different parts of your application. Having the chance to write about yourself by filling in the blanks left by your resume is a rare opportunity. Differentiation can also come from unexpected places, such as a direct and clear vision that only you have, or the ability to interpret and use that vision in a way that communicates real abilities and daily practices.

4. Showcasing Fit and Interest in the School

Effective responses also discuss specific academic, co-curricular, and community offerings, often through anecdotes, that cannot be found elsewhere—you could be amazed at some of the degree or module opportunities, so including those will be strategic. Conducting a school visit will help you gather this type of sensory information and help you make better pitches. Also, a visit is a signal to the school of your strong interest. Indeed, many colleges have an interest in retarding the mimsy-meter activity of students haunting their hallways in order to bump up the number of serious applications. If you are asking for a “scholarship” that is tied to a school or degree program, you will need to craft a particularly strong pitch. But remember to write a substantive response that indicates “serious scholarship student.”

One key to the “Why Us?” question is showing a clear awareness and understanding of a school’s culture, programs, and activities, and this may or may not require a college visit. You may be best placed to show this by diligently researching the website, a practice that will also familiarize you with some of the school’s vocabulary. You can express your interest in these and reasons for them by citing statistics, people, and programs from the website. As with the above examples, give specific examples. Use faculty or department profiles to identify the best candidates to address your particular academic and extracurricular interests. If you want to pursue a major or minor or have a special offering that is not widely available on other campuses, it is advantageous to discuss that.

5. Editing and Polishing Your Essay

Conduct a final check for misspelled words, and, as we shared earlier, do not rely entirely on spell-check. Although a spell-check will indicate that you have a word in print, it may well be the wrong word spelled correctly. Do not use tense, negative, or gender confusing shifts (intending to write “woman” instead of “wanting,” for instance). Make certain that your punctuation is both subtle and correct, in particular that your use of semi-colons, colons, ellipses, em dashes, and commas are accurate.

Crucial to editing and polishing your essay is reading your completed essay carefully through at least once – verbally if possible. Make certain that your language reflects the writer you chose to be: make sure your word choices and syntactical flow are what you intended. Reading your essay aloud and slowly will help you determine whether or not your essay reflects your style. Look for common editing blunders, such as the proper italicizing of book titles, checking the formatting specifically requested by individual colleges (double- or single-spacing, for instance), and scanning each page to ensure that all information is printable.

After you have organized your discovery information, written the thematic statement of the essay’s purpose, and developed specific examples within a well-structured approach, you are ready to edit and polish your essay.