Supplemental Essays Matter!

If you’re applying to ten or twelve different colleges, it can feel overwhelming. You worry excessively about every B (or A minus) on your transcript. You curate your activities list – trying to make those afternoons your aunt took you to the ICU sound like in-depth hospital visits. You write that major 650-word “Main Personal Statement” – and revise five times over. You’re ready to just be… finished!

Not yet. Before you send off your application, take special care to fill out the supplementals for each school!

What are “supplementals”?

“Supplementals” are extra essays that supplement the main application. These are no less important than the main application. However, there’s one big difference between supplementals and main application essays: supplementals are specific to the school!

If you write a dazzling, A+ supplemental essay for Northeastern… Northeastern is the only school that’s going to ever see it. However, you can (and should) “recycle” bits of your supplemental essays, provided you do so with care to detail – we’ll get more into that later.

Here’s the rundown on supplementals:

• As mentioned, each supplemental essay is only sent to one school each. This means that you can (and should) include school-specific information.

• They’re not required by every school. Some schools have zero supplemental essays, while others have multiple in their applications.

• Even when offered by a school, they’re sometimes optional. Example: “If distance learning posed an exceptional challenge to you in 2020 or 2021, please explain.”

• The word count can vary – quite significantly! Some supplementals take the form of extra “short answers” with limits of 100 words (or even 100 characters), while others may have a word count on par with that of the Main Personal Statement (650) – or even an “unlimited” word count!

• They are reviewed alongside your Main Personal Statement, not instead of it. So avoid unnecessary repetition.

Supplementals matter in admissions – so much so that we held a webinar solely about them. But why exactly are they so important? They help the school get to know you, the applicant, as a person, and determine fit: “They give the reader a sense of who you are as a person, what kinds of things are important to you, and what you have accomplished.”

Tacking the supplementals

This all being said, before you throw up your hands at the 10-20 extra essays you may now have on your to-do list, let’s cover some strategies to tackle them.

Know your college list

You should not finish all your Common App essays and only then look at the supplementals! Rather, you should know what you’re going into before you even set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and start to compose draft #1.

Work on your college list first. Know the schools to which you’re applying, researching them thoroughly, so that you’re prepared for any essay that may come your way. And know the supplements that come with each school’s application – before you start writing any essays.

Pick your battles

You do not need to write every supplemental! If the essay prompt doesn’t apply to you, consider whether you should use the limited time and effort you have to write it.

One example we gave in our webinar on supplemental essays was that of essay prompts about COVID-19: “Everyone was impacted by COVID… but a supplemental essay might be asking, ‘Were you impacted in a significant or unique way by distance learning?’ For example, no access to internet. For example, unstable housing situation. If your distance learning experience was difficult, but not particularly unique, you don't need to answer that.”

The same goes if the prompt is asking about something that doesn’t apply to you, like a disability, religion, dietary restrictions, or sports career. These things won’t apply to everyone – and that’s fine. Don’t go out of your way to make up something to force the prompt to apply to you!

However, “if you look at the prompt, and it's something that you definitely can write, do it!” This can only help, providing schools with more insight into you as a person and an applicant.

Overlap

Supplementals – while specific to each school – have a fair deal of overlap between one another. You can take advantage of this, as suggested by our ILUMIN Educational Consultant, Heather Vaughan, in our webinar: “Create a spreadsheet with all of the schools [you’re applying to], and then each supplemental essay prompt that you're going to have to write about. For some schools you'll get to choose [between prompts] – and so you should write out those options.(All this really takes is a little bit of time: looking at the schools’ websites, or looking at the Common App, and just putting it all in one place. Once you've got that, I would say it's a good idea to strategically – when you have the option to choose prompts – see if you can choose prompts that are similar to one another – so you can use the same essay for multiple schools.”

Our ILUMIN College Essay Specialist, Kate Schultz, cautioned: “It's not going to be the exact, word-for-word, same essay. … There is still going to be some editing, from essay to essay – based on the school.” However, “it's [still] a great idea to use an essay for one school for another – while still tailoring it to the other school. … You can reuse the bulk of the content of your essay for one school for another school, while changing the specific details, to save yourself some time and some energy.”

Two common supplementals

Two common kinds of supplementals – into which we went into great depth in our webinar – are the “Why Us?” (why that particular school) and the “Why major?” (why you want to major in your chosen major). Obviously, there’s not a huge amount of room for overlap with “Why us?”, given the inherent level of school-specificity that kind of prompt necessitates. However, it is possible to reuse parts of both of these kinds of supplemental essays.

“Why us?”

The most common supplemental prompt is “Why us?” Schools want to know that you researched them, are familiar with their programs, and can see yourself there. It’s a matter of fit.

How much research to do, and how to demonstrate it? One way is talking about a specific professor. “That's actually a good thing to do,” Kate says, “because it shows that the student has familiarized themselves with the specific program, and the faculty they would be working with… Be as specific as possible, because it shows that [you] have done [your] research.”

However, you can reuse certain parts of a “why us?” essay. Maybe you’re first-generation, or come from a family of immigrants, and that’s a big reason why you want to go and study at college. Maybe you’re passionate about a certain unusual sport, and you’re only applying to schools that have strong teams. Whatever your underlying reason for going to college is, that isn’t going to change from school to school.

Just make sure to craft each essay to the specific school too – mention specific programs in the school to which you’d look forward if you’re admitted. And, as Heather says in the webinar, “Please proofread.” Don’t have your Stanford essay end, “Those are the reasons I want to go to UC Berkeley!”

“Why major?”

In the end, “Why major?” is really just about telling a story. As we point out in the webinar, “It's really a story about how you came to love the thing that you want to study.”

However, beware of niche terms. As we point out, “it’s important to ‘connect the dots’ for the reader – so that they understand your journey.” Don’t say something like, “I went to Camp Cogsteen, and that introduced me to TECA, so at Chap National I knew for sure I wanted to study Inter-Fry Biology” (all names fictional). Your admissions reader doesn’t know any of those clubs or organizations – and may not even have heard of your specific field of interest, if it’s particularly niche!

That said, it’s good to note that you can write some “Why major?” essays without over-mentioning the school’s specific programs. Clearly, it makes a stronger essay if there is some reference to them – but it’s not a requisite. So you can reuse large parts of this one!

And then you have schools like the University of Chicago…

Supplementals aren’t always straightforward, though! The University of Chicago is particularly famous in admissions circles for the wacky, off-the-beat questions that it asks its applicants. Examples from this year’s prompts include: “What advice would a wisdom tooth have?” and “If you had to represent all of humanity to the Martians, in one image or song, what would it be and why?”

The point of this is that supplemental questions can be weird. They can be out-of-the-box. They can be complicated. 

But why would a school ask such strange questions? “The real thought is they want to get at how you think and reason!” The school wants to see how you fare when put against something that’s quite unusual or different from what else you’ve seen in the admissions process. In fact, in the University of Chicago’s case, many of their essay prompts are sourced from none other than their own students, as if giving prospective students a taste of its campus culture and seeing how these applicants respond to that prototype experience.

While you’re unlikely to be asked “Where’s Waldo?” from a school outside of Illinois – it’s important to prepare yourself for whatever the schools might throw at you. Stanford, for example, asks you to write a letter to your roommate. (Suffice to say, “hey dude, how’s it rolling?” will not be a very impressive answer to the admissions board.)

Whether it’s a standard “Why us?” essay about why you’re applying to MIT, Pomona, Northwestern, etc. over any other school, or whether it’s a thought experiment where you’re on a space crew with Martians, the supplemental essays are your chance to speak directly to a school to which you’re applying – to show them how you think, what’s important to you, and – most importantly – why you would be a good fit with the students who are already there, as well as the others that they’ll admit in your year.

Supplementals matter. Put the time and effort into writing them with care, and use them as a weapon to show admissions boards more about who you are as a person, beyond the other aspects of your application!