I just finished my college applications, and from now on I’m only going to remember less and less over time about the process. I barely knew anything about it until I actually started, and there are lots of things I could have done more efficiently if I had known what to expect. I’m going to dump all my advice and warnings in this post to help solve those problems for students after me.

After I finished, I also did some analysis on my essays to find what kinds of questions my colleges were asking, and which essays I was able to reuse the most. I’m going to talk about my experience and how it relates the information I found to give tips on how to approach essay prompts and make your writing is as good as possible.

General Advice

First off, here is the big picture of everything you need to do for college:

  • Take the SAT, ACT, and subject tests
  • Decide where you want to apply
  • Send test scores to each of your colleges
  • Fill out the FAFSA (Federal Student Aid) and CSS Profile (extra financial information for CollegeBoard)
  • Send FAFSA and CSS to each of your colleges
  • Add information to the application forms for each college
  • Write essays
  • Submit your applications
  • Do anything else you need to do for specific colleges

This is basically just a large writing assignment and a lot of paperwork. You want to stay as organized as possible, especially if you’re applying to a lot of schools. It is a good idea to make a specific folder or document with all of your test scores, essays, and identification information separate from any websites that would serve you that information. Most of them aren’t completely reliable and it is easier to use multiple applications if you don’t have to copy information from one to another.

I also want to point out that even though the ACT and the SAT are similar tests, it is cheaper and more convenient to send SAT scores than ACT scores, by far. The ACT’s website is slow, poorly organized, and a gigantic hassle. Sending your ACT scores is also priced differently, making it much more expensive if you want to send multiple scores. Sending your ACT scores costs $13 per score sent, while sending your SAT scores costs $12 per institution. So, if you wanted to take advantage of super-scoring by sending extra tests, your ACT price will double/triple/quadruple while your SAT price stays the same. You can also include SAT subject tests in that per-institution price. Lastly, if you want to spend as little as possible, make sure you take advantage of the free score sends offered by the ACT and SAT when you sit for the test. You can usually write in a few colleges to send your scores to for free, but only before and for two-ish weeks after you take the test. I would put the free sends towards safety schools in case it accidentally goes badly, but even that is risky. Safety schools are usually the ones that offer the biggest scholarships, so it’s important to take them seriously too.

My last big general tip is to make sure you have a cohesive idea of your identity as a student. Colleges want to know that you didn’t just pull your interests out of a hat, and they will be much more receptive to you if your application and your essays convey that you want to be a part of the programs you’re applying to. You don’t have to repeat yourself, but ideally you want there to be clear and identifiable themes throughout your extracurriculars, community service, and your essays.

Essay Writing

Essays are by far the most time consuming part of applying to college. Shared applications like the Common and Coalition Applications usually require you to include one 500-600 word essay that goes to every college, and you can choose any topic. Then, each college can include extra essays in their “writing supplements.” Most supplements ask some unique questions that the college get to know you as a student, but there are a few prompts that tons of colleges will ask. These are the ones you want to write your best on, because you can reuse your answers in most of your applications.

Once I finished writing all of my answers, I was interested in figuring out which prompts really were the most important, so I set out to identify the essays that I reused the most to get a better idea of which of my characteristics as a student were actually the most important. I’ll go through each of the different groups of essays and talk about how I addressed them.

Extracurriculars

This is definitely the most closely related group of prompts. Most of them ask the exact same question: “Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences.” I chose to talk about my main community service activity, so I was also able to reuse the response in essays about impacting my community for Berkeley and MIT.

The project itself was an event to raise awareness for technology education in my community, so I started by talking about my experience taking high school computer science classes and explained how they weren’t preparing students very well. Then, I explained how the event worked, and I ended the essay by talking about the results of the event. Basically, this essay was a straightforward chronological explanation of the whole activity.

If I could pick any of my essays to do again, this would have to be it. Even though the chronological organization works well for structure, the essay was really bland, like I was a reporter documenting the event. It would have been much better if I spent more time on what the project actually meant to me, instead of listing off facts about it.

So, after this essay, I would recommend other students to try to focus on their personal attachment to their extracurriculars and to save the facts about it for their résumé. This is an example of a good opportunity to develop that cohesive identity as a student.

“Why do you want to study that?”

This is the other big essay group, and it has a much more interesting story than the extracurriculars group. These prompts aren’t as strongly related, but for all of them I chose to incorporate writing about some of my favorite subjects to study and to explain why I liked them so much. For example, one of the key ideas in my answers was that I want to study computer science because I’ve always enjoyed being able to experiment and work virtually with anything I want on the internet. Prompts like these give you the chance to talk about what you’re interested in and why you would be a good candidate that at the school you’re applying to. Again, this is another big place for you to amplify your identity as a student.

If you’re having trouble thinking of ways to approach this prompt, I recommend thinking hard about what it would be like to get in to the college you’re applying to and study exactly what you’re interested in. Do some research, see what programs are available to you, and keep going until you find something you’re genuinely excited about. Then, explain why that thing is exciting. Some of my personal examples here would be the nerd culture at MIT, the whole idea of the Brown curriculum, and undergraduate research opportunities at CMU.

My last tip for writing a compelling essay here is to ask your English teacher for help. I can’t speak for every English teacher, but all of mine are fantastic at pointing out ways to improve the technical aspects of writing to make it more impactful.

Essays in Small Groups

These are all of the essays that I reused once or twice. I’ll talk a bit about each in bullets (organized from top to bottom, left to right).

  • Academic subjects that inspire you: I could have merged this essay with the “Why do you want to study that?” group, but wrote on a different topic for these two. The same advice goes here.
  • Culture/Communities/Something that is meaningful to you: These essays are about my online community and the culture (read: fandoms) I picked up from them. I’ve only talked to some of my best friends over the internet and I decided to write a lot about it because I think it’s interesting and unique to me.
  • How have you spent the last two summers: I answered of these pretty literally. They were both supposed to be very short (< 50 words) so there’s not much to say.
  • Favorite book: I’m a huge fan of Douglas Hofstatder, and out of all of his books I like Gödel Escher Bach the most. I a specific book doesn’t just stand out to you, you can always go with a book from class, but don’t say you read it for school. Talk about why you like the book and relate it to your other interests if possible.
  • Where have you lived/Additional Academic Activities: I actually wrote about a funky take on the “where have you lived” essay and wrote about my online life, playing video games and working on projects with other people. I also counted this as an “intellectual activity outside of school.” These prompts are only related for me, but if you can come up with creative answers it definitely helps you stand out.
  • Describe the world from: This essay is about my physical community, which is a super-rural town (I get a spotty 1.5 MBps at best) in the center of Florida. If I didn’t write something more interesting for my Brown prompt about where I’ve lived, I probably would have used this essay for that one too. I think the Brown version is better overall because it’s more interesting and says more about me. Always watch out for ways to be interesting!

Non-groupable Essays

These are all the unique essays that I could only use for one college. I won’t talk about every single one, but there are some patterns for these I can still point out:

  • Red Essays: These are all pretty standard “why” essays, but instead of asking “Why do you want to study that?” they ask “Why do you want to attend our college?” The approach is the same: do research until you can find something you’re actually excited about and talk about it.
  • Blue Essays: Each of these prompts ask for specific situations that indicate some personal quality the school wants to see. These are more difficult to reuse because they’re specific. Like my extracurricular essay, I generally took a straightforward approach to answering them, and I also felt like my answers were stale because of it.
  • Green Essays: I think of these as “rapid fire essays.” Both Princeton and Stanford had special sections in their writing supplement with a ton of short random questions. These are good places to be unique (try not to pick any answers that your friends could guess easily).

The leftover uncolored essays are just those essays which were completely unique for me. I remember most of them well because they were difficult to write, and it’s interesting that the fact they were difficult is reflected so clearly in this analysis. I’ll talk about each of these (top to bottom):

  • Something you do for the pleasure of it: this one wasn’t actually so hard. I wrote about cooking, which is exactly what the prompt asked for.
  • Greatest talent: This was difficult because I overthought the answer and tried to say too much in the words I had available. Eventually, I rewrote this essay from scratch using a suggestion from a friend, which was definitely a good way to get a simple answer to focus on.
  • Conversation between any two people: I had to think hard to come up with an answer I actually liked, but it definitely payed off. I chose Daniel Shiffman and Vi Hart, who are both some of the most creative and entertaining teachers I know, and I really would like to hear a conversation between them. The big lesson here is just that work put into planning a difficult essay will pay off.
  • Letter to roommate: This essay was just hard to start, because it’s always hard to make an introduction for yourself. I cheated a bit to write it, or at least had an unfair advantage: last summer I spent seven weeks in a research program (shoutout to any SSTP kids reading this), so I just asked my roommates what they would have liked to hear from me before we met. If you have to answer essays like this, family members and friends could probably do the same thing to help you out.

Conclusion

The writing supplements are arguably the most influential part of your college applications. They allow you to express your personality in your applications and can help differentiate you as a candidate. I hope this post does a good job presenting the types prompts a student would see on their applications and gives some helpful tips on ways to approach them.

If you’re interested in reading more about the way these graphs were generated, see the previous post.