Types of College Application Essay

For most students applying to competitive colleges, the first essay is just the beginning. If you’re applying to a dozen or more schools, you may find you’re looking at 20 or more different essay prompts! But as I’ve written before, you absolutely should not write something new for each. To make the best use of your writing time, you need a plan, so to start your brainstorming wheels churning, here’s a preview of some of the most common application essays.

How Do I Classify Different Types of College Application Essay?

There are two key instructions for every essay on an application, and most students lock on to the first, and forget to notice the second. The first, of course, is the prompt. There is a fair amount of overlap on prompts, whether because the question is an obvious choice or because schools are reading their competitors’ applications every year for good ideas. (I assume they do this—why wouldn’t they?!) But the other super-important aspect of an essay is the word count. An essay of 850 words (don’t worry, those are VERY rare!) is a completely different question than one of 150 words, and sometimes you’ll be asked a question that you could write 800 words on but you’re only asked for 100. So I’ll be paying attention to both of those classifiers in this post.

Your Best 650: The Personal Statement

The main essay required for most applications goes by “the Common App essay,” “the Coalition App essay,” or “the main essay,” but sometimes people will use the phrase “personal statement” (usually grown-up people who went to graduate school, where they actually use that term). I like to call it “your best 650” because the word count is … 650 words, for both application systems. I strongly recommend you use every word.

Whatever you write, you should actually struggle to shorten it to fit in this space. I promise you, you have a story that will fill it. This should be a personal essay—using personal pronouns (that’s “I” and “we”) and language that sounds at least somewhat like what you would truly sound like if I met you. Yes, you want to make your best impression—but you want to look like you hired a professional makeup artist … not like you’re wearing a mask.

(Looks amazing—but we’d never recognize this person without the mask. Doesn’t matter how amazing you look, if it doesn’t look like you. Photo by Fernand De Canne on Unsplash)

This essay, both because of its length and because it goes to every school where you apply, is your main opportunity to express everything you want schools to know about you, and the good news is, they aren’t leaving you without guidance. Whether you’re submitting via the Common App or the Coalition App, I personally recommend relying on the prompts written for the Common App, which in my opinion have more depth and brainstorming power. (For a much more detailed exploration of how to use the prompts to help you brainstorm, head to my Subscriber Hub for my FREE guided tour of the Common App prompts!)

Enough About You … Why Us?

The most common supplemental essay topic is naturally, Why Do You Want to Come to Our School? I’m often surprised how many students underestimate the importance of this piece and give a perfunctory answer. If a school has 2000 spots, and 5000 qualified students (and I honestly think that’s an underestimate), then they’re going to be carefully reading why a student wants to be at their school. They want to know that you know about it, and that you’re excited—not just to tell the world, “I got into Harvard!!” but to actually attend school there!

Here’s where the word-count limit starts really mattering—different schools give wildly different amounts of space to this question, from 650 to only 100. When the word limit is extensive, you can and should include everything, from the campus atmosphere to school clubs. When the limit is tiny, you must be smart and evaluate—what is truly special about this school? Yale knows you could write more than 150 words about why you want to go there, but most of it is vague variations of ‘very good school.’ So in 150 words, what do you know about it—and why it is the perfect fit for your needs—that makes you a logical choice for one of its limited spots?

Don’t waste time name-dropping specific classes unless you know something about the professor and why you want to work with or learn from them. When I was applying to Northwestern University, there was a nationally famous course called Investigative Journalism in which the professor and his students found information to overturn wrongful convictions for death-row inmates, and their work led to a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. If that were your specific interest, it would be fair to mention because there were not comparable courses or programs at other schools.

If you have a niche area of interest and you’ve been combing course catalogs looking for it and can confidently say it’s hard to find—by all means, mention it. But that’s just not usually the case. If a school features a program you’re applying to, it has the classes you need. Cherry-picking from a course catalog can always find you interesting possibilities, some of which might have been one-time offerings anyway, and given that you’re going to be taking anywhere from 32 to 48+ classes before you graduate, being able to name three you’re excited for just isn’t that persuasive.

Notice EXACTLY how the prompt is phrased—some schools want to know how you’ll engage in the community, and some want you to focus on academics. University of Wisconsin-Madison is apparently happy to hear about how much you’ll love cheering on the Badgers, while the University of Michigan phrases its question in a way that leaves me little doubt they don’t want to read one more essay about Games at the Big House. So give the school what it wants.

(Although it’s not at all a given that you’re looking forward to watching football, you don’t really need to emphasize it in your essay if you’re applying to a big sports school. They assume that part. Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash)

Where Are You From: The Community Essay

For most schools, a long supplement is between 250 and 350 words. These are pieces that are great for reusing because there are common themes that schools like to return to.

The first theme that comes up for a lot of schools is the increasingly common “community” essay. What is your community like? What is a community you are part of? Where are you from, and how has it made you who you are? First verify how many of these essays you need to write and compare the phrasing. Some ask you quite specifically about your actual hometown, while others are open to many different types of communities, from your school to your house of worship to your improv club.

If you have an essay that requires you to write about your actual hometown, focus on that so you can reuse it—rather than writing one piece about your hometown and another about a club or other community, unless you feel that’s really worth the effort.

If, however, you only have the more vague ‘communities of which you are part’ prompt, try to consider your different possibilities with an open mind. Choose the one that is honestly most important to you, not the one you think the college wants to hear about.

What Do You Do: The “Academic Interest” or Career Essay

Another common topic for long supplements is the ‘areas of academic interest’ or career plan. Most freshmen go into college undecided, and of those who don’t, a significant number transfer. It’s OK if you don’t yet know what you want your career to be. That said—it’s important to sound genuinely excited about your possibilities. If you have no areas of particular interest, it’s time to start cultivating them. (This is one of the concerns that led me to writing the Proactive College Application Journal for underclassmen.)

Even if you’re currently finishing junior year, you have a summer to come up with some answers. Don’t let this feel like jumping through a hoop to be allowed to apply to college—see this as an investment of time now that’s going to save you paying for expensive university classes in a subject area you eventually realize you hate.

(Architecture seems fun, but have you done any investigation at all into how difficult the field is, and what talents and skills will be necessary to succeed? If you’re interested in a competitive field, you need to do your homework! Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash)

If you’re wavering among two or three possible majors, unless you have something important to say about all of them, just choose one and go with it. Claim it with confidence and excitement. No one is ever going to come back and say, “But you SAID you were majoring in Econ!” Not going to happen.

The Shorts

Short supplemental essays are between 150 and 200 words. It’s barely long enough to say anything worthwhile—but about 100 words longer than you’re actually going to be able to write without thinking about it. Generally, a student writes the one or two sentences that seem most important, realizes they haven’t filled the space but they don’t have enough room to get into anything else, and then adds some fluff to make it look longer. I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you that that is not an effective process. You have to be deliberate about what you want to say, and figure out how to say as much as possible with the words you have. That’s when coaching on clear and concise writing becomes a huge advantage.

These short prompts usually focus on something discrete like “Describe an extracurricular.” You’re already writing about them in your activities list, so take this space to give more context—why you joined, or what your group does on a regular basis, and especially what you feel you get from it.

The Short-Shorts

Make sure to read your word-count limits carefully—sometimes it really is 150 characters—not 150 words! The short-short answer questions are growing in popularity. I think colleges like to use them as “personality” questions because they don’t have obvious right answers. (What brings me joy?) A question like, “What is an interesting fact you’ve learned from research” tells the school, does this student really have independent interests? Because it’s not about your structure or paragraphs at this length, focus on brainstorming several possibilities and then decide the one that is both the most interesting and the most clear at short length. (You may brainstorm a possible answer that’s fascinating, but doesn’t convey well in two sentences.)

(Twitter has taught us many things, including that it’s hard to be clear and clever in a short space. Be careful what you assume is obvious about what you’re writin. Photo by Edgar Moran on Unsplash)

Make a Plan

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at this point, I don’t blame you! I’m not going to pretend this will be easy—but it is doable. You need a plan of attack! At this point, your focus should be on choosing the schools that really matter to you.

By October, students who started with lists of 20 schools are burning out on application essay-writing and choosing applications based on whether or not they want to (or feel they can) write one more essay. You want to make that decision based on how important the school is to you, not by how many essays it has.

Do your homework now. Make your long list (again, check out the free resources to Get Organized at my Subscriber Hub). Then make your short list by thoroughly researching your possibilities. When you have your list of schools you are genuinely excited about, the work of applying won’t feel so hard.

(Photo by Amelia Bartlett on Unsplash)