14d • General discussion
Rising Seniors, Your Supplement List Is Longer Than You Think
Most rising seniors right now are focused on their Common App personal statement. That makes sense. But here is what catches people off guard every single August: the sheer volume of supplemental essays.
If you are applying to 12 to 15 schools, you are likely looking at 25 to 40 supplemental essays. Some schools want three or four. Georgetown wants four. UChicago wants two plus their famously weird prompt. Stanford wants three short answers plus three short essays. And every single one needs to sound like you actually want to be there.
The students who handle this well are the ones who start categorizing now. Most supplements fall into a few buckets: why this school, community or diversity, intellectual curiosity, and an activity or experience deep dive. If you draft strong core responses for each bucket in June and July, you are not starting from zero when apps open.
Here is what I would do this week. Pull up the Common Data Set or the supplement prompts from last year for every school on your list. Make a spreadsheet. Log the prompts, the word counts, and which bucket each one falls into. You will immediately see overlap, and that overlap is your leverage.
Students in the Platinum program, we will map this out together in our next session. Everyone else, how many schools are on your current list and have you looked at last year's prompts yet?
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Rising Seniors, Your Supplement List Is Longer Than You Think
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