How to crack supplemental essays (SEs)
Understand the concept of “yield protection”. You want to receive a letter of acceptance from the college of your dreams, right? Did you know that colleges also want to be accepted by you? They want you to accept their letter of acceptance. There is something called “yield protection”. Yield is the ratio of returned acceptances to extended acceptances and no one has a 100% yield. Even Harvard’s yield is less than 90%. Each college’s yield directly impacts their ranking (read “endowments” and “donations”) so colleges want to make sure that they are sending out their acceptance letters ONLY to those students who have a high chance of actually enrolling there. So how do you make EACH college believe that they are your dream school? You will convey this message in your supplemental essays but you can’t just say “you are my dream school” and leave it at that. You have to prove it and the best way to prove it in your application is to show that you know a lot about the college you are applying to.
Research colleges where you will apply. Read their websites, newsletters, media posts, etc. Visit the campuses and jot down some of the things that your tour guides are sharing. Often, those info tidbits can’t be found anywhere else so it will be obvious that you visited the campus, and colleges will appreciate that you spent time visiting them. Virtual visits are great too.
Start writing SEs in the summer. Yes, we don’t know the exact topics until August but we do know that there are the same recurring themes from year to year so you can start organizing your thoughts and jotting down the ideas. The hardest part is figuring out what to write about so, by the time the Common App opens in August, we want to have a list of bullet points and tentative paragraphs for each of them.
Start thinking about what you can write on recurring topics such as “Life lessons I’ve learned”, “Contribution to my community/future contribution to my college community”, “why this college”, etc. Reach out for the rest of the recurring topics and an explanation of each topic here .