Supplemental Essays

Some colleges only require the main personal statement. But many require supplemental essays. The most common supplemental prompts are the “Why us?” essay, the “Why X major?” essay, the “Community” essay, and the “Extracurricular activity” essay.

These prompts offer ways for colleges to get to know more about who a student is, and, through the “Why us?” essay, get a sense of whether a student has really done their homework researching how they might fit with a particular school.

Because what each student has to write may vary greatly from what someone else does, we’ll keep this brief and point to the guides above. But we do want to emphasize that students should spend a good amount of time on their supplemental essays—schools generally care just  as much about these as they do about the personal statement (and in some cases, more). And because so many schools have overlapping prompts, we highly recommend taking what we call the “super essay” approach: It can save students hours of writing time.