Finding the Unique in Short Supplements
by Sarah M.
No matter what particular prompts you are responding to for your applications, there is pressure to figure out how to make yourself stand out. How do you pick topics, or even supporting details, that are unusual enough to catch your readers’ eyes?
When you have the space to tell a full story, as in your Common App personal statement, you can spend some time building a unique narrative. But many colleges will also include supplemental essay prompts with specific questions that you have to answer in 200, 100, or even 50 words – questions like “What is your favorite snack,” or “What have you been reading lately?” With such simple questions and so little space, how do you stand out?
There’s no one answer to this question, but there are few strategies that can help:
- Try to choose topics and details that have a backstory in your life. You may not have the space to get into that story in any kind of detail, but it will always be more effective to write about the snack you’ve enjoyed since you were a tiny child (for example), or the snack particular to your culture that you can only have once a year when you visit family, or the snack you labored to learn how to make when it was discontinued by its manufacturer. You don’t have to explain everything in order to make it clear that what you’re writing about is unique to you.
- Especially for very short supplemental essays, remember that you do not need to spend any time telling readers what you think they want to hear. Don’t worry about creating a balanced list of favorite movies, one that presents you a mature and culturally-aware consumer. If you’re wild about fantasy or sci-fi, lean into that. If you don’t really like movies but you could watch endless hours of a certain sitcom, write about that. Honesty is always a good place to start, especially when you feel stumped.
One final word of advice: often, students will tell me that they have nothing to write about for these questions because they’re just “normal” or “boring.” The thing is, normal and boring don’t mean that you aren’t also unique.
Once I had a student who couldn’t think of anything to write for a “What have you been reading”-type question, so we made a list of what she had actually been reading, and it turned out that she had been spending the most time on her AP Chemistry textbook. That’s a book that thousands of other students are reading as well at any point, and yet her essay was still unusual and evocative because she was able to talk a little about her struggles with the class, and the way she was addressing them through self-study.
Don’t worry if you think your life is boring! There’s still so much about you that is unique, and worth writing about.