I know you may be thinking, I wrote my main college essay, I should be done, right? Wrong. The quintessential “college essay” is only one part of your application, and after college applications are done, there are still scholarships to consider or different applications for specific programs or opportunities. Luckily, supplemental essays aren’t as scary as they seem, and once you have written one or two, you have basically written them all.
So, here are some tips to consider to make those supplemental essays and scholarship applications seem much less intimidating!
Tip #1: Save all of your essays and short answers!
Make sure to copy all of the writing you do on any sort of application, whether it is a large essay or just a paragraph. Though most supplemental essay prompts seem very different, there ends up being a lot of material that you will want to have to reference or reuse in different essays.
I have been saving my application and form responses for a few years, and I have definitely referenced answers I came up with or topics I thought of from multiple years ago. Even if the answers you wrote down seem simple or obvious at the time, it is still beneficial to save because you never know when you might need or want to look back on the things you have already written.
Tip #2: Don’t reinvent the wheel
Now, this may seem like confusing advice, but it boils down to not rewriting from scratch when you have already written something that can be edited then reused. This ties in to the first tip, because if you haven’t saved all of the writing you did somewhere, you can’t reuse it to make writing easier for yourself.
Something that I personally struggle with while writing is coming up with my idea or topic, whether it is a 100-word short answer or a one-page personal essay. Reusing topics or chunks of essays that I have previously written greatly helps me overcome this struggle in any later piece of writing I am working on.
It might seem scary to reuse your essays, but there are two reasons why that fear should be dismissed. First of all, you aren’t copying anything someone else wrote, these are YOUR essays that YOU wrote, so submitting them to multiple places does not mean you are plagiarizing because this is still your essay! Secondly, the application readers at one school will have no interaction at all with the application readers at another school, who will both have no relationship with the person reading your scholarship application. So if the fear is that someone will know everything that you submitted to every college and notice that two essays are quite similar, no one sees ALL of your essays except for you.
Tip #3: “Why this college” essays
Generally, you need to make sure that an essay about why you want to go to a certain school needs to be specific and reference specific programs that are unique to that school. However, don’t just talk about the school because whoever is reading that essay already knows all of that stuff, this essay still needs to be very specific to YOU. A nice rule of thumb is to make half of the essay about the college and half about you, that provides a good balance of letting the college know that you did learn about their specific programs and you are dedicated in researching about them, but it also allows you to express yourself in your application and lets the school learn more about why you are a good fit for them, not just why that school is a good fit for you.
Another thing to keep in mind is to not be afraid to reuse the “you” parts in multiple “why” essays. You are the same person, no matter what school is reading the application, so don’t make this more complicated than it needs to be by rewriting the whole essay every time. If similar classes or programs are present as well, you can just replace the names for different schools, but make sure to check that all of the details are correct for each school’s essay.
Tip #4: Focus on the “flow”
Yes, “flow” is an arbitrary concept that doesn’t mean much, but sometimes an essay just doesn’t feel right because the sentences or paragraphs are in the wrong order. Don’t be afraid to reorder your thoughts because sometimes you don’t need to rewrite a section that doesn’t make sense, you just have to rearrange it.
Something that helps me when I am looking at the flow of my essay is to read it out loud and have other people read and look over it. Reading your writing out loud can help you find the places you might stumble over or the moments when your ideas get jumbled up.
I hope these tips are helpful and just remember that you just have to display your best self through your writing and all of these essays are just to help the admissions and scholarship teams get to know you better, so don’t stress too much!
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