short answer questions college application

How to Tackle Short Answer Questions on College Applications

short answer questions college application

Overview of Short Answer Questions

In general, short answer questions fit into two categories: those asking for more than a 100 word response; and those asking for fewer than 100 words. These questions, which are seen less often, are attempts to get to know you by asking about your favorite things or about your personality.  Longer response questions typically ask about your place within the college’s academic and campus community in order to assess whether you are a good fit for the college and the college is a good fit for you. Regardless of their length and purpose, short answer questions deserve as much care and attention as other parts of the application. 

Recommendations and Advice

The key to successfully answering any short answer question is to understand that less is more. Responses most likely to make a good impression are those that avoid redundancy and clichés and instead provide clear and concise answers that are candid, creative, and even humorous. It might seem unnecessary, but it’s always a good idea to brainstorm responses to a short answer question. Brainstorming will help you narrow down which topics highlight the range of your personality and interests outside of information that you have already presented in other parts of your application. It is also important to keep in mind that unlike academic essays and the longer admissions essay, short answers don’t need fancy introductions with hooks or anecdotes. A short answer response should follow this basic structure: a topic sentence that answers the question, evidence to support your answer, and a sentence or two of introspection.

Here are some additional short answer do’s and don’ts:

  • Do your homework. Some of the more common short answer questions ask applicants to explain some version of “Why us?” So know your audience. Go beyond citing a school’s elite engineering program or its wide range of extracurricular offerings. Mention if you visited the campus, spoke with admissions counselors, or met with professors, current students, or alumni. Help admissions see your genuine interest in the school. Show them how you will fit into the school and how the school complements your unique goals and talents.
  • Do embrace variety and creativity. You have interests or experiences that are unique to you, so use them to stand out from the crowd. For example, if asked about how you use free time, instead of writing about community service work that you have already cited, share a quirky hobby like knitting. To describe yourself, avoid generic adjectives likely to appear on most applications or already appear on yours somewhere already (e.g. responsible, passionate, empathetic), and don’t repeat adjectives using synonyms (e.g. kind and considerate). 
  • Do try to be as authentic as possible. While there are some things you may not want to share with admissions officers, it’s in your best interest to be candid about your struggles or any unique circumstances that have shaped you. When an answer sounds like someone crafting the persona of a “cool” or “perfect” candidate, the result is often cliché and bland. Likewise, avoid using pretentious vocabulary. Be yourself as much as possible or risk not making an impression.
  • Do answer the question and be specific. Make sure your answers describe your personal growth or illustrate the “Why?” behind your choices and preferences. Use vivid details and examples to support your answers.
  • Don’t repeat yourself. Whenever possible, do not answer a short answer question with information that can be found somewhere else in your application, including any anecdotes.
  • Don’t forget the small stuff. Some schools may ask students to answer questions that require fewer than ten word responses (e.g. What 3-5 words best describe you? List five books you have read that intrigued you.). Most of the same advice applies to these questions, but there are some special considerations to keep in mind. The tiny word limit means your answers have to be even more bold and idiosyncratic. Don’t worry about sounding silly or perhaps even ruffling some feathers. The rest of your application should demonstrate your academic achievements and personal accomplishments, so see this as an opportunity to have some fun!

Looking Ahead

With so many aspects to the college application—especially written components like personal statements, supplements, and short answers—it can be so overwhelming that it becomes difficult to come up with and organize ideas or to know if what you have written hits the mark. This guide shares useful tips, but help from a tutor at A+ Test Prep and Tutoring can provide even more assistance. Take advantage of its editing and essay services , including two different packages designed to help students as they brainstorm, compose, and edit their college application written requirements. That way, you can make sure you have given your best answers to even the shortest of questions and have fully taken advantage of another opportunity to stand out from other applicants.

At A+ Test Prep and Tutoring, our practices are based on the latest developments in educational theory and research. We have an excellent team of tutors who can help you with standardized testing, executive functioning, or achievement in any other school subject. If you want to find out more about our services, our Client Service Directors Susan Ware and Joelle Faucette can be reached at 215-886-9188.

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College Reality Check

College Reality Check

How to Answer Short-Answer Questions in College Application

Al Abdukadirov

Short-answer questions specified in the Common App or Coalition App are answered with concise and specific responses that tackle the prompts without going beyond the word count limit. They are college-specific questions, which means that students applying to, say, Harvard University cannot provide the same answers to short-answer questions asked by, say, Carnegie Mellon University or Stanford University.

Read on if the colleges you are applying to require applicants to answer some short-answer questions.

In this post, we will talk about the reasons why some college admissions officers ask short-answer questions as well as how you are supposed to answer short-answer questions asked by some of the most popular institutions.

What are Short-Answer Questions?

Short-answer questions are prompts that require responses from college applicants using considerably fewer words than long-form essays, such as personal statements and supplemental essays. Some short answer essays have word limits ranging from 100 to 250, while others may specify exactly the number of words applicants may use, such as only 1 or 3.

Although requiring much fewer words than supplementals, short-answer questions are not any less difficult to answer since you will have to express yourself succinctly given that you have to stay within the word count limit.

What is the Primary Purpose of Short-Answer Questions?

The primary purpose of short-answer questions is for college admissions officers to gain additional insight into an applicant’s personality, experiences, interests and academic and career goals, which may not necessarily be covered by his or her application materials. It also allows them to see an applicant’s communication and writing skills.

In some instances, short-answer questions may serve as a tie-breaker when college admissions officers cannot decide which applicants with the same academic profiles they should admit.

Do All Colleges Require Short-Answer Questions?

Not all colleges and universities require short-answer questions. Some institutions that require them may no longer require long-form supplemental essays, while others may still do. Some schools may make it mandatory for applicants to answer short-answer questions, while others may present them as optional additions to their supplementals.

Here’s a resource by the College Board that provides you with guidance on what sort of writing questions you can expect within individual college questions — just click on the schools you are planning on applying to.

How to Answer Short-Answer Questions

When answering short-answer questions, understand each of the questions very well and determine what college admissions officers are looking for exactly. So, in other words, it’s important that you correctly address each and every prompt. It’s also a must that you answer short-answer questions without going beyond the word count limit.

Let’s talk about how to answer short-answer questions asked by some of the most popular colleges in the country:

Brown University

Brown’s short-answer questions can be very short — answers can range anywhere from a few words to a few sentences. For instance, the question “What 3 words best describe you?” should be answered in 3 words only, while the rest should be answered in no more than 100 words. There’s also a Brown short-answer question that should be answered in just 1 sentence.

The California Institute of Technology applicants are required to answer 3 short-answer questions. Topics range from STEM experiences, creativity and Caltech values that speak to them, and the word limit ranges from 100 to 400. There are 3 optional short-answer questions that let applicants show more of their personality plus 1 optional academic short-answer question.

Carnegie Mellon

Most colleges that accept the Common App and Coalition App require applicants to write a personal statement and some supplemental essays. Instead of writing a college-specific essay, Carnegie applicants are required to answer a series of short-answer questions to give everyone a chance to talk about their talents and interests.

Columbia University

As of this writing, there are 9 Columbia short-answer questions. Word limit can range from 100 to 150. Columbia asks short-answer questions to know about an applicant’s academic, extracurricular and intellectual interests. Of course, the Ivy League school also wants to learn about why an applicant feels that Columbia would be the perfect fit for his or her undergraduate education.

Cornell University

Other than the school-specific short-answer questions specified in the Common App and Coalition App, some applicants to Cornell may be given the opportunity to answer optional short-answer questions, depending on the college or department. The general consensus is that every opportunity for Cornell’s admissions officers to know the applicant more should be grabbed.

Duke University

Duke requires applicants to answer only 1 supplemental essay, which is just 250 words long. But there are 4 optional short-answer questions, whose maximum word count each is similar to that of the mandatory supplemental. Given that Duke has a low acceptance rate of 6%, it’s a good idea for applicants to shine by answering the optional short-answer questions.

Harvard University

Harvard itself says that your application to the Ivy League school isn’t complete without answering a series of short-answer questions. When answering Harvard short-answer questions, stick to the 200-word limit. Harvard advises applicants to reflect on how their experiences and extracurriculars have shaped them and how they will engage with others on campus.

Instead of asking applicants to answer some long-form essays in addition to the personal statement, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology requires them to answer several different short-answer questions. MIT advises applicants to talk about the things that inspire them and demonstrate that they are thoughtful individuals much like the institution’s attendees.

Princeton University

In addition to the 2 supplementals, Princeton applicants must also answer 3 short-answer questions, each with a 50-word limit. There are no wrong and right answers when it comes to short-answer questions. Applicants are also encouraged to be themselves given that short-answer questions are there to provide more insight into those who like to attend the Ivy League.

Rice University

After writing their personal statements, Rice applicants must also write additional school-specific essays — 1 long essay and 2 short-answer questions. The short-answer questions have a 150-word limit, and applicants should grab this opportunity to demonstrate their interest in attending for they are asked about the program of their choosing and the Rice experience they want.

Stanford University

Stanford applicants must answer a total of 5 short-answer questions, each with a 50-word limit. A couple of those ask applicants to specify a date and list 5 things. Rather than just mentioning an event and enumerating things, applicants are encouraged to elaborate to allow Stanford’s admissions officers to see aspects of themselves that their applications may have stifled.

Texas A&M University

It was only in 2020 when Texas A&M started requiring applicants to answer short-answer questions. Some programs, such as engineering, require applicants to answer additional short-answer questions. According to Texas A&M itself, applicants must also apply the same amount of thought and care when answering short-answer questions as supplemental essays.

UC Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley refers to short-answer questions as personal insight questions, and applicants’ answers to them are reviewed by both admissions and scholarships officers. According to UC Berkeley itself, it uses short-answer questions in the admissions process in many ways, including deciding between 2 applicants with very similar academic records.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a unique approach to short-answer questions: instead of the applicants giving complete free-response answers, they are asked to fill in the blanks using 25 words or less. Some examples of these fill-in-the-blank types of short-answer questions include “The quality I most admire in myself” and “One protagonist I identify with”.

Yale University

The number of short-answer questions Yale applicants must answer can vary, depending on the application platform used. For instance, those who are using QuestBridge will have to answer 3, while those who are using the Common App or Coalition App will have to answer 7. All Yale short-answer questions are personal, and applicants are encouraged to reflect deeply.

Al Abdukadirov

Independent Education Consultant, Editor-in-chief. I have a graduate degree in Electrical Engineering and training in College Counseling. Member of American School Counselor Association (ASCA).

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short answer questions college application

Princeton’s “More About You” Questions: Examples + Tips

Princeton asks applicants to respond to three short-answer questions in a section titled “More About You.” These questions have a 50-word limit, which can be extremely daunting.

This post will go over the purpose of these questions, tips for writing strong responses, as well as real example responses and analysis.

Princeton “More About You” Questions

The three “More About You” questions in the 2022-2023 admissions cycle were:

  • What is a new skill you would like to learn in college?
  • What brings you joy? 
  • What song represents the soundtrack of your life at this moment?

These are questions that might come up in casual conversation, and the goal is to learn “more about you” in a down-to-earth way. This is an opportunity to humanize your application and show more of your “fun” side.

Tips for Princeton’s “More About You” Questions

These short-answer questions are really unlike other parts of your application. Here are our expert tips for writing an engaging response that will win over admissions officers.

1. Be more casual

These are casual questions, so you want your response to feel down-to-earth as well. There’s no need for academic writing here, or even complete sentences. You can even use slang!

Just make sure that your response is still well-written; it should feel like a response in a conversation to an acquaintance or stranger, not like something you’d text a friend.

2. Maximize the word count.

Do not repeat the question in your response. You only have 50 words, so make the most of them! Dive right into your answer.

3. Pay attention to presentation.

Grammatical and formatting mistakes will stand out even more in a short-answer question. Other than maybe using some stylistic fragments, make sure your grammar is correct. You should especially double-check spacing and punctuation/

4. Get an extra set of eyes on your responses.

While most students think to get their college essays edited, these short-answers may not feel like they need an extra set of eyes. Since these are still an important part of your application to Princeton, we recommend having someone else look over your responses. A friend is a great choice since these are more casual questions, and your friend can let you know if your personality shines through.

We also recommend using our free Peer Essay Review platform , where you can get feedback from another student. And, you can review other students’ essays to improve your own writing. If you prefer to have an admissions expert review your essay, you can do so as well on CollegeVine.

Princeton “More About You” Examples

Here are a couple strong responses to the “More About You” questions, as well as analysis on what the writers did well and what could be improved.

Example 1: Joy

Prompt: What brings you joy? (50 words)

The ancient, burlesque sounds of the violin. I love the feeling of completion, when I can finally play a piece I’ve been working at for months. The glide of a slur, the bounce of the spiccato, plentiful accents and tones; The diversity of music lights a fire in my heart. 

What the Response Did Well

This answer feels authentic. The student’s use of unique descriptors like “burlesque” and “bounce” communicate to the reader that they have a unique relationship with the violin — one that brings them joy in a specific and special way.

At the same time, the idea of “the feeling of completion” bringing joy is extremely relatable. This student pulls off unique and relatable in the same short answer.

What Could Be Improved 

Small mistakes make big impressions in short answers. For example, the word following a semicolon should not be capitalized. While this kind of grammar error could go unnoticed in a larger essay, it stands out when it is one of fifty words.

Example 2: Soundtrack

Prompt: What song represents the soundtrack of your life at the moment? (50 words)

As I sit lost in thought, an urge to stand and pace overwhelms me. The floorboards creaking echoes through the quiet–a familiar symphony accompanying my musings. New ideas take form, energizing, exciting me. In a way, floorboards are my muses fostering my creativity and inspiration, my growth and learning.

This student’s answer is more memorable than traditional answers due to their unique interpretation of the word “soundtrack.” I’m sure this is the only creaking floorboards essay that was submitted to Princeton last year! Originality and setting yourself apart from others is of the utmost importance during the college admissions process.

Admissions officers spend very little time reading short responses and don’t want to parse through your words to find your answer. Because of its roundabout structure, this response requires a second read for an aha moment (“Ohhh the creaking floorboards are the soundtrack!”).

Additionally, your response to a short answer question doesn’t have to be eloquent or figurative. It can be more like an answer to an interview question — to the point, memorable, and honest. This student might have been better off with a casual structure, writing something like:

The sound I hear most often is the creaking of my floorboards, so I’ll call that the soundtrack of my life. I pace when memorizing things, when trying to inspire creativity, when working through complex ideas. My floorboards are probably tired, but pacing is my method.

Finally, like with Example 6, the use of a double hyphen instead of an em dash (—) stands out in a short answer question. Ensure that your grammar is impeccable in your short answers.

More Princeton Essay Resources

How to Write the Princeton Essays

Princeton Essay Examples

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

short answer questions college application

PrepScholar

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, my successful harvard application (complete common app + supplement).

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Other High School , College Admissions , Letters of Recommendation , Extracurriculars , College Essays

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In 2005, I applied to college and got into every school I applied to, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. I decided to attend Harvard.

In this guide, I'll show you the entire college application that got me into Harvard—page by page, word for word .

In my complete analysis, I'll take you through my Common Application, Harvard supplemental application, personal statements and essays, extracurricular activities, teachers' letters of recommendation, counselor recommendation, complete high school transcript, and more. I'll also give you in-depth commentary on every part of my application.

To my knowledge, a college application analysis like this has never been done before . This is the application guide I wished I had when I was in high school.

If you're applying to top schools like the Ivy Leagues, you'll see firsthand what a successful application to Harvard and Princeton looks like. You'll learn the strategies I used to build a compelling application. You'll see what items were critical in getting me admitted, and what didn't end up helping much at all.

Reading this guide from beginning to end will be well worth your time—you might completely change your college application strategy as a result.

First Things First

Here's the letter offering me admission into Harvard College under Early Action.

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I was so thrilled when I got this letter. It validated many years of hard work, and I was excited to take my next step into college (...and work even harder).

I received similar successful letters from every college I applied to: Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. (After getting into Harvard early, I decided not to apply to Yale, Columbia, UChicago, UPenn, and other Ivy League-level schools, since I already knew I would rather go to Harvard.)

The application that got me admitted everywhere is the subject of this guide. You're going to see everything that the admissions officers saw.

If you're hoping to see an acceptance letter like this in your academic future, I highly recommend you read this entire article. I'll start first with an introduction to this guide and important disclaimers. Then I'll share the #1 question you need to be thinking about as you construct your application. Finally, we'll spend a lot of time going through every page of my college application, both the Common App and the Harvard Supplemental App.

Important Note: the foundational principles of my application are explored in detail in my How to Get Into Harvard guide . In this popular guide, I explain:

  • what top schools like the Ivy League are looking for
  • how to be truly distinctive among thousands of applicants
  • why being well-rounded is the kiss of death

If you have the time and are committed to maximizing your college application success, I recommend you read through my Harvard guide first, then come back to this one.

You might also be interested in my other two major guides:

  • How to Get a Perfect SAT Score / Perfect ACT Score
  • How to Get a 4.0 GPA

What's in This Harvard Application Guide?

From my student records, I was able to retrieve the COMPLETE original application I submitted to Harvard. Page by page, word for word, you'll see everything exactly as I presented it : extracurricular activities, awards and honors, personal statements and essays, and more.

In addition to all this detail, there are two special parts of this college application breakdown that I haven't seen anywhere else :

  • You'll see my FULL recommendation letters and evaluation forms. This includes recommendations from two teachers, one principal, and supplementary writers. Normally you don't get to see these letters because you waive access to them when applying. You'll see how effective strong teacher advocates will be to your college application, and why it's so important to build strong relationships with your letter writers .
  • You'll see the exact pen marks made by my Harvard admissions reader on my application . Members of admissions committees consider thousands of applications every year, which means they highlight the pieces of each application they find noteworthy. You'll see what the admissions officer considered important—and what she didn't.

For every piece of my application, I'll provide commentary on what made it so effective and my strategies behind creating it. You'll learn what it takes to build a compelling overall application.

Importantly, even though my application was strong, it wasn't perfect. I'll point out mistakes I made that I could have corrected to build an even stronger application.

Here's a complete table of contents for what we'll be covering. Each link goes directly to that section, although I'd recommend you read this from beginning to end on your first go.

Common Application

Personal Data

Educational data, test information.

  • Activities: Extracurricular, Personal, Volunteer
  • Short Answer
  • Additional Information

Academic Honors

Personal statement, teacher and counselor recommendations.

  • Teacher Letter #1: AP Chemistry
  • Teacher Letter #2: AP English Lang

School Report

  • Principal Recommendation

Harvard Application Supplement

  • Supplement Form
  • Writing Supplement Essay

Supplementary Recommendation #1

Supplementary recommendation #2, supplemental application materials.

Final Advice for You

I mean it—you'll see literally everything in my application.

In revealing my teenage self, some parts of my application will be pretty embarrassing (you'll see why below). But my mission through my company PrepScholar is to give the world the most helpful resources possible, so I'm publishing it.

One last thing before we dive in—I'm going to anticipate some common concerns beforehand and talk through important disclaimers so that you'll get the most out of this guide.

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Important Disclaimers

My biggest caveat for you when reading this guide: thousands of students get into Harvard and Ivy League schools every year. This guide tells a story about one person and presents one archetype of a strong applicant. As you'll see, I had a huge academic focus, especially in science ( this was my Spike ). I'm also irreverent and have a strong, direct personality.

What you see in this guide is NOT what YOU need to do to get into Harvard , especially if you don't match my interests and personality at all.

As I explain in my Harvard guide , I believe I fit into one archetype of a strong applicant—the "academic superstar" (humor me for a second, I know calling myself this sounds obnoxious). There are other distinct ways to impress, like:

  • being world-class in a non-academic talent
  • achieving something difficult and noteworthy—building a meaningful organization, writing a novel
  • coming from tremendous adversity and performing remarkably well relative to expectations

Therefore, DON'T worry about copying my approach one-for-one . Don't worry if you're taking a different number of AP courses or have lower test scores or do different extracurriculars or write totally different personal statements. This is what schools like Stanford and Yale want to see—a diversity in the student population!

The point of this guide is to use my application as a vehicle to discuss what top colleges are looking for in strong applicants. Even though the specific details of what you'll do are different from what I did, the principles are the same. What makes a candidate truly stand out is the same, at a high level. What makes for a super strong recommendation letter is the same. The strategies on how to build a cohesive, compelling application are the same.

There's a final reason you shouldn't worry about replicating my work—the application game has probably changed quite a bit since 2005. Technology is much more pervasive, the social issues teens care about are different, the extracurricular activities that are truly noteworthy have probably gotten even more advanced. What I did might not be as impressive as it used to be. So focus on my general points, not the specifics, and think about how you can take what you learn here to achieve something even greater than I ever did.

With that major caveat aside, here are a string of smaller disclaimers.

I'm going to present my application factually and be 100% straightforward about what I achieved and what I believed was strong in my application. This is what I believe will be most helpful for you. I hope you don't misinterpret this as bragging about my accomplishments. I'm here to show you what it took for me to get into Harvard and other Ivy League schools, not to ask for your admiration. So if you read this guide and are tempted to dismiss my advice because you think I'm boasting, take a step back and focus on the big picture—how you'll improve yourself.

This guide is geared toward admissions into the top colleges in the country , often with admissions rates below 10%. A sample list of schools that fit into this: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, MIT, UChicago, Duke, UPenn, CalTech, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Brown. The top 3-5 in that list are especially looking for the absolute best students in the country , since they have the pick of the litter.

Admissions for these selective schools works differently from schools with >20% rates. For less selective schools, having an overall strong, well-rounded application is sufficient for getting in. In particular, having an above average GPA and test scores goes the majority of the way toward getting you admission to those schools. The higher the admission rate, the more emphasis will be placed on your scores. The other pieces I'll present below—personal statements, extracurriculars, recommendations—will matter less.

Still, it doesn't hurt to aim for a stronger application. To state the obvious, an application strong enough to get you Columbia will get you into UCLA handily.

In my application, I've redacted pieces of my application for privacy reasons, and one supplementary recommendation letter at the request of the letter writer. Everything else is unaltered.

Throughout my application, we can see marks made by the admissions officer highlighting and circling things of note (you'll see the first example on the very first page). I don't have any other applications to compare these to, so I'm going to interpret these marks as best I can. For the most part, I assume that whatever he underlines or circles is especially important and noteworthy —points that he'll bring up later in committee discussions. It could also be that the reader got bored and just started highlighting things, but I doubt this.

Finally, I co-founded and run a company called PrepScholar . We create online SAT/ACT prep programs that adapt to you and your strengths and weaknesses . I believe we've created the best prep program available, and if you feel you need to raise your SAT/ACT score, then I encourage you to check us out . I want to emphasize that you do NOT need to buy a prep program to get a great score , and the advice in this guide has little to do with my company. But if you're aren't sure how to improve your score and agree with our unique approach to SAT/ACT prep, our program may be perfect for you.

With all this past us, let's get started.

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The #1 Most Important College Application Question: What Is Your PERSONAL NARRATIVE?

If you stepped into an elevator with Yale's Dean of Admissions and you had ten seconds to describe yourself and why you're interesting, what would you say?

This is what I call your PERSONAL NARRATIVE. These are the three main points that represent who you are and what you're about . This is the story that you tell through your application, over and over again. This is how an admissions officer should understand you after just glancing through your application. This is how your admissions officer will present you to the admissions committee to advocate for why they should accept you.

The more unique and noteworthy your Personal Narrative is, the better. This is how you'll stand apart from the tens of thousands of other applicants to your top choice school. This is why I recommend so strongly that you develop a Spike to show deep interest and achievement. A compelling Spike is the core of your Personal Narrative.

Well-rounded applications do NOT form compelling Personal Narratives, because "I'm a well-rounded person who's decent at everything" is the exact same thing every other well-rounded person tries to say.

Everything in your application should support your Personal Narrative , from your course selection and extracurricular activities to your personal statements and recommendation letters. You are a movie director, and your application is your way to tell a compelling, cohesive story through supporting evidence.

Yes, this is overly simplistic and reductionist. It does not represent all your complexities and your 17 years of existence. But admissions offices don't have the time to understand this for all their applicants. Your PERSONAL NARRATIVE is what they will latch onto.

Here's what I would consider my Personal Narrative (humor me since I'm peacocking here):

1) A science obsessive with years of serious research work and ranked 6 th in a national science competition, with future goals of being a neuroscientist or physician

2) Balanced by strong academic performance in all subjects (4.0 GPA and perfect test scores, in both humanities and science) and proficiency in violin

3) An irreverent personality who doesn't take life too seriously, embraces controversy, and says what's on his mind

These three elements were the core to my application. Together they tell a relatively unique Personal Narrative that distinguishes me from many other strong applicants. You get a surprisingly clear picture of what I'm about. There's no question that my work in science was my "Spike" and was the strongest piece of my application, but my Personal Narrative included other supporting elements, especially a description of my personality.

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Want to get into Harvard or your personal top choice college?

We can help. PrepScholar Admissions is the world's best admissions consulting service. We combine world-class admissions counselors with our data-driven, proprietary admissions strategies . We've overseen thousands of students get into their top choice schools , from state colleges to the Ivy League.

Learn more about PrepScholar Admissions to maximize your chance of getting in.

Get Into Your Top Choice School

My College Application, at a High Level

Drilling down into more details, here's an overview of my application.

  • This put me comfortably in the 99 th percentile in the country, but it was NOT sufficient to get me into Harvard by itself ! Because there are roughly 4 million high school students per year, the top 1 percentile still has 40,000 students. You need other ways to set yourself apart.
  • Your Spike will most often come from your extracurriculars and academic honors, just because it's hard to really set yourself apart with your coursework and test scores.
  • My letters of recommendation were very strong. Both my recommending teachers marked me as "one of the best they'd ever taught." Importantly, they corroborated my Personal Narrative, especially regarding my personality. You'll see how below.
  • My personal statements were, in retrospect, just satisfactory. They represented my humorous and irreverent side well, but they come across as too self-satisfied. Because of my Spike, I don't think my essays were as important to my application.

Finally, let's get started by digging into the very first pages of my Common Application.

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There are a few notable points about how simple questions can actually help build a first impression around what your Personal Narrative is.

First, notice the circle around my email address. This is the first of many marks the admissions officer made on my application. The reason I think he circled this was that the email address I used is a joke pun on my name . I knew it was risky to use this vs something like [email protected], but I thought it showed my personality better (remember point #3 about having an irreverent personality in my Personal Narrative).

Don't be afraid to show who you really are, rather than your perception of what they want. What you think UChicago or Stanford wants is probably VERY wrong, because of how little information you have, both as an 18-year-old and as someone who hasn't read thousands of applications.

(It's also entirely possible that it's a formality to circle email addresses, so I don't want to read too much into it, but I think I'm right.)

Second, I knew in high school that I wanted to go into the medical sciences, either as a physician or as a scientist. I was also really into studying the brain. So I listed both in my Common App to build onto my Personal Narrative.

In the long run, both predictions turned out to be wrong. After college, I did go to Harvard Medical School for the MD/PhD program for 4 years, but I left to pursue entrepreneurship and co-founded PrepScholar . Moreover, in the time I did actually do research, I switched interests from neuroscience to bioengineering/biotech.

Colleges don't expect you to stick to career goals you stated at the age of 18. Figuring out what you want to do is the point of college! But this doesn't give you an excuse to avoid showing a preference. This early question is still a chance to build that Personal Narrative.

Thus, I recommend AGAINST "Undecided" as an area of study —it suggests a lack of flavor and is hard to build a compelling story around. From your high school work thus far, you should at least be leaning to something, even if that's likely to change in the future.

Finally, in the demographic section there is a big red A, possibly for Asian American. I'm not going to read too much into this. If you're a notable minority, this is where you'd indicate it.

Now known as: Education

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This section was straightforward for me. I didn't take college courses, and I took a summer chemistry class at a nearby high school because I didn't get into the lottery at my school that year (I refer to this briefly in my 4.0 GPA guide ).

The most notable point of this section: the admissions officer circled Principal here . This is notable because our school Principal only wrote letters for fewer than 10 students each year. Counselors wrote letters for the other hundreds of students in my class, which made my application stand out just a little.

I'll talk more about this below, when I share the Principal's recommendation.

(In the current Common Application, the Education section also includes Grades, Courses, and Honors. We'll be covering each of those below).

Now known as: Testing

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Back then AP scores weren't part of this section, but I'll take them from another part of my application here.

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However, their standards are still very high. You really do want to be in that top 1 percentile to pass the filter. A 1400 on the SAT IS going to put you at a disadvantage because there are so many students scoring higher than you. You'll really have to dig yourself out of the hole with an amazing application.

I talk about this a lot more in my Get into Harvard guide (sorry to keep linking this, but I really do think it's an important guide for you to read).

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Let's end this section with some personal notes.

Even though math and science were easy for me, I had to put in serious effort to get an 800 on the Reading section of the SAT . As much as I wish I could say it was trivial for me, it wasn't. I learned a bunch of strategies and dissected the test to get to a point where I understood the test super well and reliably earned perfect scores.

I cover the most important points in my How to Get a Perfect SAT Score guide , as well as my 800 Guides for Reading , Writing , and Math .

Between the SAT and ACT, the SAT was my primary focus, but I decided to take the ACT for fun. The tests were so similar that I scored a 36 Composite without much studying. Having two test scores is completely unnecessary —you get pretty much zero additional credit. Again, with one test score, you have already passed their filter.

Finally, class finals or state-required exams are a breeze if you get a 5 on the corresponding AP tests .

Now known as: Family (still)

This section asks for your parent information and family situation. There's not much you can do here besides report the facts.

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I'm redacting a lot of stuff again for privacy reasons.

The reader made a number of marks here for occupation and education. There's likely a standard code for different types of occupations and schools.

If I were to guess, I'd say that the numbers add to form some metric of "family prestige." My dad got a Master's at a middle-tier American school, but my mom didn't go to graduate school, and these sections were marked 2 and 3, respectively. So it seems higher numbers are given for less prestigious educations by your parents. I'd expect that if both my parents went to schools like Caltech and Dartmouth, there would be even lower numbers here.

This makes me think that the less prepared your family is, the more points you get, and this might give your application an extra boost. If you were the first one in your family to go to college, for example, you'd be excused for having lower test scores and fewer AP classes. Schools really do care about your background and how you performed relative to expectations.

In the end, schools like Harvard say pretty adamantly they don't use formulas to determine admissions decisions, so I wouldn't read too much into this. But this can be shorthand to help orient an applicant's family background.

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Extracurricular, Personal, and Volunteer Activities

Now known as: Activities

For most applicants, your Extracurriculars and your Academic Honors will be where you develop your Spike and where your Personal Narrative shines through. This was how my application worked.

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Just below I'll describe the activities in more detail, but first I want to reflect on this list.

As instructed, my extracurriculars were listed in the order of their interest to me. The current Common App doesn't seem to ask for this, but I would still recommend it to focus your reader's attention.

The most important point I have to make about my extracurriculars: as you go down the list, there is a HUGE drop in the importance of each additional activity to the overall application. If I were to guess, I assign the following weights to how much each activity contributed to the strength of my activities section:

In other words, participating in the Research Science Institute (RSI) was far more important than all of my other extracurriculars, combined. You can see that this was the only activity my admissions reader circled.

You can see how Spike-y this is. The RSI just completely dominates all my other activities.

The reason for this is the prestige of RSI. As I noted earlier, RSI was (and likely still is) the most prestigious research program for high school students in the country, with an admission rate of less than 5% . Because the program was so prestigious and selective, getting in served as a big confirmation signal of my academic quality.

In other words, the Harvard admissions reader would likely think, "OK, if this very selective program has already validated Allen as a top student, I'm inclined to believe that Allen is a top student and should pay special attention to him."

Now, it took a lot of prior work to even get into RSI because it's so selective. I had already ranked nationally in the Chemistry Olympiad (more below), and I had done a lot of prior research work in computer science (at Jisan Research Institute—more about this later). But getting into RSI really propelled my application to another level.

Because RSI was so important and was such a big Spike, all my other extracurriculars paled in importance. The admissions officer at Princeton or MIT probably didn't care at all that I volunteered at a hospital or founded a high school club .

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This is a good sign of developing a strong Spike. You want to do something so important that everything else you do pales in comparison to it. A strong Spike becomes impossible to ignore.

In contrast, if you're well-rounded, all your activities hold equal weight—which likely means none of them are really that impressive (unless you're a combination of Olympic athlete, internationally-ranked science researcher, and New York Times bestselling author, but then I'd call you unicorn because you don't exist).

Apply this concept to your own interests—what can be so impressive and such a big Spike that it completely overshadows all your other achievements?

This might be worth spending a disproportionate amount of time on. As I recommend in my Harvard guide and 4.0 GPA guide , smartly allocating your time is critical to your high school strategy.

In retrospect, one "mistake" I made was spending a lot of time on the violin. Each week I spent eight hours on practice and a lesson and four hours of orchestra rehearsals. This amounted to over 1,500 hours from freshman to junior year.

The result? I was pretty good, but definitely nowhere near world-class. Remember, there are thousands of orchestras and bands in the country, each with their own concertmasters, drum majors, and section 1 st chairs.

If I were to optimize purely for college applications, I should have spent that time on pushing my spike even further —working on more Olympiad competitions, or doing even more hardcore research.

Looking back I don't mind this much because I generally enjoyed my musical training and had a mostly fun time in orchestra (and I had a strong Spike anyway). But this problem can be a lot worse for well-rounded students who are stretched too thin.

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Aside from these considerations about a Spike, I have two major caveats.

First, developing a Spike requires continuous, increasingly ambitious foundational work. It's like climbing a staircase. From the beginning of high school, each step was more and more ambitious—my first academic team, my first research experience, leading up to state and national competitions and more serious research work.

So when I suggest devoting a lot of time to developing your Spike, it's not necessarily the Spike in itself—it's also spending time on foundational work leading up to what will be your major achievement. That's why I don't see my time with academic teams or volunteering as wasted, even though in the end they didn't contribute as much to my application.

Second, it is important to do things you enjoy. I still enjoyed playing the violin and being part of an orchestra, and I really enjoyed my school's academic teams, even though we never went beyond state level. Even if some activities don't contribute as much to your application, it's still fine to spend some time on them—just don't delude yourself into thinking they're stronger than they really are and overspend time on them.

Finally, note that most of my activities were pursued over multiple years. This is a good sign of commitment—rather than hopping from activity year to year, it's better to show sustained commitment, as this is a better signal of genuine passion.

In a future article, I'll break down these activities in more detail. But this guide is already super long, so I want to focus our attention on the main points.

Short Answer: Extracurricular Activities

In today's Common Application, you have 50 characters to describe "Position/Leadership description and organization name" and 150 characters for "Please describe this activity, including what you accomplished and any recognition you received, etc."

Back then, we didn't have as much space per activity, and instead had a short answer question.

The Short Answer prompt:

Please describe which of your activities (extracurricular and personal activities or work experience) has been most meaningful and why.

I chose RSI as my most significant activity for two reasons—one based on the meaning of the work, and another on the social aspect.

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It's obvious that schools like Yale and UChicago want the best students in the world that they can get their hands on. Academic honors and awards are a great, quantifiable way to show that.

Here's the complete list of Academic Honors I submitted. The Common Application now limits you to five honors only (probably because they got tired of lists like these), but chances are you capture the top 98% of your honors with the top five.

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Charlie wins a Golden Ticket to Harvard.

I know this is intimidating if you don't already have a prestigious honor. But remember there are thousands of nationally-ranked people in a multitude of honor types, from science competitions to essay contests to athletics to weird talents.

And I strongly believe the #1 differentiator of high school students who achieve things is work ethic, NOT intelligence or talent. Yes, you need a baseline level of competence to get places, but people far undervalue the progress they can make if they work hard and persevere. Far too many people give up too quickly or fatigue without putting in serious effort.

If you're stuck thinking, "well I'm just an average person, and there's no way I'm going to become world-class in anything," then you've already lost before you've begun. The truth is everyone who achieves something of note puts in an incredible amount of hard work. Because this is invisible to you, it looks like talent is what distinguishes the two of you, when really it's much more often diligence.

I talk a lot more about the Growth Mindset in my How To Get a 4.0 GPA guide .

So my Chemistry Olympiad honor formed 90% of the value of this page. Just like extracurriculars, there's a quick dropoff in value of each item after that.

My research work took up the next two honors, one a presentation at an academic conference, and the other (Siemens) a research competition for high school researchers.

The rest of my honors were pretty middling:

  • National Merit Scholarship semifinalist pretty much equates to PSAT score, which is far less important than your SAT/ACT score. So I didn't really get any credit for this, and you won't either.
  • In Science Olympiad (this is a team-based competition that's not as prestigious as the academic Olympiads I just talked about), I earned a number of 1 st place state and regional medals, but we never made it to nationals.
  • I was mediocre at competition math because I didn't train for it, and I won some regional awards but nothing amazing. This is one place I would have spent more time, maybe in the time I'd save by not practicing violin as much. There are great resources for this type of training, like Art of Problem Solving , that I didn't know existed and could've helped me rank much higher.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, think about how many state medalists there are in the country, in the hundreds of competitions that exist . The number of state to national rankers is probably at least 20:1 (less than 50:1 because of variation in state size), so if there are 2,000 nationally ranked students, there are 40,000 state-ranked students in something !

So state honors really don't help you stand out on your Princeton application. There are just too many of them around.

On the other hand, if you can get to be nationally ranked in something, you will have an amazing Spike that distinguishes you.

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Now known as: Personal Essay

Now, the dreaded personal statement. Boy, oh boy, did I fuss over this one.

"What is the perfect combination of personal, funny, heartrending, and inspirational?"

I know I was wondering this when I applied.

Having read books like 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays , I was frightened. I didn't grow up as a refugee, wrenched from my war-torn home! I didn't have a sibling with a debilitating illness! How could anything I write compare to these tales of personal strength?

The trite truth is that colleges want to know who you really are . Clearly they don't expect everyone to have had immense personal struggle. But they do want students who are:

  • growth-oriented
  • introspective
  • kind and good-hearted

Whatever those words mean to you in the context of your life is what you should write about.

In retrospect, in the context of MY application, the personal statement really wasn't what got me into Harvard . I do think my Spike was nearly sufficient to get me admitted to every school in the country.

I say "nearly" because, even if you're world-class, schools do want to know you're not a jerk and that you're an interesting person (which is conveyed through your personal essay and letters of recommendation).

Back then, we had a set of different prompts :

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What did you think?

I'm still cringing a bit. Parts of this are very smug (see /r/iamverysmart ), and if you want to punch the writer in the face, I don't blame you. I want to as well.

We'll get to areas of improvement later, but first, let's talk about what this personal essay did well.

As I said above, I saw the theme of the snooze button as a VEHICLE to showcase a few qualities I cared about :

1) I fancied myself a Renaissance man (obnoxious, I know) and wanted to become an inventor and creator . I showed this through mentioning different interests (Rubik's cube, chemistry, Nietzsche) and iterating through a few designs for an alarm clock (electric shocks, explosions, Shakespearean sonnet recitation).

2) My personality was whimsical and irreverent. I don't take life too seriously. The theme of the essay—battling an alarm clock—shows this well, in comparison to the gravitas of the typical student essay. I also found individual lines funny, like "All right, so I had violated the divine honor of the family and the tenets of Confucius." At once I acknowledge my Chinese heritage but also make light of the situation.

3) I was open to admitting weaknesses , which I think is refreshing among people taking college applications too seriously and trying too hard to impress. The frank admission of a realistic lazy habit—pushing the Snooze button—served as a nice foil to my academic honors and shows that I can be down-to-earth.

So you see how the snooze button acts as a vehicle to carry these major points and a lot of details, tied together to the same theme .

In the same way, The Walking Dead is NOT a zombie show—the zombie environment is a VEHICLE by which to show human drama and conflict. Packaging my points together under the snooze button theme makes it a lot more interesting than just outright saying "I'm such an interesting guy."

So overall, I believe the essay accomplishes my goals and the main points of what I wanted to convey about myself.

Note that this is just one of many ways to write an essay . It worked for me, but it may be totally inappropriate for you.

Now let's look at this essay's weaknesses.

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Looking at it with a more seasoned perspective, some parts of it are WAY too try-hard. I try too hard to show off my breadth of knowledge in a way that seems artificial and embellishing.

The entire introduction with the Rubik's cube seems bolted on, just to describe my long-standing desire to be a Renaissance man. Only three paragraphs down do I get to the Snooze button, and I don't refer again to the introduction until the end. With just 650 words, I could have made the essay more cohesive by keeping the same theme from beginning to end.

Some phrases really make me roll my eyes. "Always hungry for more" and "ever the inventor" sound too forced and embellishing. A key principle of effective writing is to show, not say . You don't say "I'm passionate about X," you describe what extraordinary lengths you took to achieve X.

The mention of Nietzsche is over-the-top. I mean, come on. The reader probably thought, "OK, this kid just read it in English class and now he thinks he's a philosopher." The reader would be right.

The ending: "with the extra nine minutes, maybe I'll teach myself to cook fried rice" is silly. Where in the world did fried rice come from? I meant it as a nod to my Chinese heritage, but it's too sudden to work. I could have deleted the sentence and wrapped up the essay more cleanly.

So I have mixed feelings of my essay. I think it accomplished my major goals and showed the humorous, irreverent side of my personality well. However, it also gave the impression of a kid who thought he knew more than he did, a pseudo-sophisticate bordering on obnoxious. I still think it was a net positive.

At the end of the day, I believe the safest, surefire strategy is to develop a Spike so big that the importance of the Personal Essay pales in comparison to your achievements. You want your Personal Essay to be a supplement to your application, not the only reason you get in.

There are probably some cases where a well-rounded student writes an amazing Personal Essay and gets in through the strength of that. As a Hail Mary if you're a senior and can't improve your application further, this might work. But the results are very variable—some readers may love your essay, others may just think it's OK. Without a strong application to back it up, your mileage may vary.

Want to build the best possible college application?

We know what kinds of students colleges want to admit. We want to get you admitted to your dream schools .

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This is a really fun section. Usually you don't get to read your letter of recommendation because you sign the FERPA waiver. I've also reached out to my letter writers to make sure they're ok with my showing this.

Teacher recommendations are incredibly important to your application. I would say that after your coursework/test scores and activities/honors, they're the 3 rd most important component of your application .

The average teacher sees thousands of students through a career, and so he or she is very well equipped to position you relative to all other students. Furthermore, your teachers are experienced adults—their impressions of you are much more reliable than your impressions of yourself (see my Personal Essay above). They can corroborate your entire Personal Narrative as an outside observer.

The most effective recommendation letters speak both to your academic strengths and to your personality. For the second factor, the teacher needs to have interacted with you meaningfully, ideally both in and out of class. Check out our guide on what makes for effective letters of recommendation .

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Starting from sophomore year, I started thinking about whom I connected better with and chose to engage with those teachers more deeply . Because it's standard for colleges to require two teachers in different subjects, I made sure to engage with English and history teachers as well as math and science.

The minimum requirement for a good letter is someone who taught a class in which you did well. I got straight A's in my coursework, so this wasn't an issue.

Beyond this, I had to look for teachers who would be strong advocates for me on both an academic and personal level . These tended to be teachers I vibed more strongly with, and typically these were teachers who demonstrably cared about teaching. This was made clear by their enthusiasm, how they treated students, and how much they went above expectations to help.

I had a lot of teachers who really just phoned it in and treated their job perfunctorily—these people are likely to write pretty blasé letters.

A final note before reading my actual teacher evaluations— you should avoid getting in the mindset where you get to know teachers JUST because you want a good recommendation letter . Your teachers have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of students pass through, and it's much easier to detect insincerity than you think.

If you honestly like learning and are an enthusiastic, responsible, engaging student, a great recommendation letter will follow naturally. The horse should lead the cart.

Read my How to Get a 4.0 GPA for tips on how to interact with teachers in a genuine way that'll make them love you.

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Teacher Letter #1: AP Chemistry Teacher

I took AP Chemistry in 10 th grade and had Miss Cherryl Vorak (now Mynster). She was young, having taught for fewer than 5 years when I had her. She was my favorite teacher throughout high school for these reasons:

  • She was enthusiastic, very caring, and spent a lot of time helping struggling students. She exuded pride in her work and seemed to consider teaching her craft.
  • She had a kind personality and was universally well liked by her students, even if they weren't doing so well. She was fair in her policies (it probably helped that science is more objective than English). She was also a younger teacher, and this helped her relate to kids more closely.
  • She was my advocate for much of the US National Chemistry Olympiad stuff, and in this capacity I got to know her even better outside of class. She provided me a lot of training materials, helped me figure out college chemistry, and directed me to resources to learn more.

By the time of the letter writing, I had known her for two full years and engaged with her continuously, even when I wasn't taking a class with her in junior year. We'd build up a strong relationship over the course of many small interactions.

All of this flowed down to the recommendation you see here. Remember, the horse leads the cart.

First, we'll look at the teacher evaluation page. The Common Application now has 16 qualities to rate, rather than the 10 here. But they're largely the same.

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You can see a very strong evaluation here, giving me the highest ratings possible for all qualities.

In today's Common Application, all of these Ratings are retained, aside from "Potential for Growth." Today's Common App also now includes Faculty Respect, Maturity, Leadership, Integrity, Reaction to Setbacks, Concern for Others, and TE Overall. You can tell that the updated Common App places a great emphasis on personality.

The most important point here: it is important to be ranked "One of the top few encountered in my career" for as many ratings as possible . If you're part of a big school, this is CRITICAL to distinguish yourself from other students. The more experienced and trustworthy the teacher, the more meaningful this is.

Again, it's a numbers game. Think about the 20,000+ high schools in the country housing 4 million+ high school students—how many people fit in the top 5% bucket?

Thus, being marked merely as Excellent (top 10%) is actually a negative rating , as far as admissions to top colleges is concerned. If you're in top 10%, and someone else with the SAME teacher recommender is being rated as "One of the top ever," it's really hard for the admissions officer to vouch for you over the other student.

You really want to make sure you're one of the best in your school class, if not one of the best the teacher has ever encountered. You'll see below how you can accomplish this.

Next, let's look at her letter.

As you read this, think— what are the interactions that would prompt the teacher to write a recommendation like this? This was a relationship built up in a period of over 2 years, with every small interaction adding to an overall larger impression.

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You can see how seriously they take the letter because of all the underlining . This admissions reader underlined things that weren't even underlined in my application, like my US National Chemistry Olympiad awards. It's one thing for a student to claim things about himself—it's another to have a teacher put her reputation on the line to advocate for her student.

The letter here is very strong for a multitude of reasons. First, the length is notable —most letters are just a page long, but this is nearly two full pages , single spaced. This indicates not just her overall commitment to her students but also of her enthusiastic support for me as an applicant.

The structure is effective: first Miss Vorak talks about my academic accomplishments, then about my personal qualities and interactions, then a summary to the future. This is a perfect blend of what effective letters contain .

On the micro-level, her diction and phrasing are precise and effective . She makes my standing clear with specific statements : "youngest student…top excelling student among the two sections" and "one of twenty students in the nation." She's clear about describing why my achievements are notable and the effort I put in, like studying college-level chemistry and studying independently.

When describing my personality, she's exuberant and fleshes out a range of dimensions: "conscientious, motivated and responsible," "exhibits the qualities of a leader," "actively seeks new experiences," "charismatic," "balanced individual with a warm personality and sense of humor." You can see how she's really checking off all the qualities colleges care about.

Overall, Miss Vorak's letter perfectly supports my Personal Narrative —my love for science, my overall academic performance, and my personality. I'm flattered and grateful to have received this support. This letter was important to complement the overall academic performance and achievements shown on the rest of my application.

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Teacher Letter #2: AP English Language Teacher

My second teacher Mrs. Swift was another favorite. A middle-aged, veteran English teacher, the best way I would describe her is "fiery." She was invigorating and passionate, always trying to get a rise out of students and push their thinking, especially in class discussions. Emotionally she was a reliable source of support for students.

First, the evaluation:

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You can see right away that her remarks are terser. She didn't even fill out the section about "first words that come to mind to describe this student."

You might chalk this up to my not being as standout of a student in her mind, or her getting inundated with recommendation letter requests after over a decade of teaching.

In ratings, you can see that I only earned 3 of the "one of the top in my career." There are a few explanations for this. As a teacher's career lengthens, it gets increasingly hard to earn this mark. I probably also didn't stand out as much as I did to my Chemistry teacher—most of my achievement was in science (which she wasn't closely connected to), and I had talented classmates. Regardless, I did appreciate the 3 marks she gave me.

Now, the letter. Once again, as you read this letter, think: what are the hundreds of micro-interactions that would have made a teacher write a letter like this?

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Overall, this letter is very strong. It's only one page long, but her points about my personality are the critical piece of this recommendation. She also writes with the flair of an English teacher:

"In other situations where students would never speak their minds, he showed no hesitation to voice questions, thoughts, and ideas."

"controversial positions often being the spark that set off the entire class"

"ability to take the quiet and shy student and actively engage"…"went out of my way to partner him with other students who needed"

"strength of conviction"…"raw, unbridled passion"…"He will argue on any topic that has touched a nerve."

These comments most support the personality aspect of my Personal Narrative—having an irreverent, bold personality and not being afraid of speaking my mind. She stops just short of making me sound obnoxious and argumentative. An experienced teacher vouching for this adds so much more weight than just my writing it about myself.

Teacher recommendations are some of the most important components of your application. Getting very strong letters take a lot of sustained, genuine interaction over time to build mutual trust and respect. If you want detailed advice on how to interact with teachers earnestly, check out my How to Get a 4.0 GPA and Better Grades guide .

Let's go to the final recommendation, from the school counselor.

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Now known as: School Report

The first piece of this is reporting your academic status and how the school works overall. There's not much to say here, other than the fact that my Principal wrote my recommendation for me, which we'll get into next.

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Counselor Recommendation

Now known as: Counselor Recommendation

Let's talk about my school principal writing my recommendation, rather than a school counselor.

This was definitely advantageous—remember how, way up top in Educational Data, the reader circled the "Principal." Our Principal only wrote a handful of these recommendations each year , often for people who worked closely with him, like student body presidents. So it was pretty distinctive that I got a letter from our Principal, compared to other leading applicants from my school.

This was also a blessing because our counseling department was terrible . Our school had nearly 1,000 students per grade, and only 1 counselor per grade. They were overworked and ornery, and because they were the gatekeepers of academic enrollment (like class selection and prerequisites), this led to constant frictions in getting the classes you wanted.

I can empathize with them, because having 500+ neurotic parents pushing for advantages for their own kids can get REALLY annoying really fast. But the counseling department was still the worst part of our high school administration, and I could have guessed that the letters they wrote were mediocre because they just had too many students.

So how did my Principal come to write my recommendation and not those for hundreds of other students?

I don't remember exactly how this came to be, to be honest. I didn't strategize to have him write a letter for me years in advance. I didn't even interact with him much at all until junior year, when I got on his radar because of my national rankings. Come senior year I might have talked to him about my difficulty in reaching counselors and asked that he write my recommendation. Since I was a top student he was probably happy to do this.

He was very supportive, but as you can tell from the letter to come, it was clear he didn't know me that well.

Interestingly, the prompt for the recommendation has changed. It used to start with: "Please write whatever you think is important about this student."

Now, it starts with: " Please provide comments that will help us differentiate this student from others ."

The purpose of the recommendation has shifted to the specific: colleges probably found that one counselor was serving hundreds of students, so the letters started getting mushy and indistinguishable from each other.

Here's the letter:

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This letter is probably the weakest overall of all my letters. It reads more like a verbal resume than a personal account of how he understands me.

Unlike my two teacher recommendations, he doesn't comment on the nature of our interactions or about my personality (because he truly didn't understand them well). He also misreported by SAT score as 1530 instead of 1600 (I did score a 1530 in an early test, but my 1600 was ready by January 2004, so I don't know what source he was using).

Notably, the letter writer didn't underline anything.

I still appreciate that he wrote my letter, and it was probably more effective than a generic counselor letter. But this didn't add much to my application.

At this point, we've covered my entire Common Application. This is the same application I sent to every school I applied to, including Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Thanks for reading this far—I hope you've gotten a lot out of this already.

If you keep reading to the end, I'll have advice for both younger students and current applicants to build the strongest application possible.

Next, we'll go over the Harvard Supplemental Application, which of course is unique to Harvard.

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For most top colleges like Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and so on, you will need to complete a supplemental application to provide more info than what's listed on the Common Application.

Harvard was and is the same. The good news is that it's an extra chance for you to share more about yourself and keep pushing your Personal Narrative.

There are four major components here:

  • The application form
  • Writing supplement essay
  • Supplementary recommendations
  • Supplemental application materials

I'll take you through the application section by section.

Harvard Supplement Form

First, the straightforward info and questions.

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This section is pretty straightforward and is similar to what you'd see on a Columbia application.

I planned to live in a Harvard residence, as most students do.

Just as in my Common App, I noted that I was most likely to study biological sciences, choose Medicine as my vocation, and participate in orchestra, writing, and research as my extracurriculars. Nothing surprising here—it's all part of my Personal Narrative.

Interestingly, at the time I was "absolutely certain" about my vocational goals, which clearly took a detour once I left medical school to pursue entrepreneurship to create PrepScholar...

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I had the space to list some additional honors, where I listed some musical honors that didn't make the cut in my Common App.

Here are the next two pages of the Harvard supplemental form.

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The most interesting note here is that the admissions officer wrote a question mark above "Music tape or CD." Clearly this was inconsistent with my Personal Narrative —if violin was such an important part of my story, why didn't I want to include it?

The reason was that I was actually pretty mediocre at violin and was nowhere near national-ranked. Again, remember how many concertmasters in the thousands of orchestras there are in the world—I wasn't good enough to even be in the top 3 chairs in my school orchestra (violin was very competitive).

I wanted to focus attention on my most important materials, which for my Personal Narrative meant my research work. You'll see these supplementary materials later.

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Additional Essays

Now known as: Writing Supplement

For the most part, the Harvard supplemental essay prompt has stayed the same. You can write about a topic of your choice or about any of the suggestions. There are now two more prompts that weren't previously there: "What you would want your future college roommate to know about you" and "How you hope to use your college education."

Even though this is optional, I highly recommend you write something here. Again, you have so few chances in the overall application to convey your personal voice—an extra 500 words gives you a huge opportunity. I would guess that the majority of admitted Harvard students submit a Writing Supplement.

After a lot of brainstorming, I settled on the idea that I wanted to balance my application by writing about the major non-academic piece of my Personal Narrative—my music training . Also, I don't think I explicitly recognized this at the time, but I wanted to distance myself from the Asian-American stereotype—driven entirely by parent pressure, doing most things perfunctorily and without interest. I wanted to show I'd broken out of that mold.

Here's my essay:

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Reading it now, I actually think this was a pretty bad essay, and I cringe to high heaven. But once again, let's focus on the positive first.

I used my violin teacher as a vehicle for talking about what the violin meant to me. (You can tell I love the concept of the vehicle in essays.) He represented passion for the violin—I represented my academic priorities. Our personal conflict was really the conflict between what we represented.

By the end of the essay, I'd articulated the value of musical training to me—it was cathartic and a way to balance my hard academic pursuits.

Halfway in the essay, I also explicitly acknowledged the Asian stereotype of parents who drove their kids, and said my parents were no different. The reader underlined this sentence. By pointing this out and showing how my interest took on a life of its own, I wanted to distance myself from that stereotype.

So overall I think my aims were accomplished.

Despite all that, this essay was WAY overdramatic and overwrought . Some especially terrible lines:

"I was playing for that cathartic moment when I could feel Tchaikovsky himself looking over my shoulder."

"I was wandering through the fog in search of a lighthouse, finally setting foot on a dock pervaded by white light."

OK, please. Who really honestly feels this way? This is clumsy, contrived writing. It signals insincerity, actually, which is bad.

To be fair, all of this is grounded in truth. I did have a strict violin teacher who did get pretty upset when I showed lack of improvement. I did appreciate music as a diversion to round out my academic focus. I did practice hard each day, and I did have a pretty gross callus on my pinky.

But I would have done far better by making it more sincere and less overworked.

As an applicant, you're tempted to try so hard to impress your reader. You want to show that you're Worthy of Consideration. But really the best approach is to be honest.

I think this essay was probably neutral to my application, not a strong net positive or net negative.

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Supplementary Recommendations

Harvard lets you submit letters from up to two Other Recommenders. The Princeton application, Penn application, and others are usually the same.

Unlike the other optional components (the Additional Information in the Common App, and the Supplementary Essay), I would actually consider these letters optional. The reader gets most of the recommendation value from your teacher recommendations—these are really supplementary.

A worthwhile Other Recommender:

  • has supervised an activity or honor that is noteworthy
  • has interacted with you extensively and can speak to your personality
  • is likely to support you as one of the best students they've interacted with

If your Other Recommenders don't fulfill one or more of these categories, do NOT ask for supplementary letters. They'll dilute your application without adding substantively to it.

To beat a dead horse, the primary component of my Personal Narrative was my science and research work. So naturally I chose supervisors for my two major research experiences to write supplemental letters.

First was the Director of Research Science Institute (the selective summer research program at MIT). The second was from the head of Jisan Research Institute, where I did Computer Science research.

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This letter validates my participation in RSI and incorporates the feedback from my research mentor, David Simon. At the time, the RSI students were the most talented students I had met, so I'm also flattered by some of the things the letter writer said, like "Allen stood out early on as a strong performer in academic settings."

I didn't get to know the letter writer super well, so he commented mainly on my academic qualifications and comments from my mentor.

My mentor, who was at one of the major Harvard-affiliated hospitals, said some very nice things about my research ability, like:

"is performing in many ways at the level of a graduate student"

"impressed with Allen's ability to read even advanced scientific publications and synthesize his understanding"

Once again, it's much more convincing for a seasoned expert to vouch for your abilities than for you to claim your own abilities.

My first research experience was done at Jisan Research Institute, a small private computer science lab run by a Caltech PhD. The research staff were mainly high school students like me and a few grad students/postdocs.

My research supervisor, Sanza Kazadi, wrote the letter. He's requested that I not publish the letter, so I'll only speak about his main points.

In the letter, he focused on the quality of my work and leadership. He said that I had a strong focus in my work, and my research moved along more reliably than that of other students. I was independent in my work in swarm engineering, he says, putting together a simulation of the swarm and publishing a paper in conference proceedings. He talked about my work in leading a research group and placing a high degree of trust in me.

Overall, a strong recommendation, and you get the gist of his letter without reading it.

One notable point—both supplemental letters had no marks on them. I really think this means they place less emphasis on the supplementary recommendations, compared to the teacher recommendations.

Finally, finally, we get to the very last piece of my application.

Let me beat the dead horse even deader. Because research was such a core part of my Personal Narrative, I decided to include abstracts of both of my papers. The main point was to summarize the body of work I'd done and communicate the major results.

As Harvard says, "These materials are entirely optional; please only submit them if you have unusual talents."

This is why I chose not to submit a tape of my music: I don't think my musical skill was unusually good.

And frankly, I don't think my research work was that spectacular. Unlike some of my very accomplished classmates, I hadn't ranked nationally in prestigious competitions like ISEF and Siemens. I hadn't published my work in prominent journals.

Regardless, I thought these additions would be net positive, if only marginally so.

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I made sure to note where the papers had been published or were entering competitions, just to ground the work in some achievement.

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  • Recommendation Letters: Hopefully you should have developed strong, genuine relationships with teachers you care about. The letters should flow naturally from here, and you will only need to do gentle prodding to make sure they meet deadlines.
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    Writing samples are an important part of your application to any college. Your responses show how well you would fit with an institution; your ability to write clearly, concisely, and develop an argument; and your ability to do the work required of you should you be accepted. Use both short answer questions and personal essays to highlight your personality and what makes you unique while also showing off your academic talents.

    Short Answer Questions

    Short answer questions are almost harder to write than a personal essay, since you usually have a word limit. Often, this may be as short as 150 words (a paragraph). This means that your answers must be clear and concise without being so bare bones that you don’t seem to have a personality. In fact, it’s okay if you answer the question in less than the allotted space. Provided you avoid clichés and sarcasm and answer the question wholly, less can be more. Here are some tips to help you ace your short answers:

    • Don’t repeat the question.
    • Don’t use unnecessarily large words.  Not only will you come off as pretentious at best and ignorant at worst, but it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to keep the same tone throughout your response. After all, wouldn’t it be easier for you to read a paragraph that addresses “how to write concisely” rather than one about “how to circumvent the superfluous use of language?” Craft your response so that your reader can easily understand your point without resorting to a thesaurus.
    • Answer honestly. If you are asked to discuss one of your favorite things, don’t feel ashamed to tell the truth. Colleges want to get to know you. A “cool” answer isn’t as interesting as your honest, unique one.
    • Supplement your résumé. Talk about things that aren’t mentioned anywhere else in your application to show off a different side of your personality.
    • Always use details to bring even a short story to life.
    • Don’t be afraid of the word limit. Write out your answer without worrying about the length and then go back and delete any unnecessary information. Underline the stand-out points and trim the rest.
    • Describe your personal growth. When discussing an activity or event in your life, ask yourself what you learned or took away from it. Colleges like to understand how you’ve been changed by your experiences and see that you possess self-awareness.
    • Be specific about each institution. If asked why you want to attend a particular school, make sure to reference any times you visited the campus, met with admissions counselors, or spoke with current students or alumni. Talk about programs that interest you and how you think they will benefit you in the future. Tell your readers why the idea of being a student at their institution excites you. College admissions officers can spot generic answers, so do your research if you don’t know a lot about the school. Talk about each school as if it is your top choice, even if it’s not. Under no circumstances should you say that a particular school is your “safety.”

    The Personal Essay

    The majority of colleges will ask you to submit at least one personal essay as part of your application. (You can find the 2019–2020 application platform personal essay prompts here , but not all schools use an application platform. In such cases, you will find essay prompts on the school’s own application.) By reading your submission, college admissions officers become familiar with your personality and writing proficiency. Your essay, along with your other application materials, helps them determine if you would be a good fit for the school and if you would be able to keep up with the rigor of the course load. A well-written, insightful essay can set you apart from other applicants with identical grades and test scores. Likewise, a poorly constructed essay can be detrimental to your application.

    To ensure that your essay is the best it can be, you will need to spend some time reviewing the essay prompt to understand the question. Not only will you need time to become familiar with the directions, but you will also want to take your time when constructing your essay. No one can sit down and write the perfect essay in one shot. These things take effort, brainpower, and a significant amount of patience. Consider these steps for producing a well-written, thoughtful response to any essay prompt:

    • Get moving. The best way to activate your mind is to activate your body. The act of moving forward, whether you are on foot or on a bike, can help you work through the ideas that might feel stuck. Read the prompt thoroughly, and then see what comes to you as your move through your neighborhood.
    • Write down your ideas . When you get home, write down the ideas that stood out. Simply put the pen to paper or your hands to the keys and write without worrying about sentence structure or grammar. There’s plenty of time to edit later on.
    • Rule out ideas that won’t work. Use the resources in the section below to decide if you are being asked to write a personal, school, or creative/intellectual statement and read through the the corresponding tips. If any of your ideas don’t fall within our guidelines, find a different approach to answering the question or rule out the topic altogether.
    • Construct an outline (or two). At most, you will be able to use 650 words to respond to the question, so every statement you make must serve your overall objective. To stay on topic and build your story or argument, it’s helpful to have a map to guide you. Choose a topic or two from you list and give yourself plenty of time to outline each idea. Use bullet points and separate each section by paragraph. You may realize that one topic is too broad and you need to narrow your focus. If you make two outlines, ask a trusted adult to help you decide which one is stronger than the other. Even if you're not a fan of outlines and prefer to write organically, writing down your ideas in a consecutive list and creating a pseudo-outline can still help you maintain organization and flow between ideas when you actually fill in the blanks.
    • Fill in the details with positivity. You are now ready to begin your first draft of your essay. Staying positive in your writing, even if you choose to tackle a hard subject, will endear you to admissions officers while negativity, self-pity, and resentment aren’t going to make your case. Use vivid descriptions when telling your story, but don’t stray too far from your main topic as to become dishonest or exaggerated. Admissions officers are well versed in picking out the real from the fake and aren’t going to be impressed by a made-up story.
    • Walk away. When you’ve finished your first draft, walk away for a while, even a day or two, and clear your mind. You’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes later and make edits to strengthen your argument or main idea.
    • Ask for the appropriate amount of help. While it is okay to have a parent or teacher read over your essay to make sure that the points you want to make are coming through or to offer minor suggestions, it is under no circumstances acceptable to allow anyone else to make significant changes, alter the voice or message, or write the essay for you. A dishonest application will be noticed and dismissed by admissions officers.
    • Edit. For the initial proofreading, read your essay out loud or backwards, sentence by sentence. Reading it in a form that you haven’t gotten used to will make it easier for you to spot grammatical and spelling errors. Then, ask for one family member or friend to read the essay out loud to you. Together, you can listen for things you missed with your eyes.

    The Three Types of Essay Questions

    There are three types of personal essays: the personal statement, the school statement, and the creative or intellectual statement. These are described below.

    The Personal Statement

    • Goal: The personal statement should be a window into your inner life. It is a chance to show schools who you are beyond your grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities. An honest, thoughtful reflection will help admissions officers understand your passions, goals, and relationships with family, friends, and other communities.
    • Example: “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.” – Common Application, 2015
    • Don’t attempt to sum up your life in one statement. Instead, try to pick one significant experience to elaborate on. Use details to paint a picture for the reader. Talk about how you were affected and what changed about your perception of the world. How did the experience bring you to where you are today?
    • Don’t reiterate your résumé. Let your résumé, transcripts, and test scores tell one story about you. Use your essay to tell a different one. Think of it not as a place to impress, but as a place to reflect.
    • Don’t talk about an experience that isn’t unique. While almost anyone could say that they struggled with history in high school, few could describe the influence that their great-grandfather had on their understanding of U.S. history in the context of World War II. Picking an experience or topic that will set you apart from other applicants is key to catching the eye of the admissions team.
    • Don’t write to impress. Schools don’t want you to write about what you think they want to hear. It’s easy for them to tell when you aren’t being genuine. Pick a topic that’s significant and meaningful to you even if it’s not “impressive.” Having personal awareness is impressive on its own.

    The School Statement

    • Goal: With your school statement, it should be clear that you have done your research on the school to which you are applying. Admissions counselors use the essay to assess your enthusiasm for the school and your commitment to discovering how the education will benefit you in the future. You want them to understand what you are drawn to so they can begin to envision you as a student on campus.
    • Example: “Which aspects of Tufts’ curriculum or undergraduate experience prompted your application? In short: Why Tufts?” – Tufts University, 2015
    • Don’t make general statements. It’s important to cite specifics instead of referencing the obvious. If a school is highly ranked and is known for its strong liberal arts curriculum, that’s dandy, but it’s common knowledge. Instead, talk about the teachers, programs, school traditions, clubs, and activities that put the school at the top of your list. If possible, reference any times you visited the campus, met with admissions counselors, or spoke with current students or alumni. Show them that you cared to do more than just a simple Google search.
    • Don’t use the same essay for every school. It may be tempting to reuse the same essay for every school, but your essay should not be so general that you can sub out each school’s name as if it were a fill-in-the-blank answer. Sure, you may be able to recycle some content that applies to multiple schools on your list, but be sure to round off each essay with tangible information about the institution (references to buildings on campus, your interview, the mascot, an exciting lecture series, etc.). This proves that you aren’t applying to the school on a whim.
    • Don’t overlook the facts. Verifying your statements about a school is essential. If you say that you are excited to become a theater major but the college did away with the program five years ago, admissions counselors may not take you seriously. Do yourself a favor and fact-check.

    The Creative/Intellectual Statement

    • Goal: Colleges ask students creative or intellectual questions to assess their ability to think critically, construct a cohesive argument, and use a nontraditional approach to solve a problem. In short, admissions counselors are looking for students who can think for themselves. They want to see that you are open to new ideas and can support your opinions with thoughtful explanations.
    • Example: “What’s so odd about odd numbers?” – University of Chicago, 2014; “Design your own three-and-a-half-week course and describe what you would do.” – Colorado College, 2014
    • Don’t tackle the world’s problems. There’s no need to impress colleges with your knowledge of Syria or the spread of Zika virus. Keep it simple.  Remember, colleges don’t expect you to be an expert in anything yet.
    • Don’t use too many quotes . Your essay is not a collection of other people’s opinions. Back up your arguments, but be selective when using quotes. If you do paraphrase or quote someone’s work, make sure to cite your sources.
    • Don’t make it abstract. In an attempt to be creative and original, it’s easy to cross over the line into absurdity, but it’s important to stay grounded.

    Page last updated: 05/2019

    Related topics:

    Understanding application requirements, the common, coalition, and universal college applications explained, how to write your résumé for college applications, asking for letters of recommendation, gap years and college applications, the community college application, acing your college interview.

    First-year applicants: Essays, activities & academics

    Rather than asking you to write one long essay, the MIT application consists of several short response questions and essays designed to help us get to know you. Remember that this is not a writing test. Be honest, be open, be authentic—this is your opportunity to connect with us.

    You should certainly be thoughtful about your essays, but if you’re thinking too much—spending a lot of time stressing or strategizing about what makes you “look best,” as opposed to the answers that are honest and easy—you’re doing it wrong.

    Our questions

    For the 2023–2024 application, we’re asking these short answer essay questions:

    • What field of study appeals to you the most right now? (Note: Applicants select from a drop-down list.) Tell us more about why this field of study at MIT appeals to you.
    • We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do simply for the pleasure of it.
    • How has the world you come from—including your opportunities, experiences, and challenges—shaped your dreams and aspirations?
    • MIT brings people with diverse backgrounds together to collaborate, from tackling the world’s biggest challenges to lending a helping hand. Describe one way you have collaborated with others to learn from them, with them, or contribute to your community together.
    • How did you manage a situation or challenge that you didn’t expect? What did you learn from it?

    Depending on the question, we’re looking for responses of approximately 100–200 words each. There is also one final, open-ended, additional-information text box where you can tell us anything else you think we really ought to know.

    Please use our form, not a resume, to list your activities. There is only enough space to list four things—please choose the four that mean the most to you and tell us a bit about them.

    Self-reported Coursework Form

    How you fill out this form will not make or break your application, so don’t stress about it. Use your best judgment—we’re simply trying to get a clear picture of your academic preparation by subject area. We see thousands of different transcripts, so it really helps us to view your coursework and grades in a consistent format.

    Here are a few quick tips to help you complete this section:

    • The self-reported coursework should be completed by students in U.S. school systems only. If you attend an international school, we’ll just use your transcript.
    • The information you provide does not replace your official high school transcript, which must be sent to us from your school to verify your self-reported information (in order to avoid accidental misrepresentation, it might help to have a copy of your high school transcript in front of you while completing this form).
    • Avoid abbreviations, if at all possible, and enter the names of your school courses by subject area. Please include all classes you have taken and are currently taking. If your courses were taken outside of your high school (at a local junior college or university, for example), tell us where they were taken in the “Class Name” field.
    • In the “Grade Received” field, list term and/or final grades for each class, as found on your school transcript (semester, trimester, quarter, final, etc.). Use one entry only per class. For example, it’s not necessary to use a separate entry for each semester of the same class. Place all grades for a class in the same field, separating grades with commas.

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    Columbia-Specific Application Questions

    Columbia-specific questions, also known as the writing supplement, tell the Committee on Admissions more about your academic, extracurricular and intellectual interests. These questions provide insight to your intellectual curiosity, habits of mind, love of learning and sense of self. They also allow the Committee on Admissions to learn more about you in your current community and why you feel Columbia’s distinctive experiences in and out of the classroom would be a good fit for your undergraduate education. We review your responses to these questions as an essential part of our holistic and contextual review , in order to get a fuller sense of you as a unique individual beyond the standard parts of the application.

    A Columbia admissions officer talks about the Columbia-specific application questions, also known as the writing supplement.

    2023-2024 Columbia-Specific Questions

    Instructions.

    For the list question that follows, there is a 100 word maximum. Please refer to the below guidance when answering this question:

    • Your response should be a list of items separated by commas or semicolons.
    • Items do not have to be numbered or in any specific order.
    • It is not necessary to italicize or underline titles of books or other publications.
    • No author names, subtitles or explanatory remarks are needed.

     For the four short answer questions, please respond in 150 words or fewer.

    • List a selection of texts, resources and outlets that have contributed to your intellectual development outside of academic courses, including but not limited to books, journals, websites, podcasts, essays, plays, presentations, videos, museums and other content that you enjoy.  ( 100 words or fewer)  
    • A hallmark of the Columbia experience is being able to learn and thrive in an equitable and inclusive community with a wide range of perspectives. Tell us about an aspect of your own perspective, viewpoint or lived experience that is important to you, and describe how it has shaped the way you would learn from and contribute to Columbia's diverse and collaborative community. (150 words or fewer)
    • In college/university, students are often challenged in ways that they could not predict or anticipate. It is important to us, therefore, to understand an applicant's ability to navigate through adversity. Please describe a barrier or obstacle you have faced and discuss the personal qualities, skills or insights you have developed as a result. (150 words or fewer)
    • Why are you interested in attending Columbia University? We encourage you to consider the aspect(s) that you find unique and compelling about Columbia. (150 words or fewer)
    • What attracts you to your preferred areas of study at Columbia College or Columbia Engineering? (150 words or fewer)
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    • Application and Essays

    If you would like to apply to Stanford, please do so online by submitting the Common Application .

    When you apply to Stanford, you apply to the university as a whole, not to a particular major, department or school. We encourage you to indicate prospective majors and career interests in the application, but please know you are not bound by these selections in any way.

    The Common Application includes essay prompts for your personal essay. In addition to the personal essay, we also require the Stanford Questions, which you can access and submit through the Common Application once you add Stanford University to your list of colleges.

    The essays are your chance to tell us about yourself in your own words; there are no right or wrong answers and you should allow your genuine voice to come through. These questions help us get to know you as a friend, future roommate and classmate.

    Stanford Questions

    We ask applicants to answer several short questions (limit 50 words each) and to write a short essay on each of the three topics below.

    Short Essay Questions

    There is a 100-word minimum and a 250-word maximum for each essay.

    • The Stanford community is deeply curious and driven to learn in and out of the classroom. Reflect on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning.
    • Virtually all of Stanford's undergraduates live on campus. Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommate—and us—get to know you better.
    • Please describe what aspects of your life experiences, interests and character would help you make a distinctive contribution as an undergraduate to Stanford University.
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    Essays & Short Answers

    • UT Austin Required Essay in the Common App, or
    • Topic A in ApplyTexas
    • Please keep your essay between 500–700 words (typically two to three paragraphs).

    Summer/Fall 2024 and Spring 2024 Essay Topic

    Tell us your story. What unique opportunities or challenges have you experienced throughout your high school career that have shaped who you are today?

    Submitting Your Essay

    You can submit your essays:

    • In conjunction with your application.
    • Using the Document Upload System in MyStatus.

    *Students do not need to submit other Common App essays. We’ll only review what is required,

    Short Answers

    • Submit the required short answers to prompts in your admission application.
    • Answers are limited to no more than 40 lines, or about 250–300 words per prompt, typically the length of one paragraph.

    Summer/Fall 2024 Prompts

    • Why are you interested in the major you indicated as your first-choice major?
    • Describe how your experiences, perspectives, talents, and/or your involvement in leadership activities (at your school, job, community or within your family) will help you to make an impact both in and out of the classroom while enrolled at UT.
    • The core purpose of The University of Texas at Austin is, “To Transform Lives for the Benefit of Society.” Please share how you believe your experience at UT Austin will prepare you to “Change the World” after you graduate.

    Optional Short Answer

    • Please share background on events or special circumstances that you feel may have impacted your high school academic performance.

    Spring 2024 Prompts

    Submitting your short answers.

    You can submit your short answers with either your Common App or Apply Texas application. Short answer responses must be completed in order to submit your application.

    • Transfer applicants must submit one essay responding to Topic A.
    • Applicants to the School of Architecture and Studio Art, Art Education and Art History are required to upload Topic D in addition to Topic A. 

    Essay Topics

    Topic a (required).

    The statement of purpose will provide an opportunity to explain any extenuating circumstances that you feel could add value to your application. You may also want to explain unique aspects of your academic background or valued experiences you may have had that relate to your academic discipline. The statement of purpose is not meant to be a listing of accomplishments in high school/college or a record of your participation in school-related activities. Rather, this is your opportunity to address the admission committee directly and to let us know more about you as an individual, in a manner that your transcripts and the other application information cannot convey.

    Topic D (School of Architecture majors and Studio Art, Art Education and Art History majors only)

    Personal interaction with objects, images and spaces can be so powerful as to change the way one thinks about particular issues or topics. For your intended area of study (architecture, art history, studio art, visual art studies/art education), describe an experience where instruction in that area or your personal interaction with an object, image or space effected this type of change in your thinking. What did you do to act upon your new thinking and what have you done to prepare yourself for further study in this area?

    Submitting Your Essay(s)

    Freshman requirements

    • Subject requirement (A-G)
    • GPA requirement
    • Admission by exception
    • English language proficiency
    • UC graduation requirements

    Additional information for

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    Transfer requirements

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    • Applying for admission
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    AP & Exam credits

    Applying as a freshman

    • Filling out the application
    • Dates & deadlines

    Personal insight questions

    • How applications are reviewed
    • After you apply

    Applying as a transfer

    Types of aid

    • Grants & scholarships
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    • You will have 8 questions to choose from. You must respond to only 4 of the 8 questions.
    • Each response is limited to a maximum of 350 words.
    • Which questions you choose to answer is entirely up to you. However, you should select questions that are most relevant to your experience and that best reflect your individual circumstances.

    Keep in mind

    • All questions are equal. All are given equal consideration in the application review process, which means there is no advantage or disadvantage to choosing certain questions over others.
    • There is no right or wrong way to answer these questions. It’s about getting to know your personality, background, interests and achievements in your own unique voice.  
    • Use the additional comments field if there are issues you'd like to address that you didn't have the opportunity to discuss elsewhere on the application. This shouldn't be an essay, but rather a place to note unusual circumstances or anything that might be unclear in other parts of the application. You may use the additional comments field to note extraordinary circumstances related to COVID-19, if necessary. 

    Questions & guidance

    Remember, the personal insight questions are just that—personal. Which means you should use our guidance for each question just as a suggestion in case you need help. The important thing is expressing who you are, what matters to you and what you want to share with UC. 

    1. Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes or contributed to group efforts over time. Things to consider: A leadership role can mean more than just a title. It can mean being a mentor to others, acting as the person in charge of a specific task, or taking the lead role in organizing an event or project. Think about what you accomplished and what you learned from the experience. What were your responsibilities?

    Did you lead a team? How did your experience change your perspective on leading others? Did you help to resolve an important dispute at your school, church, in your community or an organization? And your leadership role doesn't necessarily have to be limited to school activities. For example, do you help out or take care of your family? 2. Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side. Things to consider: What does creativity mean to you? Do you have a creative skill that is important to you? What have you been able to do with that skill? If you used creativity to solve a problem, what was your solution? What are the steps you took to solve the problem?

    How does your creativity influence your decisions inside or outside the classroom? Does your creativity relate to your major or a future career? 3. What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you developed and demonstrated that talent over time? Things to consider: If there is a talent or skill that you're proud of, this is the time to share it.You don't necessarily have to be recognized or have received awards for your talent (although if you did and you want to talk about it, feel free to do so). Why is this talent or skill meaningful to you?

    Does the talent come naturally or have you worked hard to develop this skill or talent? Does your talent or skill allow you opportunities in or outside the classroom? If so, what are they and how do they fit into your schedule? 4. Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced. Things to consider: An educational opportunity can be anything that has added value to your educational experience and better prepared you for college. For example, participation in an honors or academic enrichment program, or enrollment in an academy that's geared toward an occupation or a major, or taking advanced courses that interest you; just to name a few.

    If you choose to write about educational barriers you've faced, how did you overcome or strive to overcome them? What personal characteristics or skills did you call on to overcome this challenge? How did overcoming this barrier help shape who you are today? 5. Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement? Things to consider: A challenge could be personal, or something you have faced in your community or school. Why was the challenge significant to you? This is a good opportunity to talk about any obstacles you've faced and what you've learned from the experience. Did you have support from someone else or did you handle it alone?

    If you're currently working your way through a challenge, what are you doing now, and does that affect different aspects of your life? For example, ask yourself, How has my life changed at home, at my school, with my friends or with my family? 6. Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom. Things to consider:  Many students have a passion for one specific academic subject area, something that they just can't get enough of. If that applies to you, what have you done to further that interest? Discuss how your interest in the subject developed and describe any experience you have had inside and outside the classroom such as volunteer work, internships, employment, summer programs, participation in student organizations and/or clubs and what you have gained from your involvement.

    Has your interest in the subject influenced you in choosing a major and/or future career? Have you been able to pursue coursework at a higher level in this subject (honors, AP, IB, college or university work)? Are you inspired to pursue this subject further at UC, and how might you do that?

    7. What have you done to make your school or your community a better place? Things to consider: Think of community as a term that can encompass a group, team or a place like your high school, hometown or home. You can define community as you see fit, just make sure you talk about your role in that community. Was there a problem that you wanted to fix in your community?

    Why were you inspired to act? What did you learn from your effort? How did your actions benefit others, the wider community or both? Did you work alone or with others to initiate change in your community? 8. Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do you believe makes you a strong candidate for admissions to the University of California? Things to consider:  If there's anything you want us to know about you but didn't find a question or place in the application to tell us, now's your chance. What have you not shared with us that will highlight a skill, talent, challenge or opportunity that you think will help us know you better?

    From your point of view, what do you feel makes you an excellent choice for UC? Don't be afraid to brag a little.

    Writing tips

    Start early..

    Give yourself plenty of time for preparation, careful composition and revisions.

    Write persuasively.

    Making a list of accomplishments, activities, awards or work will lessen the impact of your words. Expand on a topic by using specific, concrete examples to support the points you want to make.

    Use “I” statements.

    Talk about yourself so that we can get to know your personality, talents, accomplishments and potential for success on a UC campus. Use “I” and “my” statements in your responses.

    Proofread and edit.

    Although you will not be evaluated on grammar, spelling or sentence structure, you should proofread your work and make sure your writing is clear. Grammatical and spelling errors can be distracting to the reader and get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate.

    Solicit feedback.

    Your answers should reflect your own ideas and be written by you alone, but others — family, teachers and friends can offer valuable suggestions. Ask advice of whomever you like, but do not plagiarize from sources in print or online and do not use anyone's words, published or unpublished, but your own.

    Copy and paste.

    Once you are satisfied with your answers, save them in plain text (ASCII) and paste them into the space provided in the application. Proofread once more to make sure no odd characters or line breaks have appeared.

    This is one of many pieces of information we consider in reviewing your application. Your responses can only add value to the application. An admission decision will not be based on this section alone.

    Need more help?

    Download our worksheets:

    • English [PDF]
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    Short Answer Mistakes

    Admissions Officers See These Short Answer Mistakes All Too Frequently

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    Many college applications, including schools that use the Common Application , will ask you to write an essay in which you to elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. These essays are often short—150 words is typical—but you shouldn't underestimate their importance. The short answer essay is your opportunity to single out and discuss something that you love. While brief, the short answer provides the admissions folks with a window into your passions and what it is that makes you tick. The short answer section certainly carries less weight than the main personal essay, but it does matter. To make sure your short answer shines, steer clear of these common problems.

    Unfortunately, it's easy to write a short paragraph that doesn't actually say anything. College applicants often answer the short answer in broad, unfocused terms. "Swimming has made me a better person." "I have taken more of a leadership role in my life because of theater." "Orchestra has impacted me in many positive ways." Phrases such as these really don't say much. How are you a better person? How are you a leader? How exactly has orchestra impacted you?

    When you discuss the importance of an activity, do so in concrete and specific terms. Did swimming teach you leadership skills, or did your involvement in a sport make you much better at time management? Has playing a string instrument allowed you to meet different types of people and learn the true importance of collaboration? Make sure it's clear WHY the activity is important to you.

    A short answer essay, by definition, is  short . There's no room to say the same thing twice. Surprisingly, however, many college applicants do just that. Check out Gwen's short answer to see an example of repetition that weakens the response.

    Be careful not to say you love something over and over again. Dig in and provide some self-analysis. WHY do you love the activity? What separates it from other things that you do? In what specific ways have you grown because of the activity?

    Clichés and Predictable Language

    A short answer will sound tired and recycled if it begins to talk about the "thrill" of making the winning goal, the "heart and soul" that go into an activity, or the "joy of giving rather than receiving." If you can picture thousands of other college applicants using the same phrases and ideas, you need to sharpen your approach to your topic.

    Make the essay personal and introspective, and all of that tired, over-used language should disappear. Remember the purpose of the short answer: the college admissions folks want to get to know you better. If you use generic and cliché language, you will have failed in that task.

    Thesaurus Abuse

    If you have a huge vocabulary, demonstrate your skill with your SAT verbal score. The best short answers employ language that is simple, clear, and engaging. Don't test the patience of your reader by bogging down your short answer with excessive and unnecessary multi-syllabic words.

    Think about the type of writing you most enjoy to read. Is it filled with obscure and tongue-twisting language, or is the prose clear, engaging, and fluid?

    When elaborating on an extracurricular activity , it's tempting to talk about how important you were to the group or team. Be careful. It's easy to sound like a braggart or egotist if you paint yourself as the hero who saved the team from defeat or solved all the personnel problems in the school play. The college admissions officers will be much more impressed with humility than hubris. See Doug's essay for an example of how ego can weaken a short answer.

    Failure to Follow the Directions

    An important skill needed for college success is an ability to read and follow instructions. If a college has asked you for a 150-word short answer essay, don't send them a 250-word essay. If the prompt asks you to write about a situation in which you gave back to your community, don't write about your love of softball. And, of course, if the prompt asks you to explain WHY an activity is important to you, do more than just describe the activity. 

    Just because this is a short supplemental essay doesn't mean you should bang it out quickly without careful proof reading, editing, and revision. Every piece of writing that you submit to a college needs to be polished. Make sure your short answer essay is free of grammatical and punctuation errors, and spend some time improving the essay's style as well.

    • How Long Should Your Common Application Short Answer Essay Be?
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    • Sample College Application Short Answer Essay
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    • Common Supplemental Essay Mistakes
    • Common Application Short Answer Essay on Entrepreneurship
    • How to Ace Your University of Wisconsin Personal Statements
    • Tips for Writing a Winning College Application Essay
    • Bad Essay Topics for College Admissions
    • Common Application Essay Option 2 Tips: Learning from Failure
    • 2020-21 Common Application Essay Option 4—Solving a Problem
    • The 2021-22 Common Application Essay Prompts
    • What Are the Best Extracurricular Activities?
    • 5 Tips for a College Admissions Essay on an Important Issue

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    The Short Answer

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    “What excites you intellectually, really?” (250 Characters)

    “Think about a disappointment you have experienced. What was your response?” (250 Characters)

    “Suite-style living – four to six students sharing a set of rooms – may be an integral part of your Yale College experience. What would you contribute to the dynamic of your suite?” (250 Characters)

    “What do you wish you were better at being or doing?” (250 Characters)

    250 characters is not a lot of characters, which means the challenge of answering these questions lies half in generating honest, unique and clever ideas, and the other in being concise. Humorous answers can also have heavy impact here. Our advice to you: brainstorm. Think of as many ideas as you possibly can for each short answer and get them all on the page. When narrowing down your choices, think about representing a range of your personality traits and interests. If you say the overlap of food and science excites you intellectually, don’t say you will bring an immersion circulator into your dorm room to cook ramen for your roommates sous vide (though that would be awesome – please be our roommate). Use that space to elaborate on something totally new that admissions officers might enjoy knowing. Once your general plan for your answers is solidified you will be able to cut and condense your way under the limit.

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    Written by CEA HQ

    Category: Admissions , College Admissions , Essay Tips , Essay Writing , Supplemental Essays

    Tags: 2017-18 college applications , 2017-18 common application , Admissions , admissions essay , admissions help , advice , application , college applications , college essay , college essay advice , college essay help , common app , common application , supplemental essays

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    short answer questions college application

    Tackling the UT Austin Short Answer Application Prompts

    When UT Austin introduced three short answer essays to their application in 2017, many students felt panicked. Applications are already writing-intensive, so adding even more required writing was an overwhelming prospect. But when it comes down to it, these questions are intended to help students. How? By giving them more opportunity to showcase their fit for UT and their first-choice major.

    A student's expanded resume provides the “data” on their achievements and experiences. Their essay and short answers, in contrast, show that they're a living, thinking, feeling human being, someone who cares about what they do and has big dreams for their future. No admissions committee expects a student to have their life 100% planned out right now—the whole point of college is to give students time, space, and resources to learn and explore. But they do want to know that if they admit someone, that student is going to take advantage of everything they offer.

    General Tips for the UT Austin Short Answer Application Essays

    • Just answer the question. Seems simple, but it's important to keep in mind: these are not trick questions. UT Admissions is asking students exactly what they want to know. Students should read the question carefully and be sure they're addressing it directly.
    • Be succinct. Students should absolutely use illustrative examples where appropriate, but they can save their creative juices for Essay A. The short answers are more about providing extra information to the admissions committee.
    • Always keep first-choice major in mind. The short answers are a great place to provide additional evidence for why a student is a good fit for their first-choice major.

    The short answers on the UT application fit together to create the perfect opportunity for a student showcase themselves as an active, engaged future member of the UT community. Here, we'll walk you through each short answer question and offer some tips on how to tackle them.

    REQUIRED SHORT ANSWER 1: First-Choice Major

    Short Answer Prompt

    Why are you interested in the major you indicated as your first-choice major?

    HOW TO APPROACH THIS QUESTION

    In this short answer response, students need to communicate to the admissions committee what they personally find engaging and exciting about their proposed field of study. The admissions committee does not expect student to already be an expert in their field or to have their future career in this field planned out. But they do want to know that the student didn't just open the course catalog and pick a major at random.

    Remember, the student should demonstrate how they specifically—not just a generic student—will take advantage of the opportunities available to them.

    So rather than writing a dry sentence like “I plan to apply for Department X's summer research grant,” a student should write a sentence or two describing a burning question they hope to answer through their research: “With the support of Department X's summer research grants, I could deepen my understanding of [insert specific topic you're passionate about] and finally discover an answer to [burning question]—something I've been fascinated by since my sophomore year internship at [relevant workplace].” The first sentence could just as easily apply to a thousand different applicants. The second is focused, detailed, and could only have been written by—and about—one student.

    Students' responses to this question should demonstrate the following:

    • They have already begun exploring this subject on their own, independently and/or through organized opportunities (e.g., classes, summer programs, internships).
    • They have a sense of how this major fits into their long-term goals.
    • They have thought about why UT would be an excellent place to study this subject.

    QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND FREEWRITING

    Students should be careful not to simply relist classes, activities, and awards from their resume. Instead, they can highlight two or three experiences they found especially meaningful, and reflect on how those experiences shaped their interest in their major. Here are some questions they can ask themselves as they brainstorm:

    • How did this learning experience change the way you understand the world? Did you learn about new problems you hadn't been aware of? Gain a new perspective on your own life, culture, or community? Learn new skills or methods for solving problems?
    • How did you grow from this learning experience? Did it spark new realizations or spark you to take action in some way? Give you new creative outlets for expressing yourself? Open doors to careers or fields of study you hadn't previously considered?

    PERSONALIZING THE ANSWER

    If a student hasn't had the opportunity to participate in summer programs or take coursework directly related to their first-choice major, they might need to get a little more creative here. Remember: learning experiences don't have to be formally organized. Taking the initiative to explore a topic independently can demonstrate to colleges that a student is self-motivated and intellectually curious. Here are some ways students might independently explore their interests:

    • Reading books and other publications related to their interests
    • Watching relevant lectures on YouTube or listening to podcasts
    • Starting conversations with friends, family, or classmates about what they're learning
    • Finding ways to incorporate interests into assignments (e.g., researching famous social psychology experiments for an AP U.S. History project)
    • Talking with a teacher or reaching out to a professional in their field to learn more
    • Gathering information from real world experiences, even if they don't seem directly connected to the major. (For example, if a student is an aspiring accounting major who currently works a retail job, they might pay close attention to how a small business handles expenses compared to a large chain. Or, if they're an aspiring education major who cares for younger siblings, they might help their siblings with their homework assignments and come up with creative ideas to teach them difficult concepts.)

    Bottom line: Students should be sure that their answer to this question doesn't regurgitate information from their resume and instead offers new insight into their personal connection with their first-choice major.

    The college essay & resume for UT Austin process can feel overwhelming. Our program provides an experienced coach and a proven framework, working one-on-one to reduce the stress so the student can tell a compelling story.

    short answer questions college application

    Our program for students applying to UT Austin includes:

    • Guiding students through the UT expanded resume development process
    • Managing your student’s essay timeline for one long essay and four school-specific supplemental essays
    • Coaching students through a targeted set of college essays, including one long essay  and four school-specific supplemental essays
    • Providing students with suggested edits and proofing for this targeted set of college essays
    • Review of essays and application by our internal admissions committee

    Your student will be carefully matched with a coach based on personality, working style, and first-choice major—it’s just one of the many ways we modify our proven process to meet individual student needs

    REQUIRED SHORT ANSWER 2: Leadership

    Describe how your experiences, perspectives, talents, and/or your involvement in leadership activities (at your school, job, community, or within your family) will help you to make an impact both in and out of the classroom while enrolled at UT. (300 Words)

    The trick to answering this question: don't get too hung up on conventional definitions of "leadership." American popular culture tends to define leaders as people who have official titles, including Class President or Varsity Captain. We associate leadership with particular character traits, like self-confidence or charisma. And we may expect leaders to feel comfortable doing things like giving orders, delivering speeches, and making high-stakes decisions.

    But there are only so many official titles to go around—and the truth is, many of us have talents and temperaments that are better suited to different (though equally important) social roles. A community or team requires many kinds of people and many varied skill sets to function effectively.

    Think of it this way: if a varsity football team had 20 captains, or a senior class had 400 class presidents, it would be utter chaos. Nothing would ever get accomplished because there would be no one to fill other roles that are vital to the group's functioning.

    A university community is the same way. UT doesn't want to admit thousands of leaders who are all carbon copies of one another. They want to create a heterogeneous community whose members contribute different strengths, experiences, and perspectives. So, if the traditional definition of leadership doesn't resonate with a student, they shouldn't try to fit their experiences into that mold. If they do, they'll likely wind up with a response that's vague on details and padded with generic statements. At best, they'll come off as a somewhat mediocre leader by traditional standards; at worst, they risk distorting or misrepresenting what they have actually achieved.

    Instead, students should use this short answer response to explore what they personally contribute to the communities they belong to. They can create their own definition of leadership—one that is unique to their values, their experiences, and their way of walking in the world. Then, using examples drawn from their life, they can help the admissions committee understand why their impact on their communities is so important.

    In the last part of the prompt, students are asked explicitly to explain how they'll "make an impact both in and out of the classroom while enrolled at UT." It's critical for the student to speak directly to this part of the prompt and to explain how their past experiences, talents, perspectives, or involvement will help them make UT a better place—both in the classroom as well as in the dorms, in student organizations, and in any other area the student might be involved.

    Remember that leadership doesn't have to be assertive, confrontational, or even especially vocal. Yes, it can be difficult to quantify quieter, less showy forms of leadership on a resume (there's no "Presidential Gold Award for Listening"). But if you've ever been in a meeting where everyone constantly interrupts each other, or started a job where nobody has bothered to explain to you what you're supposed to be doing, you'll understand just how vital these skills are.

    Students may not be able to quantify these experiences or contributions on their resume, but their short answer can help the admissions committee understand what the student's own version of leadership looks like and how it positively impacts the communities to which they belong.

    Note: If your student is still stuck or having a hard time describing their own leadership style, taking the Belbin Team Roles Test can be a good starting place.

    If a student's version of leadership does match up with traditional definitions of leadership, that's great. In that case, their short answer response should highlight moments in their leadership career that were especially significant or meaningful to them. These might be challenges or setbacks they had to tackle, conflicts they had to resolve, or opportunities they embraced, even if it meant stepping out of their comfort zone.

    Remember, the goal here isn't for students to rattle off a list of achievements from their resume. Instead, they should demonstrate that they've reflected thoughtfully on their past experiences, and that they've learned something from those experiences that will help them be a good member of the UT community.

    REQUIRED SHORT ANSWER 3: Why UT?

    The core purpose of The University of Texas at Austin is, "To Transform Lives for the Benefit of Society."  Please share how you believe your experience at UT Austin will prepare you to "Change the World" after you graduate. (300 Words)

    This question offers applicants the chance to tell the committee how studying at UT Austin will help them impact the world for the better. A student's impact could take the form of a chosen career, service/volunteer work, advocacy, leadership, or other creative or intellectual endeavors.

    The key here is to combine two elements:

    The student's reflections on how they want to impact the world (including the lives of others) for the better.

    The student's considerations of how their experiences at UT might enable them to do so.

    Particularly when it comes to talking about future opportunities at UT, students should be specific,

    demonstrating their knowledge of the university and the possibilities it will afford them to use their education for social good.

    If students have done any brainstorming for short answer 2, they've already spent a fair amount of time thinking about the role they play in the various communities or groups they belong to. Now they need to think about why they've chosen to be involved in those activities. What core values have guided these choices, and in looking to the future, how do those values inform the impact students hope to have on their community—and even the world?

    As students think about how to make their answer to this question stand out, they should keep in mind that certain kinds of social contributions—such as helping underprivileged children or working to end world hunger—may strike the admissions committee as somewhat generic. They're incredible endeavors, yes, but the goal here is to stand out from other applicants who have similar lofty goals.

    For this reason, students should think about how they can frame their potential contributions to society in a way that distinguishes them from the thousands of other students who also want to have a positive impact. Here are some questions to consider:

    How has their past experience put them in a position to realize their positive values, in the UT community and beyond?

    What contributions can they, personally, make to their communities—and how can a UT education help them do that?

    What, specifically, about UT Austin did the student connect with, in terms of how it would help them contribute to the greater good?

    REQUIRED SHORT ANSWER: Academics

    Please share background on events or special circumstances that you feel may have impacted your high school academic performance, including the possible effects of COVID-19.

    This question provides students with the opportunity to explain any academic missteps, family circumstances, or medical issues that may have impacted them during high school, particularly over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The student shouldn't go into every detail of what happened. Instead, they should state the basic facts—just enough to convey the relevant circumstances—and then explain the impact and what they learned from the experience (at least a third of the answer should be about what the student has learned).

    The most important thing to remember is: no matter what the situation, frame any answer to this question in a positive way.

    A student's answer to this question will likely already be personal—it is, after all, describing a unique event or set of circumstances. But students shouldn't let the unique experience be the only "personal" part of the answer. By personalizing their reflections on the lessons they've learned as a result of hardship, students can demonstrate growth and self-knowledge.

    You may also be interested in:

    College Admissions Trends for The Class of 2021

    How to Choose Who Writes Your UT Austin College Recommendation Letters

    7 "Hidden Gem" Majors at UT Austin

    5-Point Scorecard To Make Sure Your Apply Texas Essay A Stands Out

    Everything You Need to Know About Honors Programs at the University of Texas at Austin

    Note: These services and programs are in no way related to the University of Texas. The University does not endorse the program or College MatchPoint’s services.

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    September 15, 2023

    Tips for Answering the Yale University Supplemental Essays and Short Answer Questions [2023-2024]

    short answer questions college application

    Not surprisingly, Yale University is consistently ranked among the top universities in the world. It accepts the Common Application, Coalition Application, and QuestBridge Application. All three applications require a personal statement essay, and to apply to Yale using any of them, candidates must also submit additional Yale-specific short answers and a writing supplement. This prestigious Ivy League school prides itself on providing undergraduates with an exceptional foundation in liberal arts education that focuses on cultivating knowledge and leadership skills. The supplemental writing responses are a chance for you to convey how the Yale experience might augment your passions and perspectives in terms of learning, living, and preparing for the future. 

    If Yale is your first choice, it offers a Single-Choice Early Action program (also known as Restrictive Early Action) for freshman applicants that has a November 1 deadline. Check the Yale admissions website for details. Under this program, Yale will notify you of its admissions decision in mid-December. The deadline for submission of applications for regular action is January 2. 

    Before you begin writing your essay(s), thoroughly research all Yale has to offer and consider how those opportunities bolster your objectives. This is the time to get excited about the prospect of attending Yale! Visit the website and/or campus, speak with students and alumni, and envision yourself as a part of the school’s exceptional learning community. The curriculum at Yale is designed to provide both breadth and depth of study as the foundation for students to pursue inspired lives and careers. The university strives to foster independent critical thinking. Yale is one of the only universities that allow you to try your classes before you finalize your schedule. The first ten days of each semester are an opportunity to visit a number of classes to determine which are most interesting to you! Also, keep in mind that applicants are not admitted to a specific major, and students do not declare a major until the end of their sophomore year. 

    Located in the small town of New Haven, Connecticut, in an urban setting that is primarily a residential campus, Yale offers a supportive community feel through its system of 14 residential colleges. This configuration, complete with its own residential deans and masters, creates a sense of intimacy within the larger university. Residential deans serve as primary personal and academic advisors. Masters work with students to shape the residential community. This is a powerfully dynamic way of bringing together students and faculty. Think about how this structure can support your intellectual growth. 

    Short Answer Questions– Applicants submitting the Coalition Application, Common Application, or QuestBridge Application will respond to respond to the following short answer questions:

    Students at Yale have time to explore their academic interests before committing to one or more major fields of study. Many students either modify their original academic direction or change their minds entirely. As of this moment, what academic areas seem to fit your interests or goals most comfortably? Please indicate up to three from the list provided.

    This is not a trick question. With approximately 80 majors to choose from, Yale is trying to gauge your unique interests. Indicate a maximum of three of your top academic areas of study.

    Tell us about a topic or idea that excites you and is related to one or more academic areas you selected above. Why are you drawn to it? (200 words or fewer)

    This prompt allows you to explain how your academic interests relate to the fields of study available at Yale. The challenge in this response is to discuss your rationale for your selected areas in less than 200 words. Consider your experience thus far in these areas. What sparked your interest? What burning question or issue motivates you? How might these concentrations support your long-term goals? Provide some context to support your interests and convey your enthusiasm.

    What is it about Yale that has led you to apply? (125 words or fewer) 

    Here again, you are under significant word limitations. Don’t underestimate this prompt. It is extremely important to demonstrate good fit in your discussion – what unique aspects of an education at Yale attract you? This is an opportunity to convey your enthusiasm for a potential Yale experience.  Sometimes making a list can help you get started. Then review your list and make sure each reason relates specifically to Yale. Consider both what Yale has to offer you and what you might be able to offer the Yale community. 

    The Yale site notes that QuestBridge applicants will complete these short answer questions via the Yale QuestBridge Questionnaire, which candidates can access through the Admissions Status Portal after their application has been received.

    Additional Short Answer Questions– Applicants submitting the Coalition Application or Common Application will also respond to respond to the following short answer questions, in no more than 200 characters (approximately 35 words): 

    What inspires you?

    This response touches on what motivates you as well as what you find valuable. Discuss something that makes a difference in your way of thinking and subsequently influences your actions and/or behavior. Think about what your response might convey about your character. 

    If you could teach any college course, write a book, or create an original piece of art of any kind, what would it be?

    Use your imagination! Consider a creative title to set the tone for your course, book, or art piece. This is a chance to infuse some fun and creativity into your response. Do you have a unique set of skills or interests that might contribute to some expertise on a particular topic? What is your specialty? Be careful to avoid any controversial statements. You never know how your suggestion might be interpreted, so try to steer clear of potentially offensive topics.

    Other than a family member, who is someone who has had a significant influence on you? What has been the impact of their influence? 

    You can select just about anyone, other than a family member! This could be someone famous (dead or alive) or your next-door neighbor. The essential component is explaining how they influenced you and the extent of their impact. Is there something you admire about them? Did/do they motivate or inspire you in some way? Have they changed or encouraged you in some way? Keep the focus on you and the result(s) of their impact. Remember to consider what your response might reflect about your values and character.

    What is something about you that is not included anywhere else in your application?

    Before you respond, take some time to review your overall application materials for Yale. You should share something meaningful about yourself that you didn’t mention elsewhere. Your response provides a glimpse into the sort of person you might be within the Yale community, so consider what you might contribute and what you hope to gain. You might mention something you always wanted to explore or learn how to do – perhaps something you are not very good at but love to do. Whatever you select will reflect something about your character. How might what you shared relate to attending Yale? 

    Essay 

    Applicants submitting the Coalition Application or Common Application will respond to one of the following prompts in 400 words or fewer.

    • Reflect on a time you discussed an issue important to you with someone holding an opposing view. Why did you find the experience meaningful?

    This prompt asks you to reflect on a time when you dealt with conflicting views. This discussion might have made you feel vulnerable expressing your viewpoint. How do you engage in a civil exchange about controversial or emotional issues? What was the issue, and why was it important to you? Explain both your position and that of the other person involved. What was at stake? How did you work through the conflict and come to an understanding of the other person’s perspective? Were you able to convey your perspective? What was the outcome? Did you change your stance or clarify and strengthen your position? Most importantly, why was the experience you shared important to you? What did you learn from this process? Your response to this prompt helps to shed light on how you learn, the topics you are drawn to, how you interact with others with diverse perspectives, and how you process the world around you. 

    • Reflect on your membership in a community to which you feel connected. Why is this community meaningful to you? You may define community however you like.

    This prompt asks you to place yourself within the context of a particular community. What is this community? Consider how being a part of this community shapes or supports you. The focus is on why you feel connected to this community. This is an opportunity to discuss your role in just about ANY community and the impact you had on it and vice versa. It also allows you to demonstrate your ability to reflect on your community from different perspectives. Topics can vary from a school club to a larger cultural or religious community to the global community, but community is however you define it. Your goal is to EXPLAIN your relationship to the community and convey WHY that community is valuable to you. What did you learn about yourself through your connection to this community? How might this community inspire, support, or ground you and vice versa? What might this reflect about your character or place in the world? How might these experiences prepare you for this next stage of your life?

    • Reflect on an element of your personal experience that you feel will enrich your college. How has it shaped you?

    If you haven’t already done so, take a detailed look at Yale’s residential college system. The 14 residential colleges strive to create a more intimate living and learning atmosphere that fosters a stronger sense of community connection. Incoming students are assigned to a college and remain affiliated with that college for the duration of their time at Yale.  As stated on the school’s website, “each college is a microcosm of the larger student population.” Identify something about your personal experience that might provide a different or unique perspective to enhance your college community. Then discuss how what you shared shaped you, motivated you, influenced your sense of identity, or reflects something essential about you.

    The tone of your essays should convey your drive and enthusiasm for learning in general and at Yale in particular. Share your perspectives in your own voice. Be thoughtful and reflective. 

    Applicants to Yale have an exceedingly competitive profile. Yale received 52,250 undergraduate applications for the Class of 2027. Overall, only 2,275 or 4.35% of applicants were admitted, and 95% of them ranked in the top 10% of their high school class. Although Yale continued to offer test optional admissions for the Class of 2027, you can consider the test scores from the Class of 2024 – average SAT scores over 1500 and average ACT scores of approximately 33 – to get a sense of your likely cohort. 

    It is easy to get overwhelmed by the numbers. At this point, it is heartening to bear in mind that Yale is dedicated to a holistic application evaluation process for admission. Your short answer responses and supplemental essay(s) facilitate a more comprehensive review of you as a prospective student at Yale. The admissions committee takes the time to read your responses carefully. Make sure you allow yourself appropriate time for thoughtful reflection and effective writing. Use your writing supplement to set you apart from your peers. The best approach is to be true to yourself and communicate your thoughts, experiences, hopes, and dreams in a way that highlights your genuine enthusiasm for the extraordinary educational journey at Yale!

    Marie Todd admissions expert headshot

    Marie Todd has been involved in college admissions for more than 20 years. Marie has counseled applicants to top colleges and evaluated more than 5,000 applications for the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts; College of Engineering; School of Kinesiology; School of Nursing; and Taubman College of Architecture. Want Marie to help you get Accepted? Click here to get in touch .

    Related Resources:

    • Five Fatal Flaws to Avoid in Your College Application Essays , a free guide
    • Common App and Supplemental Essay Tips
    • Make the Most of Your Common App Activities Summary

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    • Short Answer Questions

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    General Information

    The BC Foundation Scholarship application has an essay style format with seven short answer questions.

    Your responses to these questions are your chance to share your story and give readers an opportunity to see how a scholarship would help you achieve your stated educational and professional goals. Your responses will provide evidence of your intellectual and creative achievements, and show your writing ability. This is how the reader of your application will gain the strongest feel for who you are as a person and see what sets you apart from other applicants.

    Your responses should be treated as the equivalent of a face-to-face interview. A well-written response adds clarity, richness, and meaning to the information collected in other parts of your application. It is also an opportunity to explain how factors outside your school environment have enhanced or impeded your ability to maximize available academic and intellectual opportunities.

    • Returning Applicants

    If you’re a returning applicant, you will need to provide answers to the short answer questions again.

    While there is no one correct way to write a personal statement, here are some tips that are universally applicable:

    Start on your responses early

    Give yourself time to think about your topics, and carefully consider the rationale behind each question.

    Be clear. Be focused. Be organized.

    Make sure each response follows a logical structure. Try to think about how it may sound to an audience who doesn’t know you. Getting input from people you trust—teachers, friends, relatives—can help you get different perspectives on how your responses affect those who are reading it. Avoiding long, drawn-out essay responses will not only help keep your reader’s attention but will also show that you were thinking about your writing.

    Get personal

    The readers want to get a sense of who you are, and the only way to do this is to share a bit. This is your chance to let the reader know what you think they should know about you so that they can make an informed decision.

    Make it authentic

    Your responses should showcase who you are and what you care about, not what you believe the readers want to hear. Remember that those reading your application will be reading many other applications as well, and will be able to tell right away if what you are writing is honest and authentic.

    Be careful with humor and clichés

    What might seem funny or ironic to you might not seem that way to someone who doesn’t know you. Also, it can be difficult to distinguish humor and irony from the written word; it’s easier in conversation, when you can hear someone’s tone, along with their pauses and emphasis.

    Remember that the personal statement is an opportunity for you to give a complete picture of yourself. Don’t allow clichés to speak for you.

    Be reflective

    Your responses aren’t effective simply because they chronicle difficult circumstances. Strong short answer responses should show that you have reflected upon and learned from your experiences and achievements. Ideally, you will be able to show progression towards a clear perspective of how you see the world, and what direction you are headed towards in the future.

    An effective short answer response gives a clear sense of your personal qualities and how you have used and developed them in response to your opportunities and challenges.

    Use specific examples to illustrate your ideas

    Being too vague or writing too generally will not make your responses memorable. Many student responses discuss initiative, but only some use concrete examples of demonstrated motivation and leadership.

    But examples are only one part of the equation. You also need to show how you have assigned meaning to your experiences and how you have grown from them. Prove that you have a sense of who you are, where you are going, and how you are going to use your education and your experiences to accomplish your goals. Although some events have long-term or even lifetime ramifications, it is usually better to focus on recent events because they shed more light on who you are right now.

    Give yourself plenty of time for revisions

    Personal statements should go through several drafts before submission. Read your writing to others, and revise for clarity in content and in style. Pay attention to rules of correct grammar and punctuation, and don’t forget to spell-check. We also recommend that you make use of campus resources (such as professors, teaching assistants, advisors, the Student Success Center, classmates, or friends) to gain insight on how to improve your responses.

    We recommend that you type out your responses to the short answer questions in a Word document to ensure safekeeping if you need to abandon the application before submission.

    Learn More About BC Foundation Scholarships

    We want to make the application process as easy for you as possible. Learn about how to handle recommendations , write about extracurricular activities , and what happens if your scholarship application is successful . Also, get answers to frequently asked questions , and review the list of important dates to remember.

    We hope these tips will help you get organized and will inspire you. Your short answer responses are the best tool you have to show us the individual gifts you have to offer.

    Last Updated October 12, 2023

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    Short Answer Questions

    Tips for The Full Circle and TCU Scholarship applications

    These sections are your chance to share your story and give readers an opportunity to see how a scholarship would help you achieve your stated educational and professional goals and require you to discuss three elements: an obstacle that you have overcome in order to get to where you are now; your educational goals and how this scholarship will help you achieve those; and how your education will help your Native community.

    We recommend that you type out your responses to the short-answer question in a Word document (like this template) to ensure safe keeping if you need to abandon the application before submission.

    To enhance this section, start by creating an outline of your thoughts and initial answers to each question. The outline does not need to look perfect, but it will allow you to start thinking about and organizing these questions and how they relate to each other.

    Here are two sample outlines to help get you started:

    • A Visual Outline for those who prefer to see the outline as part of the big picture.
    • A Textual Outline for those who prefer a more linear approach.
    • Whichever outline you choose, remember that they are not meant to be exhaustive. They are designed to help you organize your thoughts and begin planning for writing your final responses.
    • There is no right or wrong answer for these questions, but it is very important that you provide a thorough response to each short-answer question.

    As always, don’t forget to check your grammar and spelling!

    NOTE: The short-answer section is ONLY available in the application, not in the profile. This means you must have all of your application ready (INCLUDING YOUR TRANSCRIPT READY TO UPLOAD) when you answer these questions; otherwise your answers will not be saved.

    Related Pages

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    News & events, getting my ged.

    By Shania L Malaterre, Turtle Mountain Community College GED Graduate

    Shania L Malaterre, Turtle Mountain Community College GED Graduate

    My name is Shania Malaterre, and I am a recent GED graduate from the program at Turtle Mountain Community College (TMCC) in Belcourt, North Dakota. I have lived in this area pretty much my whole life. I am twenty-four years old and a single mom of two beautiful little girls. My girls were my biggest inspiration for getting back into school; I believe that I must take the first step so I can show them the next. I came to TMCC years ago to try and finish getting my GED, but life happened and took me for a crazy twist. I still tried every chance I got, but not being in school for so long, I got discouraged and just felt like I couldn’t do it. So, I moved away to try for a better life and a fresh new start. However, I still felt like I had failed because I had never graduated from high school and hadn’t succeeded in getting my GED. This just kept me constantly thinking and wondering, “When will I graduate? Will I even graduate?” and “Am I going to live the rest of my life wishing I had finished?” All those thoughts and feelings got to be too much after so many years, so I moved back home to try again.

    One day, I was leaving an appointment and I started getting an anxious feeling as I pulled up to a stop sign. It was like my brain and body were trying to tell me what I should do next, so I stayed stopped for a minute. I could either turn left and go home, or I could turn right and go to Belcourt. When I thought about turning left, something said, “You’ve got more you’ve got to take care of”. Suddenly, I have these options: go home or do something else. Except the feeling of wanting to do something else was more like that urgent feeling you get when you’re about to miss an appointment or be late for work. So, I followed that feeling; I turned toward Belcourt and as I got closer, the feeling got worse and worse. That feeling didn’t go away until I pulled up to the old college and signed up for my GED.

    I felt so much better about myself after that. It was like all this weight was being lifted off my shoulders. After those first two weeks, I felt like a new person. It felt so good to get up and go to class every morning, because every day I would get greeted by the staff saying, “Good morning! You ready to get that diploma?” and “I knew you were going to pass that test – you’re so smart!” Hearing stuff like that was just great and made me feel proud of myself for getting as far as I had. But, since I wasn’t working, I had to worry about how I was going to pay for gas to get to class every day. So, I asked Sandi, the adult education program director, if there was any support to help with this challenge, and she connected me with the Wiichihin program. The Wiichihin program is specifically for students that are coming to class and need help with transportation and/or meal costs. How awesome is it to have support like that?

    Coming to TMCC’s adult education program was a smart choice for me, because now I have my GED and even found my passion for learning again! I graduated in December 2023, and I can honestly say that I couldn’t have done it without all the positive support from my family and my instructors. A huge thanks to Sandi, Bill, Harold, Scott, and Jen for all their help and positive support! After all these years of trying over and over, they finally got to see me graduate and continue on to college! I must also give a huge thanks to TMCC’s Wiichihin program, supported by the American Indian College Fund, for making it so much easier to get back and forth to class. Thank you all!

    American Indian College Fund Offers Three-Year American Indian Law School Scholarship to Attend Harvard Law School

    Applications close march 25, 2024.

    Denver, Colo.—February 7, 2024– A law degree is foundational for Native leaders to ensure the rights of their sovereign Nations and citizens. Law school graduates work as lawyers, in public policy, government, law enforcement, education, and more. Thanks to a $1 million gift from an anonymous donor, the American Indian College Fund is awarding its third American Indian Law School Scholarship for a student entering Harvard Law School in the fall of 2024.

    The scholarship covers tuition and all costs of attendance for an American Indian or Alaska Native law student enrolled in Harvard Law School’s three-year course of study. The scholarship goal is to eliminate financial hurdles to earning a Juris Doctor degree at Harvard Law School. Applications are open to American Indian or Alaska Natives who are enrolled tribal members or lineal descendants of an enrolled parent or grandparent.

    Samantha Maltais

    Samantha Maltais, an enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah located on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, is the current scholarship recipient. An American Indian College Fund student ambassador and a 2018 Dartmouth College graduate, Maltais was an American Indian College Fund Full Circle Scholar throughout her academic career. She will be the first Wampanoag tribal citizen to graduate from Harvard Law School this spring.

    Maltais’s Native Nation is intimately tied to Harvard University. The Harvard charter of 1650 stipulated the College’s commitment to ‘educate the English and Indian youth of this country.’ The first Native American student at Harvard was Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, who graduated in 1665. While the university’s original intent in welcoming Indigenous students was to assimilate them into what it then deemed “civilized” society, its focus has shifted to accepting Native students as they are and to recognizing the contributions of Indigenous peoples to American culture and higher education.

    Maltais is Co-President of the Native American Law Students Association. She worked as an article editor for the Harvard Environmental Law Review and in research assistant roles for projects related to tribal land acquisition, tribal constitutions, and the newest edition of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian law.

    She was also a Cravath International Legal Fellow for her work in Aoteoroa/New Zealand on the environmental benefits of Indigenous self-determination rights under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a T.A. Barron Fellow for public interest environmental law for her work as a summer law clerk at the Native American Rights Fund. She held additional law clerk positions at the Department of Justice – Environment and Natural Resources Division and the White House Council on Environmental Quality through Harvard’s Environmental Law and Policy Clinic. In the fall of 2023, Maltais was an adjunct lecturer in legal studies at Brandeis University, teaching a class on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and Indian law. After graduation, she plans to serve as a judicial law clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    As Samantha prepares to begin her legal career, the College Fund will select the next American Indian Law Scholar to begin their journey. The American Indian Law School scholarship application will close on March 25, 2024, to select the scholar in alignment with the Harvard Law School acceptance announcement. Interested students should complete the application at https://webportalapp.com/webform/americanindianlawscholarship .

    About the American Indian College Fund — The American Indian College Fund has been the nation’s largest charity supporting Native higher education for 34 years. The College Fund believes “Education is the answer” and provided $17.4 million in scholarships and other direct student support to American Indian students in 2022-23. Since its founding in 1989 the College Fund has provided more than $319 million in scholarships, programs, community, and tribal college support. The College Fund also supports a variety of academic and support programs at the nation’s 35 accredited tribal colleges and universities, which are located on or near Indian reservations, ensuring students have the tools to graduate and succeed in their careers. The College Fund consistently receives top ratings from independent charity evaluators and is one of the nation’s top 100 charities named to the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance. For more information about the American Indian College Fund, please visit www.collegefund.org .

    Journalists — The American Indian College Fund does not use the acronym AICF. On second reference, please use the College Fund.

    Keepers of the Flame: Part 3

    By Clarice Begaye (Diné) Diné College Graduate 2023  

    This is the story of a father who instilled in his daughter the value of education in its many forms, and a mother and grandmother who paved the way through their teachings. Read the first and second parts of the story, then join us as we follow along with our storyteller in this final segment.  

    My father and I, much like my grandfather, Hosteen Bitsi Lakai, spent time away from home in search of work opportunities. My grandfather dedicated his life to the railroad industry and retired from it in his sixties. My father served in the Army as a combat engineer, working as a welder and construction worker, resulting in his absence from home. He gave me an old army bag to carry my belongings, which became my constant companion. I embraced a simple way of life, carrying only the essentials. I resided in employee dormitories, occasionally stayed with family and friends, or rented accommodations to pursue work opportunities. Our primary objective was to send money back home, as job opportunities were scarce on the reservation. Therefore, we made the decision to work diligently and earn money to support our family’s survival. Those who remained behind also had to work tirelessly, engaging in tasks such as home maintenance, livestock care, childcare, and the preservation of cultural knowledge. My great-grandmother and mother took charge, shouldering these responsibilities, and looking after us. My formative years were spent under the nurturing and watchful eyes of these two independent and courageous women.  

    During challenging times when my father was unable to provide for us, my mother’s innovative spirit shone through. She utilized her crafting abilities to create quilts, dolls, and clothing and sold food to sustain our livelihood. Her resourcefulness and unwavering dedication to our family’s well-being continue to inspire me to this day. My mother often cooked using an open flame. She always emphasized the importance of light, as it comes at a cost, because the sun demands lives. She made it a point to feed the flame when using it to cook. For me, the kitchen and an open fire were always more than just a place to cook; they were a reference to life lesson sessions. It is in these moments that we discovered the “energy for life” and found sustenance in the tales of brave warriors, wise healers, skilled herbalists, captivating storytellers, and passionate activists passed down through generations through our oral traditions, around the warmth of a stove or open fire. According to my father, this type of education cannot be found elsewhere.   

    Growing up, meals prepared by my mother were mainly plant-based. We went foraging for wild spinach, wild tea with flowers, short-haired red tea, wild potatoes, prickly pear, and mountain tobacco. We didn’t simply pluck them and uproot them from the ground. My mother showed us the proper way to harvest, so as not to consume without thinking. She always took part of what we picked and replanted so the plants would not die out. These excursions taught me the relevance of living in harmony with the environment, with food as medicine having healing properties.   

    During harvest time, the community would gather to share a meal. My parents instilled the value of giving by sharing the crops with others. We would roast corn in a pit or grill it. Corn has always been a universal crop, and my mother used it to make cereal, blue corn tamales, blue crepes, bread, dumplings, ice cream, pancakes, and corn drinks. It was also used as a side dish or boiled in stews. We even used the dried-out corn to make fine dust for morning and evening prayer. The versatility of corn showed me that there are endless possibilities and infinite combinations and techniques to approach things.  

    I was raised around livestock just like my father. During the round-up time, we would invite people to help separate the calves and brand them. My favorite part of round-up was butchering the cattle. My parents always emphasized that cattle are for consumption and almost every part was utilized, with hardly anything going to waste. The women in our community would prepare various dishes like corn, roast chiles, ash bread, frybread, rolls, salads, and meat. We would cook the meat underground in a pit we had dug the day before. The ladies would soak paper bags, cornhusks, and burlap sacks in water and wrap the meat with them. Once the coals were taken out of the pit, we would lay the meat down, get the flat rocks out of the fire and put them on top, lay a corrugated metal sheet on top, and put wet sand on top of it. We then covered it up and waited for several hours before digging it back up. We would then gather and eat a meal. It was in those moments I understood the true essence of being a part of a community. Unfortunately, after relocating, it was hard to find a place where we could keep our livestock while waiting for our relocation home to be built. After settling in our new home in my great grandfather’s land in Skunk Springs in Jeddito Island. We found how grazing officials regulate livestock: the cattle we owned couldn’t roam freely like before and we eventually sold all our cattle due to regulations and drought.  

    Learning about where food comes from, the hard work put into growing and preparing it, and giving thanks for it gave me an appreciation for the process. My father showed us how he showed his appreciation to the spirits before our daily meals by praying for the food and passing a pitcher of water around for us to take a cup of water. During special dinners, he prayed at the end of the meal, and would pass rock salt around the table to show his appreciation to Salt Woman and ask us to pray for ourselves.    

    This has been my education – one shaped by change and adaptation, while still keeping the flame of cultural knowledge that was passed down to me burning. We experience many transformations and adjustments throughout our lives, and the decisions we make can have a significant impact on ourselves, others, and even the world around us.   

    Image provided by Clarice Begaye (Diné)

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    The Morning

    A top college reinstates the sat.

    Why other schools may follow Dartmouth’s lead.

    A portrait of Sian Beilock, the president of Dartmouth College, standing by a window in an olive-green blazer.

    By David Leonhardt

    Dartmouth College announced this morning that it would again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, starting next year. It’s a significant development because other selective colleges are now deciding whether to do so. In today’s newsletter, I’ll tell you the story behind Dartmouth’s decision.

    Training future leaders

    Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth . After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.

    “Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.

    Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article .

    A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.

    The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.

    They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.

    As the four professors — Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, Doug Staiger and Michele Tine — wrote in a memo, referring to the SAT’s 1,600-point scale, “There are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not under test-optional policies.” Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications. The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores, Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, told me.

    That finding, as much as any other, led to Dartmouth’s announcement this morning. “Our goal at Dartmouth is academic excellence in the service of training the broadest swath of future leaders,” Beilock told me. “I’m convinced by the data that this will help us do that.”

    It’s worth acknowledging a crucial part of this story. Dartmouth admits disadvantaged students who have scores that are lower on average than those of privileged students. The college doesn’t apologize for that. Students from poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools have effectively been running with wind in their face. They are not competing fairly with affluent teenagers.

    Share of students admitted to Dartmouth, by test scores and student advantage

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    25% of students admitted

    Disadvantaged

    Disadvantaged students

    with lower test scores are

    more likely to be admitted

    than advantaged students

    with the same scores.

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    “We’re looking for the kids who are excelling in their environment. We know society is unequal,” Beilock said. “Kids that are excelling in their environment, we think, are a good bet to excel at Dartmouth and out in the world.” The admissions office will judge an applicant’s environment partly by comparing his or her test score with the score distribution at the applicant’s high schools, Coffin said. In some cases, even an SAT score well below 1,400 can help an application.

    Questions and answers

    In our conversations, I asked Beilock and her colleagues about several common criticisms of standardized tests, and they said that they did not find the criticisms persuasive.

    For instance, many critics on the political left argue the tests are racially or economically biased, but Beilock said the evidence didn’t support those claims. “The research suggests this tool is helpful in finding students we might otherwise miss,” she said.

    I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said. I’ve heard similar sentiments from leaders at other colleges that have reinstated the test requirement, including Georgetown and M.I.T.

    And I asked Beilock and her colleagues whether fewer students might now apply to Dartmouth. Coffin, the admissions dean, replied that such an outcome might be OK. He noted that the test-optional policy since 2020 had not led to a more diverse pool of applicants and that Dartmouth already received more than enough applications — 31,000 this year, for 1,200 first-year slots. “I don’t think volume is the holy grail,” he said.

    Finally, I asked Beilock whether she was satisfied with Dartmouth’s level of economic diversity, which is slightly below that of most similarly elite colleges. She said no. “We have aspirations to bring it up,” she said. Reinstating the test requirement, she believes, can help Dartmouth do so.

    For more: Compare economic diversity at hundreds of colleges through our College Access Index .

    THE LATEST NEWS

    California Weather

    Intense rain and wind is lashing California, and hundreds of thousands of people are without power. Read our updates .

    Drivers were stranded in floodwaters in Los Angeles , mudslides covered a stretch of highway in Ventura County, and flights were grounded at Santa Barbara Airport.

    The storm is expected to linger over the Los Angeles area until tomorrow morning. Track it here .

    Middle East

    Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, will visit the region today to continue talks on a possible Gaza cease-fire deal. Hamas is still considering a proposal to halt fighting.

    After days of military strikes, President Biden has ordered further retaliatio n over the killings of U.S. soldiers, officials say.

    See the dignified transfer of one soldier, returning home in a coffin.

    The Houthi attacks on commercial ships are driving up freight costs. Read how business leaders are responding .

    2024 Election

    During an event in Las Vegas, Biden tried to energize voters in a key swing state.

    Nikki Haley’s husband, Maj. Michael Haley, is a National Guardsman deployed in Africa. He still has a presence on her campaign.

    Donald Trump pushed immigration conspiracy theories and mass deportations in an interview.

    War in Ukraine

    Senate Republicans and Democrats released a compromise border deal to unlock Ukraine aid , but it faces an uphill path to enactment.

    Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, hinted at a government shake-up . He said “a reset” was needed to revive the war effort.

    Boeing found a new problem with 737 Max fuselages. Badly drilled holes will require work on 50 jets and could delay deliveries , The Wall Street Journal reports.

    X, formerly Twitter, is investing in original video content — paying celebrities and influencers to try to revive the platform.

    Samsung’s top executive was acquitted of stock price manipulation and accounting fraud.

    Other Big Stories

    Wildfires in Chile killed 112, and hundreds more are missing . See photos of the fires .

    Big companies vowed to fix Mississippi cities’ water issues and save them millions. But a Times investigation found that they left many worse off than before.

    Remnants of a nuclear missile were found in a garage in Washington State .

    Pamela Paul writes about people who thought they were trans as kids — but no longer do .

    Wolf repopulation efforts used to be unpopular . But as policymakers focused on building trust, public opinion shifted, Erica Berry writes.

    Misinformation and fearmongering about drug use in Oregon are threatening to bring back the old-school drug war, Maia Szalavitz writes.

    Choosing a woman as his vice president could help Trump win. But a V.P. pick should be someone who can win and govern, Kellyanne Conway writes.

    Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss the 2024 election and Taylor Swift’s potential endorsement.

    MORNING READS

    India: Bezwada Wilson was born into a caste assigned to remove dried human waste from latrines by hand. Read about his life’s work to eradicate the practice.

    “Dalifornia”: In a mountain town in China, young people can escape the competition of the country’s megacities.

    Grieving the loss of a pet? These groups want to help .

    Medical meditation and clinical yoga: Alternative therapies are becoming mainstream in the U.S.

    Metropolitan Diary: They lived about 10 blocks away .

    Lives Lived: Michael Watford helped birth a subgenre of club music known as gospel house. He died at 64 .

    N.B.A.: The Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid will undergo corrective surgery on his left knee.

    N.F.L.: Kliff Kingsbury is the new offensive coordinator for the Washington Commanders, a splashy hire .

    Soccer: MetLife Stadium, outside New York, will host the 2026 World Cup final, FIFA announced . Dallas will field the most matches.

    ARTS AND IDEAS

    Women win: It was a big night for women at the Grammys. Taylor Swift won her fourth album of the year award, breaking the record for the category. Billie Eilish won song of the year, Miley Cyrus won record of the year and Victoria Monét was named best new artist. Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell performed. Here’s what else happened:

    Celine Dion, coping with neurological disorder , presented the Grammy to Swift.

    Swift announced a new album , coming out in April. Elle reports that fans online are scouring her relationship history to explain the title: “The Tortured Poets Department.”

    Jay-Z, speaking with his daughter onstage, implied the Recording Academy had snubbed Beyoncé , CNN reports. “She has more Grammys than anyone, and never won album of the year,” he said.

    See the most over-the-top outfits . (The Cut covered the worst and wackiest .)

    Read more takeaways from the show and a complete list of winners .

    THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

    Caramelize onions for French onion soup , a labor of love.

    Watch “ Mr. & Mrs. Smith, ” an Amazon series based on the 2005 blockbuster film of the same name.

    Get silk pillowcases for Valentine’s Day .

    Make perfect stovetop rice .

    Take our news quiz .

    Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was tenacity .

    And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku and Connections .

    Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

    Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox . Reach our team at [email protected] .

    David Leonhardt runs The Morning , The Times’s flagship daily newsletter. Since joining The Times in 1999, he has been an economics columnist, opinion columnist, head of the Washington bureau and founding editor of the Upshot section, among other roles. More about David Leonhardt

    short answer questions college application

    Create a form in Word that users can complete or print

    In Word, you can create a form that others can fill out and save or print.  To do this, you will start with baseline content in a document, potentially via a form template.  Then you can add content controls for elements such as check boxes, text boxes, date pickers, and drop-down lists. Optionally, these content controls can be linked to database information.  Following are the recommended action steps in sequence.  

    Show the Developer tab

    In Word, be sure you have the Developer tab displayed in the ribbon.  (See how here:  Show the developer tab .)

    Open a template or a blank document on which to base the form

    You can start with a template or just start from scratch with a blank document.

    Start with a form template

    Go to File > New .

    In the  Search for online templates  field, type  Forms or the kind of form you want. Then press Enter .

    In the displayed results, right-click any item, then select  Create. 

    Start with a blank document 

    Select Blank document .

    Add content to the form

    Go to the  Developer  tab Controls section where you can choose controls to add to your document or form. Hover over any icon therein to see what control type it represents. The various control types are described below. You can set properties on a control once it has been inserted.

    To delete a content control, right-click it, then select Remove content control  in the pop-up menu. 

    Note:  You can print a form that was created via content controls. However, the boxes around the content controls will not print.

    Insert a text control

    The rich text content control enables users to format text (e.g., bold, italic) and type multiple paragraphs. To limit these capabilities, use the plain text content control . 

    Click or tap where you want to insert the control.

    Rich text control button

    To learn about setting specific properties on these controls, see Set or change properties for content controls .

    Insert a picture control

    A picture control is most often used for templates, but you can also add a picture control to a form.

    Picture control button

    Insert a building block control

    Use a building block control  when you want users to choose a specific block of text. These are helpful when you need to add different boilerplate text depending on the document's specific purpose. You can create rich text content controls for each version of the boilerplate text, and then use a building block control as the container for the rich text content controls.

    building block gallery control

    Select Developer and content controls for the building block.

    Developer tab showing content controls

    Insert a combo box or a drop-down list

    In a combo box, users can select from a list of choices that you provide or they can type in their own information. In a drop-down list, users can only select from the list of choices.

    combo box button

    Select the content control, and then select Properties .

    To create a list of choices, select Add under Drop-Down List Properties .

    Type a choice in Display Name , such as Yes , No , or Maybe .

    Repeat this step until all of the choices are in the drop-down list.

    Fill in any other properties that you want.

    Note:  If you select the Contents cannot be edited check box, users won’t be able to click a choice.

    Insert a date picker

    Click or tap where you want to insert the date picker control.

    Date picker button

    Insert a check box

    Click or tap where you want to insert the check box control.

    Check box button

    Use the legacy form controls

    Legacy form controls are for compatibility with older versions of Word and consist of legacy form and Active X controls.

    Click or tap where you want to insert a legacy control.

    Legacy control button

    Select the Legacy Form control or Active X Control that you want to include.

    Set or change properties for content controls

    Each content control has properties that you can set or change. For example, the Date Picker control offers options for the format you want to use to display the date.

    Select the content control that you want to change.

    Go to Developer > Properties .

    Controls Properties  button

    Change the properties that you want.

    Add protection to a form

    If you want to limit how much others can edit or format a form, use the Restrict Editing command:

    Open the form that you want to lock or protect.

    Select Developer > Restrict Editing .

    Restrict editing button

    After selecting restrictions, select Yes, Start Enforcing Protection .

    Restrict editing panel

    Advanced Tip:

    If you want to protect only parts of the document, separate the document into sections and only protect the sections you want.

    To do this, choose Select Sections in the Restrict Editing panel. For more info on sections, see Insert a section break .

    Sections selector on Resrict sections panel

    If the developer tab isn't displayed in the ribbon, see Show the Developer tab .

    Open a template or use a blank document

    To create a form in Word that others can fill out, start with a template or document and add content controls. Content controls include things like check boxes, text boxes, and drop-down lists. If you’re familiar with databases, these content controls can even be linked to data.

    Go to File > New from Template .

    New from template option

    In Search, type form .

    Double-click the template you want to use.

    Select File > Save As , and pick a location to save the form.

    In Save As , type a file name and then select Save .

    Start with a blank document

    Go to File > New Document .

    New document option

    Go to File > Save As .

    Go to Developer , and then choose the controls that you want to add to the document or form. To remove a content control, select the control and press Delete. You can set Options on controls once inserted. From Options, you can add entry and exit macros to run when users interact with the controls, as well as list items for combo boxes, .

    Adding content controls to your form

    In the document, click or tap where you want to add a content control.

    On Developer , select Text Box , Check Box , or Combo Box .

    Developer tab with content controls

    To set specific properties for the control, select Options , and set .

    Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each control that you want to add.

    Set options

    Options let you set common settings, as well as control specific settings. Select a control and then select Options to set up or make changes.

    Set common properties.

    Select Macro to Run on lets you choose a recorded or custom macro to run on Entry or Exit from the field.

    Bookmark Set a unique name or bookmark for each control.

    Calculate on exit This forces Word to run or refresh any calculations, such as total price when the user exits the field.

    Add Help Text Give hints or instructions for each field.

    OK Saves settings and exits the panel.

    Cancel Forgets changes and exits the panel.

    Set specific properties for a Text box

    Type Select form Regular text, Number, Date, Current Date, Current Time, or Calculation.

    Default text sets optional instructional text that's displayed in the text box before the user types in the field. Set Text box enabled to allow the user to enter text into the field.

    Maximum length sets the length of text that a user can enter. The default is Unlimited .

    Text format can set whether text automatically formats to Uppercase , Lowercase , First capital, or Title case .

    Text box enabled Lets the user enter text into a field. If there is default text, user text replaces it.

    Set specific properties for a Check box .

    Default Value Choose between Not checked or checked as default.

    Checkbox size Set a size Exactly or Auto to change size as needed.

    Check box enabled Lets the user check or clear the text box.

    Set specific properties for a Combo box

    Drop-down item Type in strings for the list box items. Press + or Enter to add an item to the list.

    Items in drop-down list Shows your current list. Select an item and use the up or down arrows to change the order, Press - to remove a selected item.

    Drop-down enabled Lets the user open the combo box and make selections.

    Protect the form

    Go to Developer > Protect Form .

    Protect form button on the Developer tab

    Note:  To unprotect the form and continue editing, select Protect Form again.

    Save and close the form.

    Test the form (optional)

    If you want, you can test the form before you distribute it.

    Protect the form.

    Reopen the form, fill it out as the user would, and then save a copy.

    Creating fillable forms isn’t available in Word for the web.

    You can create the form with the desktop version of Word with the instructions in Create a fillable form .

    When you save the document and reopen it in Word for the web, you’ll see the changes you made.

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    IMAGES

    1. Short Answer Questions Examples

      short answer questions college application

    2. How to Tackle Short Answer Questions on College Applications

      short answer questions college application

    3. A How-To Guide for the Short Answer Questions for Highly-Selective

      short answer questions college application

    4. You know those Common App short answer questions required by USC

      short answer questions college application

    5. Examples Of Short Answer Questions

      short answer questions college application

    6. 2018-19 Quirky College Application Essay Prompts and Short Answer

      short answer questions college application

    COMMENTS

    1. How to Tackle Short Answer Questions on College Applications

      Overview of Short Answer Questions. In general, short answer questions fit into two categories: those asking for more than a 100 word response; and those asking for fewer than 100 words. ... With so many aspects to the college application—especially written components like personal statements, supplements, and short answers—it can be so ...

    2. How to Answer Short-Answer Questions in College Application

      Short-answer questions are prompts that require responses from college applicants using considerably fewer words than long-form essays, such as personal statements and supplemental essays. Some short answer essays have word limits ranging from 100 to 250, while others may specify exactly the number of words applicants may use, such as only 1 or 3.

    3. A How-To Guide for the Short Answer Questions for ...

      10. Don't check your humor at the door. If you're funny in life, feel free to be funny in your short answers. If you're not funny, no need to start now. Irony is one of the best ways to demonstrate intelligence and sensitivity to nuance. Check out these just-okay and better examples, all for Yale 2015:

    4. Princeton's "More About You" Questions: Examples + Tips

      Princeton asks applicants to respond to three short-answer questions in a section titled "More About You.". These questions have a 50-word limit, which can be extremely daunting. This post will go over the purpose of these questions, tips for writing strong responses, as well as real example responses and analysis.

    5. My Successful Harvard Application (Complete Common App

      The #1 Most Important College Application Question: What Is Your PERSONAL NARRATIVE? ... Back then, we didn't have as much space per activity, and instead had a short answer question. The Short Answer prompt: Please describe which of your activities (extracurricular and personal activities or work experience) has been most meaningful and why. ...

    6. The Ultimate Guide to Supplemental College Application Essays (Examples

      Let's replace the "essay question" and "short answer" analogy we hear from students a lot with an interview analogy. Your Common App essay is the initial answer you get to give the interviewer when they say, "Tell me about yourself." You deliver that with excellent posture and careful word choice.

    7. Sample Short Answer Essay for a College Application

      Sample Short Answer Essay. Christie wrote the following sample short answer essay to elaborate upon her love of running: It is the simplest of movements: right foot, left foot, right foot. It is the simplest of actions: run, relax, breathe. For me, running is both the most basic and the most complex activity I perform in any day.

    8. Responding to Short Answer and Essay Questions for College Applications

      Responding to Short Answer and Essay Questions. Writing samples are an important part of your application to any college. Your responses show how well you would fit with an institution; your ability to write clearly, concisely, and develop an argument; and your ability to do the work required of you should you be accepted. Use both short answer ...

    9. Essays, activities & academics

      At MIT Admissions, we recruit and enroll a talented and diverse class of undergraduates who will learn to use science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. ... Rather than asking you to write one long essay, the MIT application consists of several short response questions and essays ...

    10. Columbia-Specific Application Questions

      A Columbia admissions officer talks about the Columbia-specific application questions, also known as the writing supplement. 2023-2024 Columbia-Specific Questions ... For the four short answer questions, please respond in 150 words or fewer. Questions. ... In college/university, students are often challenged in ways that they could not predict ...

    11. Application and Essays : Stanford University

      These questions help us get to know you as a friend, future roommate and classmate. Stanford Questions. We ask applicants to answer several short questions (limit 50 words each) and to write a short essay on each of the three topics below. Short Essay Questions. There is a 100-word minimum and a 250-word maximum for each essay.

    12. Essays & Short Answers

      Essays. (Spring 2024) Transfer applicants must submit two essays responding to Topic A and an additional topic below. (Summer 2024 and beyond) Transfer applicants must submit one essay responding to Topic A. Applicants to the School of Architecture and Studio Art, Art Education and Art History are required to upload Topic D in addition to Topic ...

    13. Personal insight questions

      Directions. You will have 8 questions to choose from. You must respond to only 4 of the 8 questions. Each response is limited to a maximum of 350 words. Which questions you choose to answer is entirely up to you. However, you should select questions that are most relevant to your experience and that best reflect your individual circumstances.

    14. How to Respond to Short Answer Questions in Your Application

      Compose your answer and then return to the beginning. Be meticulous. Every phrase should be valuable in making your point. If there is a single word that feels superfluous, revise the sentence. When it comes to your short answers, you only have so many words to make your point. You have to make sure that every single one helps you do so.

    15. Common Application Short Answer Essay Responses

      Instead, jump right to your point: don't waste any time on setting context that is already in the question. Act as if you are in a formal conversation with someone who is asking this prompt, and get right to it! 2. "Show" a story: This is often the trickiest part of perfecting your short-answer response, but is arguably the most important ...

    16. Short Answer Essays: Avoid These Application Mistakes

      Vagueness. Unfortunately, it's easy to write a short paragraph that doesn't actually say anything. College applicants often answer the short answer in broad, unfocused terms. "Swimming has made me a better person." "I have taken more of a leadership role in my life because of theater." "Orchestra has impacted me in many positive ways."

    17. The Short Answer

      A popular format for supplement questions is short answers. Don't confuse these with the why, activity, community, or oddball essays. These are an entirely different beast. These little critters provide a different kind of creative challenge for aspiring college-goers. Take this set of short answer questions from the 2014 Yale application:

    18. Tackling the UT Austin Short Answer Application Prompts

      When UT Austin introduced three short answer essays to their application in 2017, many students felt panicked. Applications are already writing-intensive, so adding even more required writing was an overwhelming prospect. But when it comes down to it, these questions are intended to help students.

    19. Yale University Short Answer and Supplemental Essay Tips

      Short Answer Questions- Applicants submitting the Coalition Application, Common Application, or QuestBridge Application will respond to respond to the following short answer questions: ... Marie Todd has been involved in college admissions for more than 20 years. Marie has counseled applicants to top colleges and evaluated more than 5,000 ...

    20. How to Tackle Short Answer Questions on College Applications

      Don't lease aforementioned word limit foolisher them. Albeit shortest among the written responses community request on their applications—typically 250 language or fewer—short

    21. Answering USC's Short Answer Questions

      The Role of Short Answer Questions in USC's Admissions Process. From a college admissions standpoint, short answer questions serve a definite purpose. They allow the USC admissions committee to see you not just as a set of grades or scores but as a person with unique qualities, experiences, and goals. Your responses can provide significant ...

    22. Short Answer Questions :: Foundation

      The BC Foundation Scholarship application has an essay style format with seven short answer questions. Your responses to these questions are your chance to share your story and give readers an opportunity to see how a scholarship would help you achieve your stated educational and professional goals. Your responses will provide evidence of your ...

    23. Short Answer Questions

      The Full Circle and TCU Scholarship applications have an essay style format with three short-answer questions. These sections are your chance to share your story and give readers an opportunity to see how a scholarship would help you achieve your stated educational and professional goals and require you to discuss three elements: an obstacle ...

    24. A Top College Reinstates the SAT

      The admissions office will judge an applicant's environment partly by comparing his or her test score with the score distribution at the applicant's high schools, Coffin said.

    25. Create a form in Word that users can complete or print

      Show the Developer tab. If the developer tab isn't displayed in the ribbon, see Show the Developer tab.. Open a template or use a blank document. To create a form in Word that others can fill out, start with a template or document and add content controls.