JRA Educational Consulting Blog

In our recent blog, Covid-19 Has Infected the Common App!, we discussed the Common App’s Covid-19 essay prompt. Since then, the Coalition App released its own Covid-19 essay prompt:

Topics: College Application Essay, College Admission, College Application, Supplemental Essays

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News Flash! Colleges are Releasing Their Supplementary Essay Prompts!

Here are a number of supplemental essay prompts that colleges have recently made public, along with our comments – shown in bold, red font – about some of them. As a general principle, we consider prompts presented as “Optional” to be optional only for students who have no real interest in attending the school! If you’re serious about applying to the school, then Optional = Mandatory. So, beginning in alphabetical order, here’s what we can relay to you. As you read through these essay prompts, you’ll see some common themes (Why do you want to attend our school?) and unique prompts, such as UChicago’s. In every case, your responses are important for the essay reader, because what you write reveals whether you’ve done your homework about the school, and how mature and thoughtful you are as an applicant for admission to a particular academic community.

Topics: College Application Essay, College Planning, Supplemental Essays

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We recently published a blog, Twelve Guiding Principles for Creating a Sparkling College Application Personal Statement, that focused strictly on the main essay/personal statement called for in the Common Application and the Coalition Application. While some colleges that accept those two applications don’t require submission of the personal statement as part of the application, most do. And many of the colleges that accept those two applications have additional writing supplements. In this post, we’ll describe some of those supplements and how they can be best approached.

Topics: College Application Essay, Supplemental Essays, Personal Statement

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