<p>What are they? I have an entire year to think about them. Haha</p>
<p>The Common App, besides asking about address, school, family, all that standard info, gives you six options for the essay:
Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.
Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.
Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence.
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
Topic of your choice.</p>
<p>So basically anything, 250 words minimum. There's also a short question where you're asked to elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities (150 words or fewer).</p>
<p>For the supplement, you have two short answer questions:
Tell us about the academic areas that interest you most and your reasons for applying to Brown.
How did you become interested in Brown, e.g., college counselor, undergraduate, relative, web site?</p>
<p>And a required essay: What is an academic experience, project, class or book that has influenced or inspired you? (500 words or less, and don't use the essay you wrote for the Common App)</p>
<p>Good luck next year!</p>
<p>Sorry to dredge up old topics, but for the two short answer questions, is it possible to simply combine them into one essay? I have a whole essay that’d be perfect and answers both questions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Unfortunately, no.</p>
<p>How long can the short answers be?</p>
<p>I can’t remember but there is a character limit… I think. Just keep it to about 150 words max</p>
<p>@obstinate
For academic interests/why Brown, there is a 1600 character limit.
For how you heard about brown, its a 900 character limit.
An important note, though. If you apply online, you can’t type a single character over the limit. If you apply on paper (as I did), the only limit on your responses is how long you can write before you start to bore/annoy your admissions officer with the length.
I just looked up my essays from my Brown app and my responses to these two particular questions were 1854 and 1341 characters respectively. I got in ED, so I guess my A.O. didn’t find them excessive. That being said, I was very confident (and had the opinion of many other peers and teachers to mitigate my hubris) that my essays were good enough to justify the length. If you don’t think the added value is worth the extra length, don’t take the risk.</p>
<p>And as for your question about combining the questions, it’s okay to be a little redundant (but not too much), I know I was. But combining the prompts is probably a guaranteed rejection, as I’m sure A.O.s are too busy to care to make note of the fact that you left an essay blank only because you answered it somewhere else.</p>
<p>Nevermind. God that’s so short!</p>
<p>Don’t assume the academic inspiration essay will appear next year. This year was the first year it was used, and admissions needs to read the responses and decide it was helpful before putting it on the application again.</p>
<p>The 2 short answers have been around for decades, so they are a sure thing. And yes, they are 2 separate answers.</p>
<p>What is the character limit for the academic experience essay?</p>
<p>500 words</p>
<p>10char</p>
<p>No no I know the word limit, what was the character limit (if any of you guys remember)?</p>
<p>There wasn’t one. It’s always a character limit or a word limit, never both.
Otherwise they’d effectively be saying something along the lines of “we want you to use roughly 500 words, and these 500 words should have an average length of 6 characters each.”</p>
<p>If you’re talking about the common app’s website, there wasn’t a box where you can only enter a certain number of characters (for other schools where there is only a word limit, but they want you to copy/paste the essay into a box, the character limit is usually something ridiculously high such as 10,000 characters). For this one, you just have to upload a word document with your essay.</p>
<p>With spaces or without?</p>
<p>Okay, character limits are guidelines. Admissions counselors will not reject you because they took the time to count and your essay was 550 characters instead of 500. What’s that, one extra sentence? I’ve never seen it specified whether or not spaces are included, probably because it doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>(and similar to my last response, an afterthought regarding the common app website):
Test it out by holding down a key, interspersing spaces every now and then, and waiting until it stops letting you enter anything more. Copy it into Word and see what the character count is, to tell if it counted spaces. Probably would, but who knows.</p>
<p>No, for the Why Brown essay. How many there?</p>