<p>Re essays: don’t look on working on an old prompt as a bad thing. Just don’t bother to finalize and polish it. You can get a lot out of doing a draft and a rewrite as practice. It may generate ideas or parts to use in your final essay. Also many college have a “Why X College?” prompt and it doesn’t hurt you to try to dig deeply and define that for yourself as well as if you have to do it --to get past the superficial or usual answers and to personalize it. My daughter like her Chicago essay, from one of their odd prompts, so much she adapted it for one of the essays she sent out to other schools.</p>