how many essays? (general question)

<p>Hello,
I know my question may sound rather silly but I really need some help here.
I know many colleges require students to write an essay like: (for example Stanford): why did you choose to come to Stanford?
But if I send my application to 20 colleges for example? Is the essay always the same or do I have to write a different essay for each school? (if so, it's quite impossible to write different outstanding things for each college...)
Thank you</p>

<p>Yep, different essay for each school, assuming the school requires one. What I did was paste all the essay questions for each school into a single Word document, which I have open basically at all times to work on (4 out of 7 of my colleges want supplement essays). This is why the general advice is to not apply to 500 schools, because then your applications for each will not be up to their full potentials if you’re rushing everything.</p>

<p>But you can’t send a general essay to all the colleges you want to send your application to? (I’m not talking about supplement essays…) or do colleges discourage this kind of thing?</p>

<p>Ohhhh, I misread. Yeah, you have to send the same general essay to all the colleges, you’re not supposed to tailor it to each one.</p>