<p>My college counselor who is an admissions officer at Berkeley said that you should not, because it would be 'gaming the system' and adcoms would not look highly upon it. </p>
<p>But Michele Hernandez's Acing the College Application says the opposite.
"For those applications that don't ask for any additional information, include it anyway. Admissions officers are usually glad to find out a bit more about an applicant and won't mind a short essay as long as it doesn't slow them down tremendously. You would be imposing if you attached your ten-page term paper, but a short personal essay is welcome and shows you took the initiative to include more information than you were asked to."</p>
<p>Would an extra 1000-word essay be too long?
(I made the terribly stupid mistake of misreading '1000 characters' as '1000 words' and am now almost done with my 1000-word essay)</p>
<p>I know that there is no limit but it seems to me that most people write about 500-600 words for the common app essay so your 1000 word essay would be really long in comparison.</p>
<p>If I were an admissions counselor, slogging through hundreds of required essays, the last thing that would endear an applicant to me is another essay, especially a long one. My impression would be of an arrogant applicant who thinks that what he/she has to say is so important that it can’t be said in the rest of an already-long application. And the last thing I’d want to read is another essay. Can you imagine if everyone started to do that?</p>
<p>Additional information is just that: additional. Short bullets for information that didn’t fit anywhere else, or elaborations for which there was not enough room. Not an essay.</p>
<p>Be considerate of your admissions counselors’ time.</p>