<p>Did anyone else think it was weird that Wesleyan didn't have a supplemental essay? All of their peer institutions (other top 20 LACs) do as do the Ivies. I had believe Wesleyan was more quirky and individual than some other LACs, but this makes me think they are primarily interested in numbers and improving their rankings. Thoughts?</p>
<p>Wesleyan still does “evaluative” interviews, while most of its peers don’t, or offer “information only” interviews. I think both the supplemental essay and the interview are trying to glean the same information. For example the Amherst application page specifically says they ask for supplemental essays INSTEAD of an interview. This last year Amherst applicants were invited to write an essay reacting of one of several quotes such as: Rigorous reasoning is crucial in mathematics, and insight plays an important secondary role these days. In the natural sciences, I would say that the order of these two virtues is reversed. Rigor is, of course, very important. But the most important value is insightinsight into the workings of the world. It may be because there is another guarantor of correctness in the sciences, namely, the empirical evidence from observation and experiments.
I am not critisizing Amherst’s essay topics, but as far as trying to find “fit” I rather suspect that Wes’ “highly recommended” personal inteview does a better job than the answer to the preceding question.</p>
<p>At the information session I went to, the admissions dude made it clear that they don’t believe in supplemental essays because they would defeat the purpose of the essays found on the common app.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure there are supplements you can submit in other forms, but for essays they just don’t see the point in them.</p>
<p>I agree with the first poster. It seems like an appeal to get some higher stats from prospective students.</p>
<p>The Common App has essays. The question you have to ask is why do colleges require additional essays? I think additional essays do two things. First, they help weed out applicants who have an extremely low interest. Second, they provide a vehicle for applicants to express and elaborate on a facet of their personal profile that they didn’t cover in the Common App essays.</p>
<p>I have no idea why anyone would think the decision to not compel applicants to write a school-specific essay demonstrates that Wesleyan admissions places a greater emphasis on quantifiable admission metrics than its peer institutions. I’m not sure I follow the logic to that given the fact that the students do write essays.</p>
<p>In fact, if you look at the Common Data Set ( <a href=“http://www.wesleyan.edu/ir/data-sets/cds2011-12.pdf[/url]”>http://www.wesleyan.edu/ir/data-sets/cds2011-12.pdf</a> see Section C.7), you’ll see that only “Rigor of Secondary School Record” – which does not get reduced to a “stat” for the likes of the Dept. of Education and USN&WR – rates higher in importance to admissions at Wesleyan among the 19 admission criteria listed. There’s just no logic to idea that the admissions readers should spend more time reading essays to prove they’re not focused on stats. It takes about 3 seconds to ingest the stats. It takes more time than that to read the Common App essays. How much more time is needed?</p>
<p>The problem, if there is one, is the fact that in writing the Common App essays, students understand that most (or perhaps all) of their other applications will entail at least one other college-specific essay in a supplement. They may then cover concepts in the Common App essays knowing that there are additional points, ones that they believe are critical to their application, that they will address in the supplements. Without a Wesleyan supplemental essay, they need to fold all of these aspects of their statements into the Common App essays. So, if they use the same Common App essays for the other colleges that they are using for Wesleyan – the other, supplemental essays might seem redundant. This means applicants may be choosing to create a separate Common Application specifically for Wesleyan in which its essays address more material in light of the fact that there are no supplements. I don’t know if this is what people do. I don’t even know if my relatives who have recently applied to Wesleyan did this…but it seems reasonable to think they might have done so and, if they did, that cuts against the efficiency (for the applicant) of using the Common Application.</p>
<p>I’d like to see the Wes application to include a space for additional comment. Vassar, for example, has a totally optional “Your Space” area in its supplement (in addition to the required supplemental essays/short-responses). Because supplemental essays were required, none of my relatives who applied to Vassar used the additional “Your Space” essay – with no adverse results to date for declining to accept that invitation. (Whether to use that space or leave it blank invited lots of analysis and second-guessing and discussion.) With no other essays required, my expectation is that Wesleyan would have a higher participation rate for a “Your Space” essay than Vassar does. And that means more time devoted by admission readers on those optional essays. (Or required essays if Wesleyan were to join the herd.) Does that additional essay warrant that extra time?</p>
<p>Do those 300 words provide more valuable insight into who the admission officers are considering that makes them better informed than they would be without those 300 words? If so, I’d like to know how. And I’d like to understand how that additional time other college admission readers spend reading an additional 300 words means that, when they sit down to make tough decisions, those other schools are placing less weight on stats than Wesleyan does.</p>
<p>Above, I stated two reasons for requiring college-specific supplemental essays: (1) weeding out the “I’ll just toss this one in” crowd and (2) giving more space for expression. Frankly, the students recycle and tweak their supplemental essays, and – at a college as competitive as Wesleyan – applicants wouldn’t want to omit parts of their personal statements that they believe are truly essential. So if students are reconfiguring their Common Application essays specifically to address the fact that Wesleyan does not give them space for the supplement, Wesleyan – by being alone in this way – covers both of the goals I stated above without putting their admission readers through added busy work.</p>
<p>During WW2, scientists had to travel from (mostly) East coast universities to New Mexico to work on the Manhattan Project. As a security precaution, the War Department asked them not to travel from the nearest rail stations to campus because it might attract attention if a station agent saw lots of local eminent scientists all moving to New Mexico. At Princeton, one scientist decided that since everyone else was traveling from New York or Philadelphia or Peapack/Gladstone, he could travel from Princeton’s on-campus station and, at the same time, advance the interest of national security. Sometimes, when everyone else is going out of their way and doing one thing, you can achieve everything that they’re achieving by being the one who doesn’t run with the herd. Indeed, there may be some value to Wesleyan if, by sticking to the Common App standard essays, the Wes Admission Office is weeding out applicants who think that they can’t possibly submit an adequate explanation without submitting an additional 300 words about themselves.</p>
<p>D’Yer Maker, brilliant analysis! When my son was applying Early Decision to Wesleyan, I recall when he faced the realization that Wes did not give the applicant the opportunity to explain more about himself through supplementary essays. He had finished off a few of these to other colleges as he was preparing his applications, and he was tailoring those to meet the specific criteria that the AdComs at those schools were emphasizing. He had not yet done his Common App, and at that point he decided to write the Common App from the standpoint of what he would want Wesleyan specifically to know. He had had a very good in-person interview at the Wesleyan Admissions Office a few months before, so he knew they they already had a good baseline of personal information about him. So he handled the Common App essays and questions as if they were the Supplemental Essays for Wesleyan. Fortunately, it all worked out well for him.</p>
<p>I do also agree with your point that for most colleges, their Supplemental Essays do discourage the less-interested applicants. I could see this playing out with my son as well, who wisely decided to defer completing most of the other college applications until AFTER he heard from Wesleyan on Early Decision. I was very nervous about this, because he would have only had about 18 days (Dec. 13-31) to complete the essays for ten other top schools. But in the end he turned out to be right. He had a FAR greater interest in Wesleyan than in the other schools. He had come down to a first choice between Swarthmore and Wesleyan, he chose Wes, got in and I hear that he has just completed his freshman second semester there with flying colors, so once again, the father must admit to the son that he was right!</p>
<p>I would add, to Sarah1994 and dcsmiss that the fact that Wesleyan uses the personal interview as an important evaluative factor in its admissions process makes admission more difficult rather than less so, even given the absence of mandatory supplemental essays (which can be done at home and which can be tweaked in most cases after one set is done to fit almost any question). I maintain that for the great majority of applicants, admission to each of the top 20-25 liberal arts colleges is quite a fine achievement. The overwhelming majority of applicants–who are already self-selected–are not accepted to any of them. A university like Wesleyan, which has been around for 181 years, does not bend and twist according to the vagaries of a USNWR rating, but is more concerned with getting the kind of freshman class that will continue the long tradition of excellence and innovation that made it remarkable in the first place. Notwithstanding the unfortunate and individual-specific events in Claremont-McKenna’s admissions office this past year, I feel this is the case with its peer liberal arts institutions.</p>
<p>This is really funny! I’m applying to Wesleyan right now and they have a supplemental essay questions now. It’s a good question but after reading this, i’m sure they added it in to seem competitive amongst like LAC schools.</p>
<p>The OP was a legacy who had been waitlisted. There’s a tinge of sour grapes in her question. In any event, the supplemental essay is optional (though recommended.)</p>