<p>Koker, your friend likes to write. My daughter applied to and was accepted at NYU last year and she provided very brief answers to each of the questions on the NYU supplement. I remember there was one question about "what did you do last sunday" and her response was about 100 words - and that might have been one of the longer ones she wrote. (I just checked and that same question is there -- and the PDF for the NYU supp only has a teeny bit of space for each of the questions -- the other questions are essentially: "why do you like New York", "what do you want to study when you get here", and "if you were on the ad com, what is the most important reason why you should be admitted". The only question that my daughter spent a lot of time on was describing what she wanted to study, and that was only because she was applying to Gallatin and they made it clear that a strong proposal for independent study and an explanation as to why an interdisciplinary approach was needed would be helpful for admissions.</p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that they don't ask for 4 500 word essays -- they want short answers.... </p>
<p>For all the colleges -- I think it can be very detrimental to an app if the student fails to give short, direct answers when that is what is wanted. The people on the ad com are really busy and overwhelmed, and if they supplement asks a question like, "why did you want to attend our college" and the kid writes a 5 paragraph essay on the importance of education..... then some other kid who writes, "Because your bioengineering department is awesome" has done a much better job of answering the question, even if his sentence structure leaves something to be desired.</p>