<p>The NYT really dropped the ball on this "article". Northwestern's supplement was definetly not as hard as they made it out to be. It was just two 50-word short answers and a 300 word personal statement...and the Hans Hoblein question was pretty straight forward (despite what many thought). NU's app was not that extreme, especially when compared to UPenn's.</p>
<p>I found Chicago's application refreshing, and I wish they wouldn't switch. IMO, a school shouldn't use the common app if it requires the student to do more work than the school's own application.</p>
<p>Weasel,</p>
<p>100% with you there!!!</p>
<p>I agree. The NYT should have taken a look at the smaller LACs - cough cough Grinnell (a number of friends were complaining about it, I d/n apply). I feel like the smaller LACs have more touchy, feely admissions that like a lot of REALLY SUPER DUPER FUN essays. Not true for all, but a worthy stereotype.</p>
<p>NYU's supplement's REALLY long. My friend was doing it and I think he had like 4 500 word essays. Freakishly long. I wonder if some of them were optional...</p>
<p>Why do all the colleges feel the need for a supplement? Someone once said to me that it was becuase there is not limit on the number of colleges you can apply to in the US, the common app would make it easy to apply to as many as you want, with no extra effort, hence making admissions even more competitive and difficult for the adcoms. Therefore, supplements were introduced to prevent this.
In the UK, we have a central admissions service where your whole application is basically sent off to your six chosen colleges on 2 sides of A4 (they only put on it the info the colleges need for the decisions). This makes applying to college much less stressful, and admissions people in the UK do not complain that they do not have enough info to assess the candidate with. Are people in the US positively against a central admissions service where people are limited to say, 8 colleges?</p>
<p>My son found (cough cough) Grinnell's supplement to be one of the easiest. Maybe he did it wrong.</p>
<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>
<p>I dunno - for the character roommate question for northwestern, I used some image editing software to copy my text in so I could fit everything. Some schools asked questions that I thought couldn't exactly be answered in a 50 word paragraph.</p>
<p>Can anyone explain to me what this common application does exactly (besides saving a lot of time), where/how it can be found and if it works for international graduate application? Thanks :).</p>
<p>Song: "I love Google, you love Google, we all love Google, so let's use Google together, YEAH! I love Google, you love Google, we all love Google, so let's use Google togeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiieeeeeiieeeetherrrrrrrrrr ooooooooohhhh."</p>
<p>Search Google for "Common App"</p>
<p>[audience wows, cheers, some faint]</p>
<p>It's for undergraduate application only.</p>
<p>I think common app supplements are primarily used to narrow down candidates, for regular admission or just for special engineering/art (etc.) programs</p>
<p>At some highly selective colleges so many people have the same everything, so they are trying to create more stuff to compare people with</p>
<p>Want to talk about long? Hampshire College has a 8 essay supplement...and it's one of the the most important parts of admissions.</p>
<p>Although it is often a good idea to do the optional essays, they are truly optional. For the Harvard supplement, I only wrote 147 words, and my brother left it completely blank. We both got in.</p>
<p>^Did you both get in during the same admissions cycle?</p>
<p>MLevine --because of its structure, Hampshire needs students are are very highly motivated and work well independently in an unstructured setting, so it may very well be that 8 essays are the first test of academic work ethic. It also gives the ad com more opportunity to get a good insight into the student's personality and inclination. The kids who are overwhelmed by all those essays may also be the type of kids who would not do well without more structure. </p>
<p>So yes, its a lot of work, but I can see the rationale. The last thing Hampshire needs are kids who are slackers, or who target Hampshire because they think that somehow things will be easy there for them.</p>
<p>Dude, none of this is as much writing as a TASP application. ~6 full pages. Beat that.</p>
<p>Weasel8488 - yeah, we were both in the same admission cycle (this past year's early action cycle to be more specific), and we're twins. Talking to other acceptees, many of them did write the supplemental essay, but a fairly significant number didn't. I think the necessity of the optional essay really varies from applicant to applicant, depending on what they have/haven't included in the other parts of the application.</p>
<p>IMagine if there were NO supplements, you would have kids applying in even HIGHER numbers to schools and creating even more of a nightmare kids applying to many schools</p>
<p>If the school is one the student really wants to go to, they will do the essay</p>
<p>My D told me about several kids who had done several applications and were thinking, well Auntie Em told me I should apply here....but seeing an additional essay just wasn't worth it, the school wasn't that attractive to them</p>
<p>
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IMagine if there were NO supplements, you would have kids applying in even HIGHER numbers to schools and creating even more of a nightmare kids applying to many schools.
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</p>
<p>So true! Kids would be applying to 30 or 40 schools! What's another $1,950 in the scheme of things? :eek:</p>