<p>As you know, most applications say something about including supplementary materials in the application.
So what constitutes supplementary materials?
A video of particularly winning musical theatre performance?
Poetry/prose/a short play/another essay?
An extra recommendation from a youth group leader?
Or should it be something ground breaking, such as cancer research you did over the summer? </p>
<p>There's a fine line between showing your stuff and bogging down and frustrating adcom with useless extras. (And NO ONE wants frustrated a frustrated adcom reviewing his or her application...) </p>
<p>So, what is /good/ supplementary material?</p>
<p>My son (who had an extremely successful application season) didn’t submit supplementary material, but he did use the last common app section of “any more you want to tell us” to talk about a program he had written for a teacher and what he learned from the process. His program was definitely not exciting, but it was needed and useful. He wanted to enclose a DVD of it but I told him that there was no way anyone would bother installing it. Extra recommendations can be submitted just like the non-extra recommendations.</p>
<p>I would think that is a reasonable compromise. In my totally uninformed opinion, I’d think anything you can write in the “extra info” area (that doesn’t require special handling or processing like a DVD or an original photograph) is fine. From what I keep reading, you should only give extra info if it shows an extra dimension to you or your app - but EVERYBODY has extra dimensions other than those mentioned in the app!</p>
<p>So I would recommend adding:[ul][li]Poetry/prose/a short play/another essay as long as it’s no more than three pages double-spaced []A video of particularly winning musical theatre performance only if your musical or theatre abilities are a crucial part of your application (but I know engineers who have submitted these - as I said - an UNINFORMED opinion)[]an extra essay saying how much musical and theatre performances have meant to you so you can have something else in the other essays[]An extra recommendation from a youth group leader, submitted like all the other recommendations[]a PDF containing your most amazing photograph and a story about what it meant to you and a link so they can see it online if they want it in color[/ul]</p>[/li]
<p>NOTE: my homeschooled son was told repeatedly that “don’t submit too much” didn’t apply as much to homeschoolers because the adm. officers have less to evaluate you on.</p>