<p>To Mary Clark: Sounds like a wonderful idea..and there are universities and colleges that provide for the mature returning student; eg. the Ada Comstock program at Smith College (check their website for details). My daughter goes to Smith and reports that her experience has been much enhanced by the presence of older students; hopefully the reverse is true as well. Good luck!</p>
<p>Is UChicargo an exclusive user of common application? I’m a little confused that they are asking bunch of supplemental essays. Ate they required or optional? My understanding is that exclusive comapp users only requre comapp. ???</p>
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<p>Best advice right here. Many of my peers who saw my supplement to a top school thought I’d be rejected for being “crazy”…amazing though, maybe it was just me in particular but “less [effort] is more” in this case (the other two elite schools in which I had had put more effort into writing a “proper” supplement flat out rejected me).</p>
<p>My acceptance to Colgate specifically mentioned my essays, and my essays definitely pushed me over the edge to a very exclusive Honors program at my local college that I was (in all fairness) not really qualified for. If you can reach out and grab the reader, they’ll take notice of you. It might not be an instant win with a good essay, but it certainly makes them find many more reasons to reject than simple blandness.</p>
<p>All I can say is I thought my main essay was probably the best thing I have ever written, or typed, in my entire life. I got honors at BC, and though my stats are good…i don’t think i am qualified for honors solely based on my stats. I’m sure my essay helped.</p>
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<p>Amen. Hallelujah Amen.</p>
<p>This is the single biggest piece of advice I give to applicants. You need be interested in what you’ve written. If you don’t think an essay is interesting (and you’re the writer), it’s going to be awfully hard to convince others of its importance. Write your personal statements for yourselves, and let us in admissions come along for the ride.</p>
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I think I get your point, but it is certainly not one of the few controllable elements. Almost every element of the application is within the students’ control - their course load (for the most part), grades, test scores, EC’s, etc.</p>
<p>is there a part in the application where you write why you want to go to that school (especially elite and top schools)? cause I don’t want to waste my essay on that stuff</p>
<p>Some schools have that question, others don’t: Cornell and Chicago did for me, but Princeton did not.</p>
<p>But why wouldn’t you want to spend time writing an essay sharing why you want to go to a school? If you truly and deeply want to go to a specific college, this is a fantastic opportunity to share how you feel about it and why you specifically want to go there. Of my three essays for Chicago, the admissions council told me they especially enjoyed my one about why I wanted to go to Chicago: they loved the understanding I had of what the school offered and how it related to my development.</p>
<p>Colleges love to hear why a student wants to attend their school; similarly, I’d imagine any interested student would love talking about why they want to go to a school–this probably helps to weed out the students who applied to 15 colleges with no real intent of attending most of them. Colleges want to admit qualified applicants who actually want to go to there–let them know you’re one of those!</p>
<p>^Except most reasons are either actually disingenuous or sound disingenuous. I’ll take the rejection over giving a laundry list of BS.</p>