<p>I have the impression that the "Why Tufts" essay is supposed to be extremely brief--something like 50 words/250 characters. Is this correct? Is it a hard word limit, such that the Common App won't let you type more than 250 characters?</p>
<p>My daughter has several answers to the question, all quite specific to Tufts and how she came to decide to apply there, and I can't see how she can make it fit in 50 words. Three paragraphs, sure, but 50 words?</p>
<p>It’s supposed to be a few sentences.</p>
<p>I wrote mine as a list of sentence fragments.</p>
<p>part of the point of the exercise, I imagine, is to evaluate the applicant for ingenuity and creativity to see how they can respond to the challenge.</p>
<p>NOTE: the commonapp form last year enforced 50 WORDS. Thus, unlike with other commonapp forms, if it detects over 50 combinations of characters separated from each other by a space (for example, 1) counted as a word on my response), it will not accept the submission. For other responses, I could go over the word limit as long as I didn’t go over the character limit. Not so with Tufts. This caused great consternation on the day I submitted my app. but I got through it ok :).</p>
<p>Pithy, succinct, creative answers work best.</p>
<p>I loved my son’s Why Tufts essay - he managed 49 words as I recall. He picked one extremely idiosyncratic thing to write about that epitomized what he liked about Tufts.</p>
<p>It was very different from his much longer U of Chicago essay which started off with all the reasons he hadn’t even wanted to look at Chicago.</p>