You may have spent eight weeks putting the finishing touches on a wonderful Common Application essay or several months working hard to secure a top SAT or ACT score. Even after all the hard work, the cherry on the cake is a new slew of new shorter responses and supplementary essays required for the schools where you are applying.
How do you come up with good ideas for three to eight different questions? How is it possible to talk about as many as eight to ten different aspects or stories about yourself that are deemed “college application-worthy?” It is certainly tempting to just regurgitate your Common Application response or even copy-paste, but you should refrain from doing either. This guide seeks to offer advice on how to get started on short responses as well as the different components that make for top-notch short response essays.
Putting Interview Questions on Paper
One of the ways to make short response questions more manageable is to think about them as if you were receiving a typical interview question. More often than not, questions like “Talk about a time where you overcome a challenge” or “Share a personal interest” constitute the kinds of questions a candidate would receive in an interview for a job or school.
Quick tip: Imagining your short responses as the kinds of friendly “get-to-know-you” questions you might receive in an interview makes them feel far more manageable.
Of course, interview questions can feel high-stakes or high-pressure, but most interviewees have some kind of response for these kinds of questions. More importantly, interviewees understand that the questions are intended not to trip them up, but rather are designed to allow the employer, school, or organization to get a better picture of who the candidate is as a human and a person outside of their schoolwork or SAT scores. Thinking about supplementary essays and short responses in the same vein makes them seem more manageable.
Imagining short responses for the college application as an interview reply doesn’t necessarily mean you should write the essays as you would speak in an interview. The same rules about structure, grammar, style, and succinct writing apply. Embracing short responses as an attempt for colleges to get to know you better as a candidate is a surefire way to get the ball rolling on the kinds of topics or stories you should aim to share.
Driving the Brainstorm
As you brainstorm responses to short response questions, consider looking across the board for stories that best answer the questions rather than ones that most fully represent you. Smaller or seemingly secondary experiences you have can be equally as effective as the primary activities or interests in your life. It may be that even if you are a top-tier athlete or computer coder or musician, your small hobby as a baker or your newfound interest for high school debate contains a better or more relevant story for the prompt.
One of the biggest pitfalls that candidates run into is writing regurgitation of their Common Application story. Even if you have a great story that hits home with the topic of the short answer response that coincides with the experience or topic of your Common Application essay, avoid telling the same story twice.
Key takeaways: Avoid regurgitating the Common Application essay and consider writing about secondary or seemingly less relevant parts or experiences in your life if they better answer the prompt for the essay.
Your brainstorm process should be driven by a simple and obvious fact: colleges seek candidates who are well-rounded. If you’ve already conveyed that you’re a math whiz, show them that you also care about activism. Alternatively, if your Common Application essay demonstrates your interest in political science, you may want to spend time using the short answers to convey your enthusiasm for painting.
Like with the Common Application, you should start with thinking about a simple story. Start with details about the experience or event and then work outwards to its significance in your life. For example, how does an interest in knitting signify a value in artistic creation or collaboration? Alternatively, what does an experience baking a cake on a deadline reflect your broader view of working under pressure? In every instance, reflect on how a small experience or moment reflects something bigger as well as takeaway that relates the question that the prompt is asking.
Recycling Essays
As this guide has addressed, it can be daunting to write responses. If a school averages three short responses and a candidate is applying to five to seven schools, they may have to write up to fifteen to twenty responses. With the math of a 300-word response on average, writing responses could theoretically add up to 4,500-6,000 words, or twenty pages double-spaced. Very few seniors have time for that much work.
While a candidate may draft up to twenty responses in theory, it is likely that the prompts for the responses themselves may have some overlap. For example, University of California Berkeley and Pomona College may both want to know about your personal interests and inquire in a short answer response. Rather than telling the admissions team at Berkeley about one interest and the reviewers at Pomona about another hobby of yours, consider leveraging the response for both schools.
Quick tip: When applying to multiple colleges with multiple short answer responses, consider recycling material from one application to another if there is overlap in the prompts themselves.
Successful candidates should consider recycling the material, ideas, and content from one short answer from one school to another. You may find that after applying to multiple schools, there are patterns in the kinds of short answer prompts colleges are issuing out to candidates. As an applicant, you can respond accordingly by patterning your responses and recycling essays from school to another.
If you can avoid it, do not simply copy-paste your “Talk about a challenge you overcame” from one college short response to another. Some university admissions staff correspond with each other about competitive candidates, and it would reflect poorly on you to simply use an identical essay for multiple schools (with the exception of the Common Application, of course).
Quick Hits
The primary part of a strong short response essay is a good story, moment, or experience. It should make up at least a paragraph or maybe even multiple sections of the response. The response should engage with the sensory details, images, dialogues and other components that make up strong descriptive parts of an essay.
The biggest pitfall in the “experiential” part of short response essays is that candidates make a general activity, memory, or experience. It is completely fine to talk about a passion or interest generally. However, it is important to also address a specific aspect, component, or quality within the general passion. For instance, one of my strongest short responses was generally about the experience of doing high school debate. My essay did not address a singular debate or debate practice and instead described the experience of public speaking in general. The response focused on the activity of rebuttals in debate. I wrote about the experience of dealing with how to retort or respond to a good point during a debate.
Strong stories in short answer responses manifest in a great hook or opening line. As you draft, be mindful of kicking off your shorter essays with a punchy detail, image, or quote. It can be humorful, serious, or riveting in some way or another. The upshot is that you should captivate your reader from the onset. The words matter.
Selective Orientation
Like with any essay, providing contextual details is essential. Consider sharing how long and why you have participated or engaged in the activity that you are writing about. For example, if you are writing about an experience knitting, offer some details about your past experience and what drew you to the activity.
Of course, there is a limit to the amount of contextual information you should offer. No admissions officer wants a resume-style summary of your experience as a fencer or computer coder. Selectively orienting your reader with relevant information that contributes to your story is essential.
Key takeaway: Selectively orienting your reader means offering context in your essay, which is essential for success. Without strong contextual details, a short answer is often lost upon an admissions reader who does not know you personally.
One of the biggest two-way mistakes that appear on short response drafts deals with either over-orienting or under-orienting the reader within the context of the story. In other words, candidates often error by either oversharing what else was happening or under-sharing contextual details about the moment or experience.
So how do you strike a balance and contextualize your story? While there is no one fits-all-approach, the best way to selectively orient the reader is to put yourself in the mentality and mindset of an admissions reader or stranger who doesn’t know you and constantly test or review whether each detail is pertinent and whether there are facts missing. If you are unsure, overwrite and send to Diana for edits later on.
Insights and the Big Picture
Short response essays defined by the final paragraph that offers a short and succinct insight. Like the Common Application essay, the concluding thoughts should drive at a final takeaway or new understanding from the experience you have. In a short answer, the insights section should at least be a couple of sentences. It should absolutely build upon the experience you have been discussing throughout the essay.
Insights in a short answer response do not have to be sweeping, life-changing realizations. Instead, they can be as straightforward as a new strategy, approach, or value while tackling a problem or pursuing an interest. As explained in several of the UC guides, make a lesson or insight short and sweet. It is simply an attitude or view you have developed from your experiences. It is not the only view or strategy, but rather a product of personal experience.
Here are two examples: if computer coding is your thing and you had an experience creating a program with a few friends, consider sharing how collaboration in the realm of computer science has a lot of value in a field built on individual achievement. Alternatively, if political activism is a big hobby and you had a moment where you realized that your engagement was built on past academic experiences, talk about how you value the role of education within activism. In each case, the hypothetical computer coder and political activist aren’t insisting that their passion for collaborating in Java or learning while protesting is the only way to do their activities, but instead, both are suggesting a certain method or quality they’ve come to appreciate within their activity.