I’ve voiced that I thought the CommonApp personal statement essay was the most difficult part of the college application process, but these supplemental essays might be coming for that title. 

Some of the colleges I’m applying to like Fordham or Smith have one supplemental essay, however, all of the elite colleges I’m trying to get into like the University of Pennsylvania or Dartmouth, have four to five essays each. 

Doing the math, and categorizing everything, I have approximately 50 supplemental essays to write. That is actually just appalling to me. 

Not only does it take tremendous amounts of brain power to even just brainstorm ideas, but it takes all of the willpower I have to actually bring myself to write them. Think of the state I’ll be in when I eventually finish all 50 of those. 

I have a plan to simplify this process a little bit though. I can just reuse, reduce, and recycle. For the “why this school” essay, if the schools are similar enough, maybe I could just tweak it here and there to make it fit. If it’s the “why this area of study” essay, I can reuse it for all the schools I’m applying to. 

However, there are just so many colleges nowadays that have the weirdest essay prompts ever, stumping me when all I want to do is pump the gas on this process. Take the University of Chicago for example. One of the prompts is quite literally “‘Daddy-o’, ‘Far Out’, ‘Gnarly’: the list of slang terms goes on and on. Sadly, most of these aren’t so ‘fly’ anymore – ‘as if!’ Name an outdated slang from any decade or language that you’d bring back and explain why you totally ‘dig it’.

These questions make me wonder what the schools are actually looking for. What will this prompt tell you about me? Why are these factors a part of your decision? How am I supposed to answer this? Why does the slang I “dig” help you make your decision of how good of a student I’ll be on your campus? 

The need to be unique and different, to stand out in the crowd of thousands of other applicants makes me want to write the most “different” story ever. When did education become about all of the hardships you’ve overcome? How will my ability to heal from an injury or a trauma help me become a better student? More educated? 

This is by far the most time-consuming process, even in comparison to the personal statement. As a whole, of course. It takes a whole lot of time and effort as a whole, but individually, it can go quite fast, only if I’m not in a writer’s block. 

I find myself staying up incredibly late every night, maybe until 1 or 2 a.m., trying to manage all that I have to do. Whoever said senior year was the easiest year was lying. It is by far the most difficult. Junior year was one of the best years of my life, but this year, all I can feel is anxiety and weariness. 

All I can hope for now is to look forward to the day decisions come out and I commit, relieving me of some of my responsibilities.