Application Update 2025-2026

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Inside the Yale Admissions Office. I'm Hannah and I'm a Yale Admissions Officer. And I'm Mark. I'm also a Yale Admissions Officer. It is time. It's that time of year for our fourth annual application update episode. The eagerly anticipated application update episode, folks, as we promise every year we're back to tell you about the questions that are going to be on the first year application for students applying during the upcoming cycle, folks who are applying to be first year students to start in the fall of 2026, this episode is for you. We think of these episodes as a continuation of an episode we did way back in 2020 called essays, The Little Stuff, which was part of a three-part essay series on what works and what doesn't work in the application essays. And that episode was all about the Yale specific questions or the supplemental essays. Right. Once you are absolutely brand new to this, when you apply to Yale, you will fill out part of your application that is going to probably go to multiple schools, whether you're completing the common application or applying to Yale through Questbridge or you're using something called the Coalition Application, you'll put together a whole bunch of information about your activities in your background and produce an essay that will go to multiple schools. After you do that, you are going to get some questions that Yale has put together specifically for our application process. Before we get into that, a quick plug for the other episodes and that series that I mentioned, the essays, what works, essays, what doesn't work. Those episodes may be five years old, but they're still very, very relevant today. I think there's still a lot of good advice in there. Yes. So, something old, those old episodes, something new. We have a new guest on our podcast, making his debut. Welcome to the podcast, Keenan. Hi. Thank you guys so much for having me on. I am so glad to be here today. Yay. Welcome, Keenan. Keenan just wrapped up his first year as a Yale admissions officer, so he's got a lot of fresh perspective on reading applications and the kind of information that we're getting from you all in your essays. And Keenan was part of the small committee that met this year to review the application questions that we asked. So, we're going to be digging into his insight from one year of reading applications and then one year of sitting in that committee and talking about what we might want to change this year. So that, I think we should talk about some of the changes that are happening to the common application, which many, many of you will fill out. The common app hasn't changed their essay prompts for several years. Those prompts work really well. There are a number to choose from, so those are staying the same, but the common app is changing two of their additional questions. One of those additional questions is about something called a disruption in your community, and the other is something simply called additional information. And I know that we feel lots and lots of questions either specifically about the additional information section of the application, or questions where the answer that we give is, hey, use the additional information section of the application. In almost 50 episodes of this podcast, we haven't talked about this part of the application yet. We thought this would be a good place. Yeah, you have heard us say a lot that we're always thinking about context. Contacts you're coming from, the circumstances that may have led you to make certain decisions about your coursework or how you spend your time outside the classroom, all of those things, and a great place in the application to tell us about that context and those circumstances is the additional information section. All admissions officers feel a lot of questions from students along the lines of this thing has happened in my life, or this is something that is affecting my trajectory through high school that just feels different. And it feels like it's going to be hard for me to include this in my application. How do I do it? Should it be in an essay? Should I talk about it here? Will you know this? How will you get to know it? And overwhelmingly the answer is, don't worry, that's why there's an additional information section. Yes. And I think it can be tempting to think, oh, I have to write a whole essay about this specific circumstance. And often, that's not actually what you want to be spending your essay on. So that additional information section gives you a little extra space to tell us about those things. I like the fact that the common application has changed one of these two pieces from what was something about community disruption. This was specifically created in the COVID area and designed to actually specifically ask students, hey, how has the pandemic affected you and your community? Let us know. That question has remained the same even five years after COVID started. And they, I think, realized that there was some value in having that kind of space, but it didn't need to be specific to community disruptions or the pandemic. It's now been changed to specifically be about challenges and circumstances. Exactly. So that's just meant to capture kind of a broader range of the impacts that you may experience. And a note, the word limit here is relatively short. This is 250 words. This is not the space where you should be doing a lot of reflecting and analyzing and sort of extrapolating about things. This is really a place to give some facts. If you feel like there have been really specific challenges or circumstances that an admissions officer reviewing your application should know about, particularly because those challenges and circumstances have affected the other parts of your application, meaning things like your activities list, your transcript, the teachers who are writing recommendations for you, all those other things that we're going to see. This is the space to let us know about them, but be brief and to the point you don't have a lot of space to work with here. The additional information section used to have a word limit of 650 words, which is the same as the common app essay. That word limit is now being reduced to 300 words. The question is still the same of providing additional information, but the word limit is also going to be reduced. I think both admissions officers and applicants appreciate the fact that there is a essentially just an open, catch all space, right? It truly is that open, catch all space, and I kind of like now that there is specifically called out a challenges and circumstances space for challenges and circumstances, and then we still have a second space that's just whatever else you might want to add. Important caveat though, most successful applicants don't have anything to add. You should not feel that just because the space is there, you have to say something else, whatever that might be. Yeah, and we've read hundreds of thousands of applications. We've seen all kinds of stuff in this space. Most of it doesn't really add a whole lot, right? It just kind of feels like, oh, there's an extra space I can have to fill it up. Here's something else that I'm throwing in. Yeah, and the amount of space that was available, I would say, led to a lot of kind of misuse of that section. A popular way to use it was just an extra essay. Which we do not ask for and do not want, like we want you to put your effort into the main common application essay and then the else specific questions. But then a lot of people were using that section to write an entire additional 650 word essay. The other very common thing that people do with this space is they will use it as a sort of extended resume. Either they feel like, hey, I do more than the 10 activities that I can put on the common application, and so here are 10 more, or hey, I didn't have enough space to tell you about every single debate award that I won in the 30 tournaments that I participated in over four years. So here's each and every one of those details. That information really doesn't add substantively to a student's application. What I find interesting about both of the examples that you brought up is that for both the extra essay and the extended resume, those are already sorts of sections that exist on the application in the extracurricular activities and in that big common application essay. So as applicants are thinking about filling out that additional information section, a good question to maybe ask yourself, might be, is this covered in a different section of the application and would I be sort of just repeating something that I might have already repeated or spilling over from a different section? And the reason that there's limited space in the extracurricular section is because that's all we want and need. Take that limit as sort of like the freedom to not tell us every little detail about each of your activities. Some helpful uses of the additional information section have included an explanation of an extracurricular activity that is truly sort of unusual or is very specific to your high school and the space that was available in the activities list just didn't give you room to explain just like honestly what this thing is. I have seen some students use this space to explain a course that might be mislabeled or misrepresented on their transcript where they're actually using a period to take, you know, maybe an independent study advanced placement course or study for an additional AP exam, but that's not listed on their transcript. Using it as a clarifying space can be helpful if you think there's something that we wouldn't understand or is mislabeled as part of your application. Occasionally, students will sort of put in some additional kind of fun fact. Yeah. That can be helpful. So again, if you're just going through your application and feeling like I've had space to share this, that's important. I've had space to share this, but there's this other thing. There is additional information I want to share. This space is right there for you. Exactly. And please, in this space, feel free to use bullets like it doesn't have to be well-written pros. The new word limit kind of reflects that. It's not a space for another essay. And finally, just to wrap it up, if you go through the application and you say, I've shared what I want to share, there is no additional information. Leave it blank. That is cool too. You are not missing an opportunity there just to say something, to say something or to fill the space. All right. So let's talk about changes to our Yale specific questions this year. Last year, the big reveal that was that we were making zero changes to the application. Yeah. It was the first time that that had happened in as many years as Hannah or I could remember. And so we spent that application update episode last year talking about what seemed to be working and not working as well in those questions. And all of that advice, by the way, still applies. So we would encourage you to go back and listen to last year's episode. This year's application will have one change. One little small change. We are making one change to one question. Yeah. This is the result of our annual discussion as a staff that we do at a big office retreat about the questions. And there was one question in particular that we identified this year that had not been touched in a long time that we said we think we can ask this question in a more productive way. Yes. And who specifically said we should ask this question in a more productive way? I did. Okay. Yeah. So I think it's important to know that Mark sparked this conversation for us this year. And I did start the conversation. And if folks have listened to previous episodes, you might already have an idea about which question I'm talking about because I have tried to dispense a lot of advice about this question every year on these application updates. This is the why Yale question. Yeah. This is the question that we actually internally just call the why, why. That's our clever little way of abbreviating it. In previous episodes, I explained how this question needed to be about you, the applicant, and not about Yale. And I did a lot of talking about sort of how this is phrased in the present, perfect tense and how you needed to be sort of talking about telling a story about how you came to see that Yale was a good fit for you. And hey, I thought I dispensed really good advice, but overwhelmingly we have found that responses tend to tell us more about Yale than they do about the applicant. And so I said, you know, what maybe it's time that we rephrase this question. Tina, just as a first year admissions officer, how did you find that whole like staff wide conversation about this and then the subsequent committee, smaller committee that meant to talk about the wording? Oh, I found that process to be very interesting to just be a part of and I was glad not necessarily to be the driver behind the conversation, but a little bit to just be a fly on the wall and see what the process of changing an application question looks like. You know, we brought up that Mark was the person who brought up changing this question and I think that then sparked a great discussion about, well, what are the types of responses that we see to this question and how can we then create a question that allows applicants to better reflect on their interest, their values, their experiences and what led them to apply to Yale. And the amount of thought and effort that went into agonizing literally over the specific words that we chose to use, I think really shows how much thought we put into the process and I would also say to reassure anybody out there who thinks that we try and make the application more difficult, where we're sitting in a room, you know, twirling our admissions mustaches about how we can use this as a question to make it more difficult to apply, we're actually doing the exact opposite. We are trying to make it easier to apply, we are trying to make it so that applicants are set up to give better answers. Yeah. I want the phrase admissions mustaches. Yes. I want to have to incorporate that. This is fantastic. Totally. I love it. But yeah, we kind of work backwards, right? We think about, okay, what kind of response do we want and then how can we rephrase this question to make that more clear to the people who are applying? So our new wording to this question has changed. The old one just to remind you was, what is it about Yale that has led you to apply? The new question is reflect on how your interests, values and or experiences have drawn you to Yale. So the big shift here is trying to reframe the question from the very beginning, understandably, the old one which started with what is it about Yale, prompted a lot of students to say, well, let me tell you things about Yale, right? Right. Totally understandable, right? So we tended to get a lot of just Yale facts, a very typical response might be something about sort of the day and the life that you're imagining as a Yale student, where you pepper in sort of a little colorful anecdotes about old campus coming from the Yale Daily News building or going to your residential college buttery or something like that. And just overwhelmingly, these responses tended to say more about Yale than about you. They often were lovely little vignettes and pieces of writing, but they weren't necessarily giving us new information about the applicant. So we started this new question with one of our favorite words, reflect. We are pointing you in that direction right away, we're saying the first thing you need to do is not go research Yale, the first thing you need to do is look inward and reflect on your own interests, your own values, your own experiences, start with that and then think about how those have drawn you to Yale. And we included those three things, interests, values and or experiences to give you some options on how you want to approach this question. So some people might want to talk specifically about their interests and how they will translate to their time in college, other times it might be more about experiences. So we wanted to leave it sort of open and not too specific. And some folks may have something to say about all three, that's okay too. A word of warning, I find that generally speaking when applicants see a kind of triad like this in a question, interests, values, experiences, their impulse is going to be, I need to include all three. And I need to structure this in a way where I say my interest in blank of value I have and experience I had. And as you just said, Hannah, that might be the case for some students, but we've listed these out not to sort of make it a laundry list and say, well, all three of these things should have drawn you to Yale. We are just trying to actually give you some examples of things about you that might have sort of sparked the sense of, hey, Yale would be a good fit for me. And to get back to some advice that we've talked about with this question in previous episodes, I talk about this in admissions committees about the connect the dots question for us. If you think about when we hit this question in our application reading, it is sequentially after we've read that sort of core part of your application. So we've read your personal statement, we've read about your activities list, we already have a sense of your academic strengths. So by the point that we read this why Yale response, we are usually already pretty interested. We're intrigued. You say, wow, the student is accomplished. They're interesting. They have some great insights. I'm, I'm like in what I'm seeing. And then we start to ask ourselves, okay, what about Yale specifically? Because our work is not about just pinning laurels on students and congratulations you've already accomplished, we're trying to make a fit. And so this is your space to really say, hey, that interesting person that you've already started to meet, here's how this interesting accomplished person has found their way into your applicant pool. And what is it about me that led me to thinking that four years at Yale actually could be a really good fit for me. So think about connecting the dots for your reader between you, the 17 year old, that you know very well, and Yale, the university that we know very well. And if you have really been sort of thoughtful and deliberate in your college search and deciding where you want to apply and like why you're excited to apply to a school like Yale, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what to say in this question. Yes, absolutely. What you don't want to say is not only a bunch of facts about Yale, but also not sort of what you perceive as a sort of the strengths of the university, right? Like I think like a lot of the things that we get is like, oh, well, just the general consensus seems to be that Yale is a great place for this or that and usually doesn't come out and say it this way, but it sort of clear like I found on Reddit that you know, Yale seems to be good for this or sometimes even worse, it seems like Jack GPT told me that Yale is known for these areas. And so I'm just going to sort of regurgitate that back to you. That does not tell us much about you. And it doesn't reflect how we tend to think about the university experience either. Once again, we are asking, you know, for that reflection piece first. So I think when you're thinking about answering this question, first think about those interest values and or experiences and think about the Yale piece last actually when writing the essay because at the end of the day, the interest values and experiences that you had came first and then eventually you heard about Yale and there might have been a specific aspect that drew you, but only because it connected to one of those different reflections that you've come up with. And as we talk about these Yale specific application questions generally, if you find yourself going through them and saying, huh, I don't know why I would be applying to Yale, maybe you should think about whether you should go through with putting together these application questions and actually hitting submit. We have not designed them to be a barrier, but what we find many of our applicants tell us that they really enjoy the process of completing the Yale specific applications that they say. I took this as a chance to reflect and to think about what I wanted to share and to sort of think about what my connecting the dots to Yale might look like and that that was an enjoyable experience. I can't guarantee that. Right. Every single one of our applicants, but if you approach these questions as a series of opportunities to share more information about yourself as opposed to a series of questions that you might encounter on your AP calculus exam or testing different parts of your knowledge of Taylor series or something like that, you're going to do better work in that space and give us more to work with. Before we make this kind of change, we're excited to see what sort of responses we get. So I'm really looking forward to hearing what you all have to say and a year from now we'll come back together and we'll say, okay, did this question do its job? Did we get more of the types of responses that we're looking for and if the answer is no, maybe we'll be back again a year later with another change, we'll see. I don't think that this question has changed in 20 plus years. I'm pretty sure that this was the phrasing of the question that I answered more than 20 years ago. So it's exciting to finally be shaking this up. Why don't we go ahead and mention just quickly some of the other parts of the Yale Pacific questions. So in addition to that, why, Yale question, we're also going to ask students to list up to three majors that interest them and to reflect a little bit on an area that interests them that's related to those majors. We also ask a series of what are called short takes, these are kind of tweet length questions, we have four of them and those are staying the same. And then finally, there's a short essay where we give people three different choices for what they want to write about. We've talked about all these pieces in depth and other episodes, so we don't need to repeat it here. But I think it's worth mentioning that we continue to like these questions because they are eliciting good, helpful responses along all kinds of different choices. So particularly that last essay where there's three options to choose from, we are feeling really good about them because we are seeing really illuminating, helpful, reflective responses to all three of those questions. It's not the case that one of them has emerged as the better choice or the more helpful choice or something that we would advise you like, oh yeah, don't do this one. Right. Because it's a trip. Right. If we were seeing that, then we would change the questions, yeah, which we have not done this year. Again, go back to last year's episode on the 24/25 application questions and go a little bit more in depth about each of them on that episode. And Kenan, I'm curious in your first year reading applications, is there one part of the Yale-specific questions that you particularly like or that you found revealing or that when you are presenting applicants, you sort of tended to draw the committee's attention to. My favorite Yale supplemental essay from this past cycle would definitely be the question about academic interest that students have. I myself was a computer science major and that's a very, you know, kind of narrow field. And it's nice to hear about all the wonderful different things that applicants are interested in. And they write about fields of study that I've never even heard of and I'm certainly not an expert on. And I find that I can learn a lot both about applicants and just the world around me when I read those essays. Well, thank you, Kenan, for making your podcast debut today. We'll have to have you back soon. Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure and I look forward to reading my share of the 50,000 YL essays that we'll get this year. Yes. Indeed. We are excited for another year of reading all about the interesting students who are listening to this podcast and will apply to Yale. Just another plug. Go back and find those other episodes on application writing advice, essays, what works, essays, what doesn't work, and essays, the little stuff. Thanks to former admissions officer, Andrew Brick Johnson, who composes our music. You should check them out at AndrewbrickJohnson.com. If you have comments or an idea for an episode, drop us a line at Yale [email protected]. And finally, remember that the views expressed in this podcast are ours and don't necessarily represent those of Yale University. Thanks for listening.