Essays: The Little Stuff

Hello and welcome to episode 6 of Inside the Yale Admissions Office and part 3 of our series on application essays. I'm Hannah, and I'm a Yale Admissions Officer. I'm Mark, I'm also a Yale Admissions Officer, and I'm so excited that today we are joined by our one and only colleague, Reid. Thank you so much for having me, Mark and Hannah. I feel like I've been here the whole time. Having your studio in my office has really sort of expanded my knowledge about this process in some way. Which we really appreciate as the best sort of acoustically set-up office in our building. And it is so ironic that your debut on this show is not happening in your office. We are still in COVID exile, so we're doing this remotely, but are so glad that you're joining us today. I'm going to read for part 3 of this discussion about essays, which is all about the little stuff. The small questions that Yale asks all of its applicants to respond to in addition to the larger parts of the application. Yeah, each of these questions is much shorter than the full essays that we were sort of focusing on in the past two episodes. And as you're writing your answers to these questions, you may have two overarching questions going through your mind. Why are they asking me this, and what are they looking for here? We're going to try to answer those questions. And as we do, we're going to describe our process for writing those questions. Because we, as admissions officers, get together every single year and try to decide what exactly we want to ask each of our applicants when they're putting together their applications. So quick question for you, Reid, as we're getting started. What sort of impressions do you tend to get when someone uses this part of the application really well? So I will be honest, the little questions are my favorite part of the application, because I think that a lot of students really use them differently. And they break away from that larger, common or coalition or QuestBridge app essay. And they talk about some different things, and they use those short takes to really sort of explore who they are and share who they are with us. And so I think we get an idea of fit. We get an idea of person from these little questions that can be tougher to find in other parts. Yeah, totally. Like we talked about in episode one, there is a specific order that we read things in the application. So let's just run through that really quickly, just as a reminder. The first thing we see is sort of how you spend your time, your list of extracurricular activities, and then is the longer essay that will probably go to every college you're applying to. And that we talked about a little bit in the previous two episodes. All right, next up then are these Yale Pacific questions. And as we're reading, we are literally just sort of clicking through pages of the application and we'll go from the section that has been sent to all colleges to the next page. And now we are in the Yale specific responses. And I think of this as sort of a process of sort of gradually zeroing in on the student as we're trying to get some specific insights for the two big questions that we're always trying to answer about every applicant. What will the student bring to Yale and what will the student take away? And these questions are sort of the most direct opportunity we have to get some specific answers to those questions. So as you're thinking about them, keep those two big parts of the equation in mind. Yeah, and Reed, I'm curious to know what you think, like, what do you find that you get out of these shorter questions that you might not be getting from the rest of the application? So I think specifically, I get an idea of what a student is interested in outside of their main interests. Usually students are spending the time in that larger essay to talk about something that is at the core of them, whether that's an academic interest, whether that's something about their family life or personal life. And these smaller pieces really allow students to get outside of that and talk about some of the smaller things, because none of us are just one thing. And so these spaces really allow us to get to know the student and to get to see who they would be when they are on campus. We're really looking through a window at students lives, and this window is so limited. And this is a great opportunity for students in their own words to pull back some of the curtains on this window, because we're hearing from outside sources and we've heard about their core interests. But this is the time when they can really share the totality. Yeah, and that's a great segue actually to sort of the next thing we wanted to talk about, which is, you know, why do we have all these questions? I know as an applicant, you might be annoyed by these, particularly if you're putting together lots of applications and you're like, why do I have, you know, 10 more questions that they're asking me? And I want to highlight sort of two big reasons why we have these. And the first is simply, exactly as you were saying, Reed, more opportunities. We are very conscious of how limited the application is, and we want to provide as many chances as we can for the student to sort of help us meet them. Yeah, and regardless of which of these pieces is sort of more effective for you in any kind of best case scenario, we as readers will find consistency and resonance between these smaller pieces, your larger essays, and the other parts of the application. The other big reason that we have these questions is because we, meaning admissions officers and representatives of our university, we're trying to communicate something about what Yale is all about to our applicants. That might not be immediately obvious. I don't think that that crossed my mind when I was applying to colleges. But we use these questions as a way to tell our applicants what makes our school unique and what we value. Yeah, so as you're reading these questions, a question for you to ask is, okay, what are they trying to tell us about their school here? And as we get into the specific questions that we're asking for the upcoming application cycle, we can talk a little bit about that. But just keep in mind that this idea of fit sort of goes both ways. So our process isn't just about recognizing the most accomplished and deserving students, but finding the students who are going to fit the best into our community, who are going to really take advantage of the experience and bring something to Yale as well. Right. It's a good sign, as you're putting together your applications, that if you approach the questions on an application that are specific to a school and you say, oh, I would be delighted to tell you about that. Thanks for asking me. I would love to tell you about this. It's probably a good sign that you've done sort of your side of the fit equation, right? And that you've been able to say, yeah, this is a school that's speaking my language, and I'm really glad that I have the chance to tell this school these kinds of things about me, because those are the kinds of things about me that seemed really important as I was putting together my college list. Totally. And because of that, we spend a lot of time crafting these questions because we're trying to not only elicit sort of the best writing out of you, but we're trying to get our message across as well. So, Reed, do you want to talk about the process that our admissions office staff goes through to put together these questions every year? Oh, absolutely. If I had to choose two words to describe this process, they would be thorough and granular. If you look back at the sort of past three, four years of prompts we have, I think from an outside perspective, you would probably think that the questions haven't changed that much. A word here or there has been switched. A clause added in every rare occasion, but we have spent so much time thinking about why that specific word is replacing the word that it's replacing. I think my first year that I was involved in these conversations, I was stunned by how much time we could spend debating the specific meaning of a word that was going in a prompt. But we have this sort of wealth of experience at this point where we can see the changes in the types of writing that we get, one prompt versus another, even with only one word having been changed. And the discussions that we're having around word changes are often framed in the terms of what is going to give our students who are applying the best opportunity to present themselves well. I think it could be misconstrued as us trying to make challenging prompts, but in reality we want to give students the ability to put their best foot forward, and I was certainly surprised by that when I engaged in these discussions for the first time. Yeah, that's a great point. They're not trick questions. We're not a sort of diabolical group getting together and saying, "How can we trip them up? How can we confuse them?" Yeah, I'd even take it a step further where we're in these conversations as a full staff, putting the wording together for these questions, and we'll say to ourselves, actually, we shouldn't word it like this because we don't want students to fall into this trap or think that we're looking for this. We really are looking for the best out of these responses. Right, and we undertake this exercise deliberately, sort of right at the end of every reading cycle. So after each and every one of us has read a few thousand of these answers to every question, we sort of take it fresh and say, "Okay, how did we feel about these questions? Could we do something differently?" And we go through that process that we just described. Yeah, so we did that a couple of weeks ago, so we have fresh brand new questions for the upcoming application cycle. If you're listening to this episode, not in the summer of 2020, definitely be sure to check the website because the questions may have changed. And we put these out online early, usually in July or so, even though the application itself will not come online until August, and our first application deadline is not until November, because we think it's helpful to see these in advance. It's not the case that you need to do lots of drafting and rewriting of these questions, but you will definitely use the space better if you give yourself some time to think about how you want to respond to them. Yeah, we give you very limited real estate to work with, so think carefully about your word choice. Some rewriting might be helpful here. Right, they are short enough that you could do them quickly, but I don't recommend that. So my analogy here is of doing a cross repuzzle. So Hannah and I are both cross repuzzle enthusiasts. Hannah is much, much better than I am. I'm the kind of person who takes a long time with cross repuzzles, and if I find that I'm stuck on something, often if I walk away for a couple of hours, I will be able to come back and sort of see things very differently. And I think that can be the case with these kinds of questions. You might have an immediate response, which is good, but give it some time. Think about it because you might actually find a different way to present yourself using that part of the application. Yeah, as a speed solver, I can't say I fully relate to that analogy, but yeah, that's a great point. Mark and I are two totally different flavors of complete nerd. I'm not a cross word person, but the shorter, shorter essays and shorter pieces of writing are often much trickier to produce than longer pieces because each word matters so much more. So whatever your crossword approach, use that approach in harmony with some outside editing for these questions. Yeah, totally. So now we're going to walk through these specific questions and give you some insights in terms of how the questions wound up this way and what effective responses can look like. So because we have Reed here, and as everyone listening already knows, Reed has such a fabulous radio voice. I was self-conscious about inviting him on because I just knew everyone would be like, "Mark, why is Reed not doing this? He's so much better at this." So I'm going to put my pride aside, and I'm going to ask that Reed use his perfect radio voice to artistically read the actual text of each one of the questions. So first episode we call the "Why Yale?" or "Why Why?" What is it about Yale that has led you to apply 125 words or fewer? And I also briefly want to say that, though I may have a radio voice, I also have a radio face, so it's a good thing this is a video conference. Alright, so a deceptively simple question. This kind of question probably appears on just about every college application. How did you get here? Why are you applying here? And I want to start off with a warning about this question. This is not designed as an exercise to simply sort of profess your love for Yale or for whatever institution you are applying to. And the same rules apply here that apply in other parts that we were discussing, particularly show, don't tell. I think this is a question that we get a lot of telling, particularly when people go and research obscure faculty members or find something that appeared in the student newspaper four years ago. And they're just telling us, "I've done my homework here and I want to tell you that I've done that already." Right, we are not looking for facts about Yale here. We already know those. You don't need to tell us. We are looking specifically for why you want to come here. What specific experiences have you had that led you to deciding that Yale would be a good place for you? You don't need to talk about prestige or rankings. Those aren't good reasons to apply to a school. You don't need to be just sort of listing the facts. We're looking, as always, for a little bit of reflection here. And I want to draw your attention to the fact that the question is phrased in the past tense. It is, "What has led you to apply?" I find that really good responses to this point to specific experiences in a student's past. Hopefully, the recent past that led them to decide, "Yeah, I want to apply here." The weaker responses in my experience tend to launch right into the future tense. And they say, "I want to go to Yale because I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this, and I want to tell you all about how wild is this castle I'm going to be here?" And that's all interesting as a sort of thought exercise, but it actually doesn't tell me a whole lot about how you got to this place right now. So keep it in the past tense. Alright, next up is a longer one. Students at Yale have plenty of time to explore their academic interests before committing to one or more major fields of study. Many students either modify their original academic direction or change their minds entirely. As of this moment, what academic areas seem to fit your interests or goals most comfortably? Please indicate up to three from the list provided. Why do these areas appeal to you? 125 words or fewer? Yeah, and the list that Reid is referring to there is a list of available majors at Yale. You choose up to three that you may be interested in. This is not a commitment, and I often get the question, "Will I have a better chance if I choose this major or that major?" The answer is no, and what we're looking for here is just to see that you've thought a little bit about what you might want to study in college. And note the long wind-up for this question. There's a lot of contextualizing here because we really do want to make it clear that you're applying to a school where you don't have to stay in one major. As a liberal arts school, you have the opportunity to move around and change your mind a little bit. And, you know, we have great applicants who are sometimes interested in three very different areas. Others who have three very similar areas. Others who are sort of making clear. Now, I am really passionate about one particular area, and all three of those approaches can be successful. It's a chance for you, though, to give us an idea of sort of how you fit and how you've connected the dots between the specific academic offerings at Yale and your future planning. Yeah, and this is a relatively new question on our application that has come out of some conversations with faculty around Yale and among our staff, where we really just wanted to get a sense of academic interest without only asking sort of, "What are you planning on majoring in?" It is a question specifically about why. And I think sometimes we get responses that are just along the lines of, "Well, I really like this, and I really like this." And they don't go this step further, which is actually answering the specific question of why do these appeal to you. All right, let's get to my favorite part, the short takes. These we ask you to answer in only 35 words or less. Reed, do you want to hit us with the four short takes? Absolutely. What inspires you? Yale's residential colleges regularly host conversations with guests representing a wide range of experiences and accomplishments. What person, past or present would you invite to speak? What question would you ask? You were teaching a Yale course. What is it called? Most first year Yale students live in suites of four to six students. What do you hope to add to your suite mates' experience? What do you hope they will add to yours? This actually came from our experience with a Questbridge application. So we'll probably talk about Questbridge in another episode later on. It's a fabulous nonprofit organization, and they have their own application that includes about 10 of these short questions. Officers found over the years that as we were reading those applications, we really liked those shorter responses. So we kind of stole the idea from them. I think these should be a little bit fun to answer. They're simple. Again, like we said before, they're not trick questions. We really want to know your genuine answers to these questions. One thing that I will point out, Reed was talking a little bit about how we change up these questions every year. I will say that you are teaching a Yale course. What is it called? Short take number three has remained unchanged for the past four or five years because we like it so much. We love the answers to this question. So once we landed on that one, we sort of said, "You know what? That's such a perfect question. It's getting exactly what we want." Our advice here is the same as it is for other parts. Think about what is it that the school is trying to tell me about their experience by asking me these questions. And they rarely win the day for an applicant. I can't think of an experience I've had where an answer to a short take is really kind of what a committee decision sort of hinged on. But they often add a little bit more texture. And when that texture comes in, as part of the larger consistent story we're talking about, we keep learning something new that doesn't necessarily fit in the other parts of the application. So I would say this might be a space where you sort of say, "You know, I didn't have another place to tell them about this thing that is just a fun project for me or just something that I really enjoy. It wouldn't fit anywhere else." One of these short takes actually might be a place to share that with us. Definitely. Reed, what do you find that you get out of these questions sort of the most often? So I actually can think of a time from this past year when the short takes were the thing. It was a student who I was presenting to committee, and he was clearly very brilliant academically, very focused on research and what he was doing, and he had chosen to spend most of his personal statements, both the long ones and the shorter ones, talking about that work. And we had all this evidence from the teacher recommendations and the counselor recommendation that he was this wonderful person outside of the classroom that he was caring and loved to have fun. But we didn't really get that from him at any point until you got to those short takes, and they were just so lively and so different from every other piece of writing that you produced. Yeah, I like that because I do think that these short takes can be an opportunity to be a little bit more spontaneous with your answers. I mean, we're telling you to craft them carefully because you have limited real estate here. But yeah, they can sometimes give us a little bit more spontaneity or personality than a full-sized essay they can. Alright, so next we get to the medium-sized pieces. So we ask for two shorter essays, around 250 words, which is usually like one to two paragraphs. That's how much space you have here. The first one is one that everybody writes, and then you have a choice among three other topics. So Reid, tell us the first one that everyone's going to write, and this is new wording this year. Yale's extensive course offerings and vibrant conversations beyond the classroom encourage students to follow their developing intellectual interests wherever they lead. Tell us about your engagement with a topic or idea that excites you. Why are you drawn to it? Yeah, so there is a reason this one is required. We want to know more about you as a student. Academics are our top priority here, and we can't capture who you are as a student with just your GPA or just your test score. So that's really what we're trying to get out here. And we're also trying to tell you a little bit about our academic environment with the wind-up to this question. And I will draw your attention to a few very carefully chosen words. Again, as we were saying, we spent a lot of time thinking about these in particular. So we're saying topic or idea, because we want to be really broad here. This might be something that came up in a classroom. It might be something that you just saw on a documentary or is a social issue that is a great concern for you. We want this to be broad, just something that your brain gets worked up and excited about. And to the next part, then I'll draw your attention to, that excites you. That word excites is chosen very deliberately as well. It's different than, you know, I enjoy this or I found it interesting. We're trying to highlight something that really kind of gets your motor running. And then the last piece of it, why are you drawn to it? That piece is included for very specific reason. We want you to, the recurring theme, reflect and analyze. You have to do both here. Connect the dots for us. Hopefully we will finish this and as a reader, we will be interested in this topic or idea as well. But we want to know about the topic or idea specifically as it relates to you, so that we can say, oh, I can see why this applicant is excited about this. That makes sense that this kind of person would really get jazzed up about this particular thing. Yeah, we are not looking for the Wikipedia entry on the topic here. We still want this essay to be about you. All right. Our final read monologue today. Will you give us the second short essay choices, the three of which every applicant will choose one? Reflect on your membership in a community. Why is your involvement important to you? How has it shaped you? You may define community however you like. Yale students, faculty and alumni engage issues of local, national and international significance. Discuss an issue that is important to you and how your college experience could help you address it. Tell us about your relationship with a role model or mentor who has been influential in your life. How has their guidance been instrumental to your growth? Yeah, so we give you a choice here. We want you to choose whichever one sort of resonates best with you, whatever you feel like. You'll be able to write the best response to for you. But do go ahead and read all three carefully because again, we're trying to communicate a little bit about our values here at Yale with you with these questions. One of these will probably jump out for you and your choice of essay as much as the essay itself might tell us a little something about what you want to share and what you value. So, you know, depending on your expectations coming in and depending on how much you enjoy writing about yourself or dread it, that all might seem like a ton of work that's going to, you know, be totally exhausting. Or you might say that is not nearly enough space to share everything that I would want to share, you know, with members of the admissions committee. It is not going to be the case that every piece is going to work for every applicant or, you know, and probably for you. If you're a prospective student who is listening to this, some of these are probably going to resonate more with you than others. You'll probably be sort of more excited about your responses to some questions than others, and that is absolutely fine. Yes, totally. Don't forget to sort of zoom out and think about the application as a whole and the story that it's kind of telling about you. When things go well in the application, sort of in the best case scenario here as a reader, we will read all of these responses and end up thinking, wow, this person is really going to fit well here at Yale. And sometimes it's clear to us that the applicant already knows that they're a great fit for Yale. Sometimes we feel like we know that they're a great fit, even though the applicant might not quite know it yet. But our whole process of crafting these questions is designed to let that sort of thing happen where we get to the end of the application and we think, wow, this person's a great fit. So, you know, writing the responses to these questions, it shouldn't be a full-time job, but we do advise you to start early. Give your brain some time to mull these over and make some choices about what you're going to share using these different parts of the application. Thanks, as always, to our friend and colleague Jill, who is both our sound engineer and a great admissions officer. Hey, Reed, thank you for lending us your office when we're in the office, but more importantly, thanks for lending us your amazing voice and your invaluable insights to today's episode. Thank you for having me, and I can't wait to hopefully record again in my actual office. Definitely. We look forward to that. Thanks to former admissions officer Andrew Brick Johnson, who composes our music. You should check him out at AndrewBrickJohnson.com. If you have comments or an idea for an episode, feel free to drop us a line at [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. (upbeat music)