[Podcast] When Should My Supplemental Essays Be Finished?

Sheila Akbar 0:00
I could tell this story about a time that I went stargazing or a time that I visited my relatives in India and had this interaction with somebody or fell off a boat, you know, whatever. These really memorable stories and they’re gorgeous. And I’m like, well, what are you trying to say with that? And they’re like, what do you mean?

Sheila Akbar 0:24
Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. Today we’re talking about supplemental essays in a way that maybe will surprise you as much as it surprised me. Take a listen.

McKenzie Carver 0:37
This is a time when a lot of students are working on their supplemental essays because on August 1st, the Common App opened. And one of the most commonly asked questions from students as they go through this all is when should my supplemental essays be finished?

Sheila Akbar 0:57
Oh. That’s an interesting question. It’s not the question I thought you were gonna ask about supplements. That’s great though. It’s good to know that people are looking for that answer because it’s not the question I would be asking about supplements at this time of year. You know what that says to me, if we can do a little meta-analysis of this question, because you’ve done research on what are the questions people are asking Google or AI at this time. And if that’s the question kids are asking, I’m like, oh, that tells us something.

McKenzie Carver 1:34
Right.

Sheila Akbar 1:35
So before I actually answer the question, let’s talk about what the question means. I think these are kids who are feeling the pressure, yeah. Either because they know there’s a deadline looming and they haven’t done much yet, or and or their parents are like, tick tock, fellas, let’s get a move on. And I just imagine a teenager being like, bro, it’s my last summer. Like, let me rest, let me have some fun before I have to go back to school. And many of them are back to school already. And they’re like, how serious is this? Right. Like, when do I have to have this finished? So that they can plan to procrastinate up until that point, which is a very interesting approach to procrastination.

McKenzie Carver 2:32
They’re saying this is the latest day I can start in order to — yeah, yeah.

Sheila Akbar 2:38
That’s like a weirdly sort of responsible way to procrastinate, I suppose. It is. But it is still procrastination, my friends. So, okay, to answer the question just as straightforwardly as I can, it depends on your deadline. Right? If you’re applying early action, early decision, you might have an October 15th, November 1st, or November 15th deadline, depending on the schools. And so they better be done by then, right? And the deadline is usually midnight on the date, like midnight your local time on the date that the college has set. So, like, I’m in California, November 1st at midnight, 11:59 p.m., November 1st. So, like technically the border between November 1st and November 2nd. But I don’t recommend that. For a number of reasons. One, some computer thing is always gonna happen.

McKenzie Carver 3:39
Yeah.

Sheila Akbar 3:40
Like, what if the platform crashes or your computer crashes or your internet goes out as mine has been doing all day today? Don’t leave it for 11:58 p.m. on the date of the deadline. That’s just gonna be really stressful. So beyond outside circumstances, going to submit your application actually involves several steps. So again, don’t leave it to the last minute because you might find, oh, there’s this little piece of information that you have to put in in order to hit submit or whatever, right? So more practically, I think the thing to do is be ready to submit a few days before the deadline. It’s not gonna win you extra points to submit three weeks early or a month early, though it might be nice for you to get it off your desk and not have to think about it again. You really don’t want to submit until you’re sure this is the best that you can do and the message that you want to put forward. And you’ve done proofreading, you’ve had someone else kind of proofread things because sometimes we get too familiar with our own writing that we miss a mistake, miss a typo. So you want to give yourself some space to take that more objective view and final polish. But a couple days before the deadline, I think is when you want to have it done. If only the supplemental essay was the only thing you had to do, though.

McKenzie Carver 5:08
Right.

Sheila Akbar 5:09
Right. That is a building block, an important building block of the whole application package, right? I tend to think of it like a portfolio that’s gonna tell a certain piece of your story, but the rest of the application will also tell that story. And you want to make sure those pieces work together. They’re not at least not telling conflicting stories or something that’s gonna confuse somebody, right? You want to make sure all these pieces are really working together to represent you and speak to that college about why you’re a great fit for that college and why that college is a great fit for you. And that’s really, I think, the heavy lifting that the supplemental essay can do. So you do need to have your activity list done and your personal statement done and a good idea of what is going to be communicated through the other pieces of your application in order to know even what to write in your supplemental essays, right? And to make things even more complicated, I like to brainstorm supplemental essays with my students before we talk about what’s our Common App or personal statement topic, because the supplements get a little bit more specific. They often ask about what’s your idea of community or what does diversity mean to you, or what are your academic interests? And if students haven’t looked at those prompts before, they might try to write about one or more of those things in their personal statement. And then they look at the supplemental essays and they’re like, well, now what do I write for this? I already told them this thing. Exactly. So we kind of have to keep all these pieces in mind as the whole thing is coming together. And it’s not as simple as just this part, then this part, then that part, because they all influence each other. Right.

McKenzie Carver 7:02
So in an ideal world, when would a student start working on their supplemental essays?

Sheila Akbar 7:11
I like to start — I know it’s not June right now — but I like to start in June. I like to say, hey, what are our schools that we’re most interested in? Is there an early decision or restricted early action in that group? What are the other EAs that you would do? And let’s think about this first phase of applications and what supplements they’re gonna be asking. And earlier in the year, before August 1st, as you mentioned, the colleges haven’t confirmed their supplemental questions. Some of them do earlier, which I think is a service to students. I’m really glad that they do. It’s just on the college website, but it’s not gonna be in the Common App yet. And the good news is these questions don’t change all that much year to year. Most schools, if they’re changing anything, it’s just a slightly reworded version of a question they’ve already been asking. And then across schools, the questions fall into a couple main categories. Like I gave you a couple already: community diversity, academic interest. We see meaningful extracurricular. We see tell us about a time you had a difficult conversation with somebody. That one comes up a lot. Students are like, what are you talking about? I’m like, I’m sure you disagree with somebody every day. Like, let’s talk about one of them. But that’s a hard one to write. If you could teach a class on anything, what would you teach about? You know, why this college is probably the most common. Like, what draws you to apply to our school? And so those are things because we know the basic category of question, we can start to brainstorm. Okay, this story about why you like psychology is gonna go over here. And this story about how you like a block plan in your academic schedule is gonna go over here. And the thing that you once told me about teaching karate, that fits under your meaningful extracurricular. So now, you know, you don’t have to write them yet, but we’ve got placeholders, right? We kind of know what we’re generally gonna try to communicate in each of these supplements. Okay, for my ED school, these are the supplements that I’m planning to write. What else do I really need to make sure they know so they get a full picture of me? And that becomes your Common App essay or your personal statement essay. And then maybe they want to start writing that one. That is one that usually takes a long time. But I have plenty of students who like to start writing the supplements first, and maybe we’ll write a generic 300-word version of it because it’s smaller, it’s contained, the topic is a lot more focused, and it feels easier to write than who am I in 650 words, right? That’s a really hard thing to do. But once they’ve done one or two of these, it gets easier and easier, right? So the sequence at that point doesn’t really matter, but it’s more about the ideation. I want to start with the supplements, or if they’re applying to the University of California, that’s actually a great brainstorming exercise for supplements and personal statements because the University of California gives you eight questions, you only have to choose four of them. Well, let’s brainstorm them all. What would you say if you had to answer all eight? And I’m gonna save that in your content bank, right? Because some other school is gonna ask you how do you express your creative side or tell us a story about your leadership, and you could just use that thing right there, right? So that’s how I like to approach it.

McKenzie Carver 10:46
I think a lot of students probably underestimate how much time it’s gonna take for them to think of what they’re gonna write about, in addition to the actual craft of writing it.

Sheila Akbar 10:56
You are completely correct. I have a lot of students who come up with all kinds of gorgeous ideas, but they haven’t thought about what they are really trying to communicate. You know, I could tell this story about a time that I went stargazing or a time that I visited my relatives in India and had this interaction with somebody or fell off a boat, you know, whatever. These really memorable stories and they’re gorgeous. And I’m like, well, what are you trying to say with that? And they’re like, what do you mean? It’s like you tell a story to tell a story, like there is some message you’re trying to convey about yourself through this story. So I’m not saying that’s a bad story, but I need to know what it connects to, right? I had a student recently who we had kind of looked at his whole package and we’re like, all right, the thing that’s happening here is that you’re one of these interdisciplinary students who likes to take technical and scientific knowledge and find ways to apply it to help people in the real world because you have a vision for this world we could live in and you really want to help us get from here to there. It’s beautiful, right? And he was like, yeah, okay. And he had no idea what to do with that. I’m like, all right, I’m gonna hold your hand through this because he had all of these stories. He’s one of these kids who, like, I can write about this and I can write about that, and write about this. And I’m like, I love it. I love the energy and all the ideas, but which one is actually gonna communicate this thing about your broader vision for humanity and your role in it? Because that sounds like the thing we really need to make sure they understand. And so the veil is falling, and he’s like, oh, now I see what we’re doing, right? And we looked at his supplements, and one is definitely about academic interest, one is about a meaningful educational opportunity. And I’m like, okay, so you can talk about this group that you work with where you’re doing gene sequencing and helping people understand what that means or whatever, as this sort of technical impact example. And something else is going to go in this other supplemental essay. But what we really need to communicate in your main essay then is this visionary aspect, right? And he had a whole list of stories that he could tell. And one of them was about how he lost his glasses for a week and he felt like he was blind. And I’m like, well, that has to do with vision. That’s interesting. And then there was another one where I think for a period of time, his grandfather had lived with his family as he was aging, and this student used to take him on walks and used to be very frustrated because his grandfather walked very slowly. But he’s like, all right, I just I’m gonna have to slow down, just walk with my grandfather at his pace. And when he did, his vision opened up. He started noticing things that he never would have noticed on a fast-paced 17-year-old walk, walking at the pace of an 85-year-old man. He saw a lot more, noticed a lot more. And I’m like, okay, that one also has to do with vision. So we could go with either of these, right? But the goal is to communicate something about vision, right? I went into a lot of detail there, but I hope that really illustrates for everybody how beautifully this can come together. And you don’t want to put the cart before the horse. So what do you do if you haven’t started? I think the key is to get strategic. The key is get really clear on if there is an ED or an early school that is your favorite or have a couple that are your favorites and just start with those, right? That’s the soonest deadline. Let’s plan around that, right? So you can still do that whole process of like, what do the supplements say? Okay, then what do I need to do in my personal statement? Now I gotta write all of these things. But you gotta start now because the longer you wait, the harder it’s gonna get to fit it all in. But just focus on one or two. Right. And be diligent about it. I know a lot of the times with high school papers, we’re like, all right, I’m gonna sit down for six hours and we’re gonna crank it out. And we often wait for the pressure of the deadline to really get us going. But it’s far more effective and less stressful to do a little bit each day over the course of a week or two weeks, and you get a lot farther than you think. And sometimes you have to trick yourself into doing that, right? This happens to me all the time. I’m not gonna pretend that I don’t procrastinate everything in my life, but what I do is I set up a reward for myself on the other side, right? I can watch another episode if I do 15 minutes of this other thing. Get a little treat or exactly. I’ll go get some ice cream or I’ll call a friend. But only if I do a half an hour of this thing that I really don’t want to do first, right? Lots of things like that. There are methods for this. The Pomodoro method is a great one. You can Google that and you’ll get lots of great instructions on how to do that. Partnering with a friend who may be in a similar situation — you don’t have to share your writing with them, but you could sit in the same room or be on a Zoom call together and just be like, okay, we’re gonna do this hard thing together. And just having someone else going through it with you and being there with you. You can ask them for help if you need it, and that can be really valuable. It actually is the thing that I have been doing with one of my students who we have these great sessions and he’s like, got it, I’m gonna go draft it. And then the next week comes and he’s like, I didn’t draft it. Okay. What we started doing is first thing in the morning, we meet for 10 minutes. And we only had to do this for five days. And his parents were like, is this gonna work? I’m like, trust me, it’s gonna work. He was not even sure if it was gonna work. But we would get on the call and we would choose a paragraph of the outline that we wanted to write. And I’d be like, okay, so just say it to me. Don’t write it, say it. He said it, and I’m like, that’s perfect, write it. And then he’d write it. And at the end of five days, I’m not saying it’s a perfect draft, it’s a first draft, but he had a full draft where we addressed every piece of content he wanted to be in that essay. And now all we have to do is revise it and make it sound like him and tweak a few things. But getting over that hump of getting the words on the page, once you start somewhere, even with the worst sentence you could possibly think of, it gets so much easier. The last piece of advice I would give is everybody should read Anne Lamott’s essay called Shitty First Drafts. It’s really good, it’s super short, it’s maybe like three pages, but she’s a really accomplished writer. And her whole philosophy is like, my first draft is gonna be the shittiest thing I could come up with. That’s my goal. I want it to sound terrible. And when she has to sort of trick herself into that goal, she gets the thing written because she’s not judging herself as she’s writing. In fact, she’s like, this is shitty. That’s great. Let’s keep going. You know, exactly. There was a Friends episode once where Monica — I don’t know if kids these days will understand this, but the parents listening probably will — Monica is very competitive. But she was the worst at, I don’t know, cooking or something like that. And she was feeling really bad about it. But her friends were like, no, you’re the best at being the worst. You are the number one worst cook we have ever met. She was so excited about it, right? So you kind of want to do that with your first draft. It’s like, this is gonna be the worst thing ever. I want it to be the worst. No one ever has to see it. It’s just about you getting these ideas down, and then you can revise it, and it’ll be a little less worse and a little less worse until you’re actually happy with it, right? So just kind of let go of that immediate perfectionism, right? This will eventually become something really wonderful. It’s not gonna start that way. It never does.