The Surprisingly Subtle Supplementary Essays

You are done with your statement of purpose, and with a smile on your face, you look at the supplementary essays. As you go through the long list of these essays, the variety of supplementary questions are looking back at you from the university applications. The task will require your time and effort, and you don’t know where to start from!

Now what are all these supplementary prompts? 

They are a peek into your growth as an individual, the many colours you have filled on the canvas of your personality, the challenges overcome, the feats achieved, the vision that propels you to success and the mission that edges you onto greatness. The subtle art of narrating the highs and the lows, the friendships and fraternity, the community building and the humbling and exhilarating experiences gained – all these and more form the answers to the numerous supplementary essays that universities pose in an attempt to understand you and the fabric of your persona and character, aspirations and purpose.  

Supplementary essays are many, varied, and versatile in their intent. Some tease you to bare your soul while others nudge to open your mind into your own underlying motivations. While some challenge your creative aspects; others softly humdrum their nuanced ideation and expect you to do the same in your answers. Academic commitment, ethics and integrity as well as leadership, creativity and innovative aptitude run through the length and breadth of the large number of supplementary essays.

There is no one way to answer these supplementary prompts. Each student has had their own journey, struggles, wins and losses and everyone’s motivation to follow a certain career path is also different. What one student grasps from a situation may be in contrast to what a second student does from the same situation. Both the perspectives are fine. Hence the way to approach these essays is to be absolutely and fully honest to one’s own self.

Many times the students try and answer the supplementary essays in ways that they think would fit into the expectations of the admissions committee members. They only look to highlight the highs of their life, put an extra shine to it and overdo the use of words by using flowery language. These more often than not, actually harm the admission prospects for the student. The admission committees have no preset ideas on what the answers should be like, nor do they look to necessarily admit students who come across as larger than life. They also look for ordinary people who could have had big fails but learnt so well from them that they went onto great achievements from them, shed a bad habit, gave up some prejudice, and reinvented themselves. Thus the obvious approach to these answers should be to think about particular events in one’s life and put that narration into a read worthy answer.

Supplementary essays have the overtones of sharing what is important to a student, and the undertones of why it is important to them. The best methodology one can adopt here is “to show and not tell”. By giving real examples of their activities, dispute resolution attempts, standing up for justice and equality, thought processes and leadership initiatives, team work and cultural sensitivity, students can use simple language and compositions to write their way to university admissions.

The first step in attempting these essays though is to read the questions carefully and understand what the supplementary essay is asking for, and which part of the supplementary question should one be focussing more on, wherein the guidance of an essay expert always comes in handy.