Читать книгу Accepted!. Secrets to Gaining Admission to the World's Top Universities онлайн

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Many US universities offer supplementary essays as a way of enabling applicants to express why they like the university. The real reason they want to give you extra essay questions relates to the concept of the early decision round. They want you to “reveal your preferences” and show how seriously committed you are to the school.

If you write an essay to a college like Columbia about why you want to go to that school and you offer generic diatribes about New York, their core curriculum and the need for broad exploration, diverse classmates and other generic answers, they know you really haven't researched the school in detail. The really winning supplementary essays (which take a long time to write!) have to be so specific that what you can say literally ONLY apply to the single college you are applying to.

Some application essays are quite generic from school to school. They might ask you to describe the community you are from, for example. Unsurprisingly, high schoolers in the frenetic rush to apply to college, who have procrastinated writing application essays, try to copy/paste answers from school to school. This is the death cross! A university that can detect you are just answering with generic responses, and not customized to their university, knows that you are just spraying across multiple universities hoping one admits you. And let's be honest—they are usually right. For every one student I meet who genuinely loves a certain single university and is head over heels in love with it for a set of specific reasons, I would literally meet more than one hundred students who choose based on rankings a set of prestigious schools (and my previous arguments justify this as being rightfully so, in not all, but many cases).