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I still resent the colleges which used "Why do you want to come to Blah University in particular?" as an admissions prompt. For a graduate program, fine. For a

I still resent the colleges which used "Why do you want to come to Blah University in particular?" as an admissions prompt. For a graduate program, fine. For an undergraduate program? There are a handful of acceptable cases (Stanford makes you apply to a major), but mostly it's either "it's a good school that I hope I can get in to" or "it's a mediocre school and I need a safety for when Harvard shoots me down". These are places that let you spend 2-3 years 'undeclared', but they put on a song-and-dance about high school students having specific goals. I'm sure some of them want applicants who do have a specific reason to attend Blah, but even then there's no excuse for the usual system. You can't plan your life around Professor X at Blah, because Blah has a 15% acceptance rate and accepts among qualified students more or less at random. I remember that UPenn in particular had an essay prompt which was effectively "We're insecure, please praise us for 500 words."

Y201K 10y ago
Essays for transfering are very similar: "Why do you want to come here / why did you leave your last situation?" Surely they'd like you to write about environment or purpose, but like with a first job as a kid, I think "the other place sucked / the classes weren't any good there" should suffice.
- krackers 10y ago
  Actually I think for transferring the "why us" essay is fine, mainly because you're transferring for some specific reason and the "why us" essay just allows you to reflect on that reason and whether the new university will truly be any better than the one you're switching out of.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    Consider the opportunity cost involved in writing such an essay: The time you invest to write such an essay cannot be invested into much more important things.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      This is actively the point of college admission essays, though. Especially for post-high-school applications, each student only has enough time to write and edit so many essays, so requiring college-specific essays keeps applications-per-student lower. That raises enrollment rates per acceptance, which helps colleges manage the size of their income class. The Common App didn't save time for most students, it let them do more applications via the same number of essays. So yeah - those essays exist as a transaction cost to weed out the uncommitted.
csa 10y ago
I personally find these types of questions easy to answer well. If you sit on admissions committees, this question is often an easy litmus test to see if the candidate really appreciates what the school (Harvard, safety, other) has to offer. For some, the answer is something specific like being a certain major for a certain reason (e.g., career path). For others, the answer is simply along the lines of "I want to explore a certain resource or resources you have and see where that takes me". Elite schools have tremendous resources available to undergrads that simply don't exist in the same quantities or qualities (or even at all) at other schools. Besides the libraries and professors, there are also research institutes and labs that take in curious and hardworking undergrads. Many of them work on really cool stuff. I realize that all people accepted to elite schools don't answer this question in a particularly interesting way, but this question is a trivially easy way to stand out in a positive way to reviewers. Said another way, demonstrating that an applicant is genuinely curious about something that is a long suit at a given university is not really fluffing the university admissions officers -- it's just a practical thing to communicate.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  > I personally find these types of questions easy to answer well. In some sense, this is my actual complaint. I'm good at answering this question, but my ability to answer it wasn't actually a representation of my interest in a given school. All it took was finding something fairly impressive and unique about a school and talking about it with a mindset of "this is more appealing to me than the unique perks of other schools". Doing that was pretty easy even without actually caring about the school, so it felt more like a test of my creative writing than an expression of interest. I suppose there were a few places that got closer to honest signals from me - they weren't the top of my list. Those were the ones that probably had best-in-class offerings, but didn't have any truly applicable to me, so my honest viewpoint was "if I don't get into X or Y, you have the third-best of this thing I want". For any top-tier place, though, I think I could have been convincing even with no intention at all of attending. As for the UPenn essay, that one in particular felt more like fluffing than creative writing. I'd have to try to and dig up the specific prompt, but the distinction was basically that it didn't say "Why are we right for you?" but instead "Why are we objectively the best for anyone?"

Y201K 10y ago

Essays for transfering are very similar: "Why do you want to come here / why did you leave your last situation?" Surely they'd like you to write about environment or purpose, but like with a first job as a kid, I think "the other place sucked / the classes weren't any good there" should suffice.

krackers 10y ago
Actually I think for transferring the "why us" essay is fine, mainly because you're transferring for some specific reason and the "why us" essay just allows you to reflect on that reason and whether the new university will truly be any better than the one you're switching out of.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  Consider the opportunity cost involved in writing such an essay: The time you invest to write such an essay cannot be invested into much more important things.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    This is actively the point of college admission essays, though. Especially for post-high-school applications, each student only has enough time to write and edit so many essays, so requiring college-specific essays keeps applications-per-student lower. That raises enrollment rates per acceptance, which helps colleges manage the size of their income class. The Common App didn't save time for most students, it let them do more applications via the same number of essays. So yeah - those essays exist as a transaction cost to weed out the uncommitted.

csa 10y ago

I personally find these types of questions easy to answer well. If you sit on admissions committees, this question is often an easy litmus test to see if the candidate really appreciates what the school (Harvard, safety, other) has to offer. For some, the answer is something specific like being a certain major for a certain reason (e.g., career path). For others, the answer is simply along the lines of "I want to explore a certain resource or resources you have and see where that takes me". Elite schools have tremendous resources available to undergrads that simply don't exist in the same quantities or qualities (or even at all) at other schools. Besides the libraries and professors, there are also research institutes and labs that take in curious and hardworking undergrads. Many of them work on really cool stuff. I realize that all people accepted to elite schools don't answer this question in a particularly interesting way, but this question is a trivially easy way to stand out in a positive way to reviewers. Said another way, demonstrating that an applicant is genuinely curious about something that is a long suit at a given university is not really fluffing the university admissions officers -- it's just a practical thing to communicate.

Bartweiss 10y ago
> I personally find these types of questions easy to answer well. In some sense, this is my actual complaint. I'm good at answering this question, but my ability to answer it wasn't actually a representation of my interest in a given school. All it took was finding something fairly impressive and unique about a school and talking about it with a mindset of "this is more appealing to me than the unique perks of other schools". Doing that was pretty easy even without actually caring about the school, so it felt more like a test of my creative writing than an expression of interest. I suppose there were a few places that got closer to honest signals from me - they weren't the top of my list. Those were the ones that probably had best-in-class offerings, but didn't have any truly applicable to me, so my honest viewpoint was "if I don't get into X or Y, you have the third-best of this thing I want". For any top-tier place, though, I think I could have been convincing even with no intention at all of attending. As for the UPenn essay, that one in particular felt more like fluffing than creative writing. I'd have to try to and dig up the specific prompt, but the distinction was basically that it didn't say "Why are we right for you?" but instead "Why are we objectively the best for anyone?"