Brown Common App/Supplement questions?

mochabear
Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:50:18 +0000

@obstinate
For academic interests/why Brown, there is a 1600 character limit.
For how you heard about brown, its a 900 character limit.
An important note, though. If you apply online, you can’t type a single character over the limit. If you apply on paper (as I did), the only limit on your responses is how long you can write before you start to bore/annoy your admissions officer with the length.
I just looked up my essays from my Brown app and my responses to these two particular questions were 1854 and 1341 characters respectively. I got in ED, so I guess my A.O. didn’t find them excessive. That being said, I was very confident (and had the opinion of many other peers and teachers to mitigate my hubris) that my essays were good enough to justify the length. If you don’t think the added value is worth the extra length, don’t take the risk.

And as for your question about combining the questions, it’s okay to be a little redundant (but not too much), I know I was. But combining the prompts is probably a guaranteed rejection, as I’m sure A.O.s are too busy to care to make note of the fact that you left an essay blank only because you answered it somewhere else.