also, during my visits to both, the facilities at UIUC Gies were a lot nicer than IU Kelley (which is pretty good), and the students themselves generally gave off more of an academic “vibe” than at IU.
I’ll just note that the experience at out feederish HS is too many applications can actually be counterproductive versus a shorter, but very carefully chosen, list. Of course the stated intention is always to treat each college selection and subsequent application with the same care either way, but the practical reality is that almost everyone starts cutting corners when faced with the many competing demands for a senior’s time and attention.
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True. I want to beat this by doing all I can in the summer, such as filling out the Common App and writing the personal statement, as well as any supplementary essays that have prompts available.
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Just fair warning, I think supplemental essays is one of those areas in which corners often get cut. Obviously it depends on the college, as some don’t have them at all. But others might be using them in part as a way of assessing whether the applicant has in fact thought carefully about why they would be a good fit for that college, and/or vice-versa.
There is then a lot of advice online that basically takes the form of putting supplementals into various categories and then using the same content repeatedly for different colleges. I think some of that is basically inevitable, but I think it comes with a lot of risks.
One obvious thing is every year a bunch of kids come online in a panic because they forgot to change a college name, referred to a major a college doesn’t have, had some major editing error, or so on, which is traceable to this practice. No one starts off applying this way planning to make such mistakes, but it happens a lot anyway.
I think a more subtle issue is that colleges are basically on to this practice, and sometimes just throw in certain variations on the prompts or other instructions to see if kids are really paying attention.
And finally, I think sometimes the content just takes real reflection, and sometimes research, to do well.
As a final note, at our feederish HS, there was a system in place for kids to get their essays reviewed in a timely fashion, and then after getting feedback they could redraft, get another review, and so on. And I could see in my own kid when he used that process, there were definitely some improvements.
But after disappointing ED results for him and several of his friends, they collectively decided to add more colleges to their RD lists. Some were added because they didn’t have supplementals, and some were chosen because they at least thought the supplementals looked easy based on their prior essays.
And to my knowledge, none of those extra applications actually ended up generating an offer a kid actually took. Some just got admitted eventually to one of their original favorites (that happened with my kid), but there were also a lot of “surprising” rejections and waitlistings (also happened to my kid).
But I actually was not all that surprised, because to me it was obvious that those applications just were not chosen and then written with the same care. And I suspect in many cases, the college could tell that was true, in one way or another.
This is just one big anecdote, but I have seen enough AOs discuss this issue to be confident they are in fact basically on the lookout for such applications. And I think it is way harder to actually fool them than kids often believe.
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