How long did you spend?

fairlights
Sun, 11 Sep 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Depends on what you define as spending time on the application. I spend a TON of time just thinking about what I was going to write about. For my intellectual vitality essay, I went through about a million topics in my head before I finally settled on two that I actually attempted writing about! I also spend a good deal of time (probably twenty plus hours in total) writing in a journal about ideas that interested me and eventually developed into essays. The actual writing of the essays probably took under ten hours for each, plus a few more hours for revision. Some (like the roommate essay and the common app activity short answer) I was more inspired on and took, from start to finish, around two hours.

Most of the actual essay writing was done in the two weeks leading up to submission day. Before that I was just thinking about it! I would guesstimate about 80-100 hours of actually doing something (filling out all the sections of Common App, writing and revising essays, double checking the app before submitting, etc.).