In a smart recent piece for theatlantic.com, Julia Ryan asks an entirely reasonable question: why do colleges ask students to be wise beyond their years when responding the supplementary writing prompts on their applications? Ryan cites, among others, supplementary questions posed by Tufts University (“What makes you happy?”) and Brown University (in reference to a quotation from Anatole France, “What don’t you know?”) that seem to require students to grapple meaningfully with life’s great questions while still being their true and sincere selves.
Ryan makes the point that a seventeen-year-old’s real answer to the question “What makes you happy?” isn’t likely to reveal that seventeen-year-old as a great sage or humanitarian. She notes that, had she been honest, her own answer “probably would have involved Ben and Jerry’s and a new episode of Gossip Girl,” and wouldn’t, in all likelihood, have improved her chances of admission at elite colleges and universities. As a high school senior, my own uncensored answer to that question would certainly have involved reading, but I would have been disingenuous had I left out the fashion magazines I loved and pretended to embrace only Great Works of Literature.
I’m reminded of a discussion I once had with my AP English students about whether it was fair for colleges to look at your Facebook page while making admissions decisions. Many of them believed that it was terribly unfair to deny college admission to a kid who happened to have posted a single picture of himself holding a red Solo cup at a party. But the part of the conversation that really struck me came when a student said she was afraid to post anything about her real cultural tastes in case those tastes were judged not serious enough. Should she be saying that she loved Dostoyevsky and Proust, just in case colleges might be looking—and, in a similar vein, should she pretend no knowledge of Twilight or “Glee”? I told her that unless she really loved Dostoyevsky’s works, claiming an affinity would be both hypocritical and unhelpful, whether she “liked” him on Facebook or wrote about him for a college essay.
Supplementary writing prompts, which some colleges require in addition to the main personal statement required by the Common Application, range from the mundane to the ridiculous. Most of them ask students to explain why they want to attend a particular institution, or why they’ve chosen a particular field of study, but increasingly, these supplements take the broad philosophical approach demonstrated by the examples from Tufts and Brown. In addition, colleges ask for applicants to answer short personal questions: USC, for example, asks that prospective students describe themselves in three words and list, among others, their favorite movie, role model, and favorite food. I’ve seen students agonize over their answers to these questions, but unless a student listed “the blood of my enemies” as her favorite food, I can’t imagine a scenario in which the answers could be truly meaningful to an admissions officer.
My original advice about college essays—be yourself—holds doubly true for supplementary questions. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not, or to have thought deep thoughts you haven’t yet entertained. If in doubt, engage with the question by questioning or exploring it at face value: explain why you feel you haven’t yet suffered anything that could meaningfully be described as adversity, or reflect on how long the list of things you don’t know seems to be. Or choose a different question, if you’re able to—most colleges offer a range of options. Above all, don’t feel compelled to tie yourself in knots attempting to appear brilliant and unique. The person who would answer the question that way isn’t you, and you (not the Proust fan who has been singlehandedly raising funds for Lithuanian orphans since the age of nine) are the one who will need to feel at home in the college you ultimately choose.
Posted by Megan Stephan
Image via oxbirdgessays.com
Monday, December 9, 2013 at 7:51AM 
