Early applications are in; Regular Decision supplements are next. Most of them are some version of “Why do you want to attend [College]?” in 150 to 400 words. It’s the most-assigned and worst-answered prompt in the process.
How it usually goes wrong
The student opens the college’s website and writes a paragraph about the beautiful campus, the renowned faculty, the vibrant community and the commitment to undergraduate research. The reader, who works at the college, already knows all of that, and has read it eleven hundred times this week. The essay has told them nothing about the student.
The structure that works
Three moves, in roughly equal parts:
1. Something specific about the student. An interest, a habit of mind, a problem they keep coming back to. Not “I’m passionate about biology” — “I’ve spent two years trying to figure out why the stream behind our neighborhood went from full of crayfish to empty.”
2. Something specific about the college that connects. A named course, a lab, a program, a professor’s research area, a co-op structure, a particular requirement that other schools don’t have. Found by actually looking, not by scanning the homepage.
3. What the student would do with it. The sentence that turns a list of facts into a plan. “Which is why the environmental field station on the Delaware is the reason I’m applying” — that kind of sentence.
A reader finishing a good “Why us” knows what the student cares about and that the student has looked carefully at this particular place.
Research in twenty minutes
For each college: the department page for the intended major (course list, faculty and what they study), one unusual program or requirement (a core curriculum, a first-year seminar, a co-op), and one thing outside academics the student would actually use. Three notes. That’s enough for a supplement.
Writing ten of them
The first paragraph — the one about the student — can be largely reused across colleges, lightly adjusted. The second and third must be written fresh for each school, because they’re the entire point. A supplement that could be submitted to a different college with the name swapped is a supplement that reader will spot.
Pace: two per week through November, with the January 1 schools first. No marathons; the fifth one written in a single sitting always reads like the fifth one.
What parents can check
Read the supplement and ask: could this have been written about any other college? If yes, it isn’t done. And ask: does this sound like my kid? If it sounds like a brochure, it’s been over-edited — usually by someone trying to help.
By Jeff Thompson, Phortex Campus · November 11, 2025 · ← All posts