Optional Essay

I have been spending all week talking about essays and I have one more section that I need to hit on and it is regarding the final 650 word Optional Essay box at the end of the main Common App section.  Let me start out by clarifying that this is truly an optional essay.  If you don't have anything that you need to address in this section, then leave it blank and keep moving with your application.  But a lot of times students are asking what types of information might necessitate this optional essay section to be used so I wanted to be sure I hit on that with all of the other essay conversations of this week.

This section is your perfect area to put something that you want to be sure that the admissions committee will understand about you that isn't able to be covered somewhere else in your application.  Here are some examples:

- If you are taking College Credit Plus classes on a college campus, your current schedule will only show those classes you have this semsester and not what you have planned for the spring.  You can write about those classes you anticipate taking so that the colleges will know that you're not just slacking off in your senior year academically.

- If you had a really bad grade in a class or perhaps you had a really bad semester, this can be your space to address that outlier so that when the admissions representatives are reading your essay and looking at your grades that they will see that you have explained the F you earned one semester when all the rest of your grades are solid.

- Significant personal issues that you want the admissions represenatives to know about you.  This could be anything from personal health challenges you have overcome, family health crises, death of a close family member, homelessness, food insecurity, or any other topic that you feel is important to helping the colleges get a better appreciation for you as a student and the obstacles you have overcome.  Obviously, if you wrote about this topic in your main common app essay then you wouldn't share it again in this area.

- Changes in status, jobs, activities or some other significant switch that the admissions reps might see in your application.  For example, maybe you played a sport for three years and then had to quit due to injuries - explaining that will help them to see that it wasn't a lack of interest or commitment to your sport that caused you to stop.  Or maybe you had been involved in a lot of clubs and activities, but then family situations changed requiring you to get a job to help pay for some of the expenses at home, you can use this space to explain that shift in your commitments.

- If you are a first-generation college student, many colleges have that as a goal for increasing admissions and so if it hasn't been hit on somewhere else in your application, including it here is a great idea.

There may be other life circumstances that you want to address in the optional essay and that is fine.  If you're not sure about including it or not, feel free to come see me and we can talk about it together.