Imagine you’re the president of a prestigious college that uses the ApplyTexas system — let’s call it Armadillo State.
What are your ambitions for Armadillo? Let’s brainstorm ...
Your particular measure of success may be less armadillo-focused, but we bet it would hit some of these same notes.
This article will crack the ApplyTexas code for you by showing you just what ApplyTexas admissions officers want (hint: it’s pretty much that list we brainstormed above) and how best to deliver it via ApplyTexas’s:
How do we know how admissions people think? We’re proud admissions nerds who love interviewing admissions officers, reading exposes and digging into data in our mission to be the best essay coaches and tutors we can be.
As essay coaches, we can say this: often, the Common App essay can just be used directly for the AT essay — provided it answers the prompt, which it usually does. And it works just as well the other way, too — you can reuse your AT essay for the CA personal statement.
If you do this, just promise us you’ll double check that you’re fully answering all elements of each prompt.
We brainstormed above on what makes a great college: students who thrive on campus, doing a wide variety of interesting, unusual, and exciting things — all while keeping up with classes, graduating, and going on to meaningful careers.
With that in mind, it won’t surprise you that the admissions officers have a directive to find that kind of student. Students who’ll succeed in college and beyond.
Your goal as you write your essays and activity descriptions is to show that you have that college potential.
At this point, your grades and test scores (if submitting) are mostly set, so let’s focus on making the rest as strong as it can be. (Essays can 10x your admission chances, so you won’t be wasting your energy.)
How can you show college potential in an essay? As we discussed, it’s not about flowery language or lovely turns of phrase — that didn’t come up when we thought about our dream campus.
Rather, we’ve found that the most effective way to think about showing your potential is to describe experiences in which you’ve shown one or more of 5 special traits that colleges love:
Which of the 5 traits resonates most with you? Find out by creating a free Prompt account to take our 5 traits test.
Knowing which 1-3 traits are most “you” is critical because your entire ApplyTexas application should be about showing off those traits through your experiences (armadillo-related or not) that show them off.
Most students tackle each piece of the application separately. But that’s not how admission readers grade them — and it’s not how you should approach them either.
While the details of the process vary from school to school, all schools give you one global score (usually, the “personal” score) for your essays, activity descriptions, recommendations and interviews (if you have any).
That means that you want to create a “brand” of you — you as a student with the potential to succeed in college and contribute to campus culture, as we saw above — that comes through in each piece of your application.
To pull this off, you’ll need to follow our 2-part plan:
This should take you about 1-2 hours.
The hardest part is probably brainstorming the experiences you’ve had that show off the 5 traits. You can use our free brainstorming tools (just create an account). We also recommend getting a second opinion about your most compelling experiences. This is part of our coaching and feedback process but you should get that second opinion whether or not you use our services.
Once you’ve got your 5 traits-demonstrating experiences all in a big heap on your kitchen table (metaphorically speaking), you want to carefully arrange them to fit into each of your school’s application processes. (Unfortunately, while 150+ schools may use ApplyTexas, they generally each have unique requirements.)
You want your very strongest experience(s) to go in your main essay, fitting other strong experiences into supplemental essays, your activity descriptions, and recommendations. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.
Alright. ApplyTexas has 3 main essay prompts, and the good news is that all of them are great for 5 trait-demonstrating essays. That’s good because you don’t always have the choice of which of these to write.
If you DO have a choice of which prompt to choose, don’t start by reading them. They don’t really matter. (They do matter in that you must read the prompt carefully and answer it fully. We’ll get to that below.) They don’t matter in that they shouldn’t be dictating what you’re going to write about — you should have already determined above when you:
In other words, your top concern here is clearly and in an easy-to-follow way showing the experience that best shows your potential for college success. (Your second concern is answering the prompt fully. Your third concern is grammar and spelling. In that order.)
Are you thinking: “Why are they harping on this? I already got it from the section above.” That’s great! It’s just that we see a ton of common mistakes. Here’s what talented, bright, smart students tend to write about that does them no favors.
These are mistakes not because your family isn’t interesting or because you don’t have a beautiful, creative soul. (It is! You do!) The mistake, though, is that these topics don’t paint that picture of you succeeding on campus that admission officers want to see. Remember your college? (Did you call it Armadillo College or did you go with something more reasonable?) Remember what kind of students and atmosphere you wanted on it?
If you write an essay that shows you as:
You will indeed be making your admissions reader leap up from their desk and yell “Admit this kid!” (Good thing they’re probably WFH as this will probably startle their colleagues.)
If you’re following along in our College Admissions Dashboard, it walks you through how to transform your best experiences into a powerful ApplyTexas essay for prompts A, B, and C.
If you want to just read about it, here are our 10 steps:
Each of the prompts can form the basis for a winning essay. But each also has hidden pitfalls. Here’s our best advice for each one.
The 2021-2022 cycle prompts are:
Some school requirements:
Essay A — What to do:
Essay A — What to avoid:
Essay B — What to do:
Note on choosing between an “identity,” “interest,” or “talent”:
Essay B — What to avoid:
Essay C — What to do:
Essay C — What to avoid:
Finally, the very best piece of advice we can give you for any of these prompts is: get feedback on your content. Don’t start writing before a trusted outside perspective has shared their thoughts on what you plan to say.
For this, you can choose a parent, a teacher, a friend or college essay experts (like us), or all of the above. If there’s one step not to skip it’s this one. If you have a really compelling experience to write up, it’s hard to go wrong — you’re going to impress that admissions reader. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up wasting a lot of time trying to get a strong essay out of weak material.
We mentioned this above. Each ApplyTexas school has its own unique requirements. Whereas you have brainstormed one list of great experiences that show your potential for college success; you have one “brand” that you want to show off to every school.
It thus follows that you need to tailor your list of experiences to each school, fitting them in best via the required and optional elements they allow you.
You can access a list of every supplement for every college on your Prompt dashboard, including ones required or optional for specific majors, programs, and scholarships offered by a college.
You can also read our 5-part strategy for great supplemental essays. While schools do sometimes ask idiosyncratic, unique questions, more often they ask common ones, such as Why Us, Why Major, and Describe an Activity.
You know that you need to tell your colleges all about your experiences that say you’ve got potential for college success. A great place to do this is in the activities sections. So you should be feeling really excited about this opportunity.
However, ApplyTexas’ activities sections require some strategizing. They’ve divided non-academic activities into 3 sections:
Within those 3 pages, your space to describe what you’ve done varies, but it’s pretty limited. In fact, it’s complicated enough that we’ve made you a chart to help your sort things out:
.jpg)
The point of this chart is not to make you think you should have quantity — you don’t need to fill in every slot or have an activity in each category. (In fact, the “family obligations” category is only for if they “keep you from participating in extracurricular activities.” Most people should keep this one blank, and you’ll likely have other blank categories, as well.)
The point of this chart is to help you think through how you can use these slots to express your “brand,” and how what you’ve done aligns with 1+ of the 5 traits. In other words, quality.
We’ll talk about how to write strong descriptions below (spoiler: it’s all about showing impact). For now, let’s talk about how to make room to fit these descriptions in.
There are 2 main strategies here:
First, use the “Talents, Awards, Honors” slots (which allow you up to 8 “Award, Honor, Distinction”) from page 7 to describe achievements you had in your jobs, internships, and summer activities, as well as your extracurriculars/community service.
For example:
You can be creative with these ideas. Try to think of something that could qualify as an award, honor or distinction for every activity you list. Then get someone to look them over for an outside perspective on whether you’re shining light on your impact or stretching things a little too much.
Second, since space is so limited, accept ApplyTexas’s offer to supplement this section with a full (one-page max) resume.
Even if you have no traditional extracurriculars because of those family obligations (for example), you can describe what they entailed in more detail — making it more clear the time involved and which of the 5 traits you demonstrated in meeting them (perhaps grit aka drive).
By including a resume, you also give yourself space for unconventional, but potentially meaningful activities, such as learning on your own (trading stocks, taking a MOOC) or creative projects (blog, YouTube channel).
Resumes can be challenging to write — they have their own lay-out and stylistic conventions. We recommend asking a teacher or writing coach for support. But showing that you have interests and impact outside of the classroom is so critical to a strong college application that it’s worth the extra effort. (Plus, you’ll need a resume for internship and job searches very soon, so why not get a headstart?)
For more on what makes a great activity (and a great activity description) take a look at our complete guide to the Common App Activity List. Even though there are differences with ApplyTexas, the basics hold true.
We’ve written in depth on how to write up your descriptions. The most important thing is to understand what the admissions officer is reading them for — evidence that you’ll succeed in college and contribute to the campus.
If you just want the gist, our style advice boils down to:
More important than style is content. We recommend spending the time to brainstorm everything you’ve done in high school. Be creative about what you consider an activity. Write something up for each activity and come back to it a few times (you’ll keep thinking of new things to add). Ask for feedback from parents, teachers or coaches.
Then sort your list based on these 3 criteria:
This applies both for the ApplyTexas activity lists as well as for your resume.
Whether required or optional, recommendations can do a lot for your application.
As you were mapping out the experiences you wanted to highlight to the admission committee, it’s very possible that there was one piece you couldn’t quite fit anywhere. Asking a recommender to talk about that piece could be a great way to fit it in.
Similarly, you can think of recommenders as a chance to emphasize experiences that you really want highlighted in the admissions officers’ minds.
What we’re saying is that you should take charge of the recommendation process. Offer to write them an outline if they’d like one. (Obviously, if they say no, don’t force it.) More likely, they’ll be grateful.
Your recommender’s outline: Using your brainstormed list of experiences as a guide, provide 2-3 specific examples that the recommender can include. Categories to think about include:
After all the hard experience brainstorming and essay writing and activity describing you’ve done by now, writing up this outline should be relatively easy.
It will also keep your recommendations from being the bland things they usually are — they’re often vague, impersonal and filled with cliches.
Speaking of which, the other thing you can do to improve your recommendations is quite simple: choose a teacher, coach or guidance counselor (or even a supervisor) who has a strong personal relationship with you. The better they know you, the more likely they’ll write a vivid letter that makes you shine.
For more advice on college admissions, check out:
.png)
As essay coaches, we can say this: often, the Common App essay can just be used directly for the AT essay — provided it answers the prompt, which it usually does. And it works just as well the other way, too — you can reuse your AT essay for the CA personal statement.
If you do this, just promise us you’ll double check that you’re fully answering all elements of each prompt.
We brainstormed above on what makes a great college: students who thrive on campus, doing a wide variety of interesting, unusual, and exciting things — all while keeping up with classes, graduating, and going on to meaningful careers.
With that in mind, it won’t surprise you that the admissions officers have a directive to find that kind of student. Students who’ll succeed in college and beyond.
Your goal as you write your essays and activity descriptions is to show that you have that college potential.
At this point, your grades and test scores (if submitting) are mostly set, so let’s focus on making the rest as strong as it can be. (Essays can 10x your admission chances, so you won’t be wasting your energy.)
How can you show college potential in an essay? As we discussed, it’s not about flowery language or lovely turns of phrase — that didn’t come up when we thought about our dream campus.
Rather, we’ve found that the most effective way to think about showing your potential is to describe experiences in which you’ve shown one or more of 5 special traits that colleges love:
Which of the 5 traits resonates most with you? Find out by creating a free Prompt account to take our 5 traits test.
Knowing which 1-3 traits are most “you” is critical because your entire ApplyTexas application should be about showing off those traits through your experiences (armadillo-related or not) that show them off.
Most students tackle each piece of the application separately. But that’s not how admission readers grade them — and it’s not how you should approach them either.
While the details of the process vary from school to school, all schools give you one global score (usually, the “personal” score) for your essays, activity descriptions, recommendations and interviews (if you have any).
That means that you want to create a “brand” of you — you as a student with the potential to succeed in college and contribute to campus culture, as we saw above — that comes through in each piece of your application.
To pull this off, you’ll need to follow our 2-part plan:
This should take you about 1-2 hours.
The hardest part is probably brainstorming the experiences you’ve had that show off the 5 traits. You can use our free brainstorming tools (just create an account). We also recommend getting a second opinion about your most compelling experiences. This is part of our coaching and feedback process but you should get that second opinion whether or not you use our services.
Once you’ve got your 5 traits-demonstrating experiences all in a big heap on your kitchen table (metaphorically speaking), you want to carefully arrange them to fit into each of your school’s application processes. (Unfortunately, while 150+ schools may use ApplyTexas, they generally each have unique requirements.)
You want your very strongest experience(s) to go in your main essay, fitting other strong experiences into supplemental essays, your activity descriptions, and recommendations. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.
Alright. ApplyTexas has 3 main essay prompts, and the good news is that all of them are great for 5 trait-demonstrating essays. That’s good because you don’t always have the choice of which of these to write.
If you DO have a choice of which prompt to choose, don’t start by reading them. They don’t really matter. (They do matter in that you must read the prompt carefully and answer it fully. We’ll get to that below.) They don’t matter in that they shouldn’t be dictating what you’re going to write about — you should have already determined above when you:
In other words, your top concern here is clearly and in an easy-to-follow way showing the experience that best shows your potential for college success. (Your second concern is answering the prompt fully. Your third concern is grammar and spelling. In that order.)
Are you thinking: “Why are they harping on this? I already got it from the section above.” That’s great! It’s just that we see a ton of common mistakes. Here’s what talented, bright, smart students tend to write about that does them no favors.
These are mistakes not because your family isn’t interesting or because you don’t have a beautiful, creative soul. (It is! You do!) The mistake, though, is that these topics don’t paint that picture of you succeeding on campus that admission officers want to see. Remember your college? (Did you call it Armadillo College or did you go with something more reasonable?) Remember what kind of students and atmosphere you wanted on it?
If you write an essay that shows you as:
You will indeed be making your admissions reader leap up from their desk and yell “Admit this kid!” (Good thing they’re probably WFH as this will probably startle their colleagues.)
If you’re following along in our College Admissions Dashboard, it walks you through how to transform your best experiences into a powerful ApplyTexas essay for prompts A, B, and C.
If you want to just read about it, here are our 10 steps:
Each of the prompts can form the basis for a winning essay. But each also has hidden pitfalls. Here’s our best advice for each one.
The 2021-2022 cycle prompts are:
Some school requirements:
Essay A — What to do:
Essay A — What to avoid:
Essay B — What to do:
Note on choosing between an “identity,” “interest,” or “talent”:
Essay B — What to avoid:
Essay C — What to do:
Essay C — What to avoid:
Finally, the very best piece of advice we can give you for any of these prompts is: get feedback on your content. Don’t start writing before a trusted outside perspective has shared their thoughts on what you plan to say.
For this, you can choose a parent, a teacher, a friend or college essay experts (like us), or all of the above. If there’s one step not to skip it’s this one. If you have a really compelling experience to write up, it’s hard to go wrong — you’re going to impress that admissions reader. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up wasting a lot of time trying to get a strong essay out of weak material.
We mentioned this above. Each ApplyTexas school has its own unique requirements. Whereas you have brainstormed one list of great experiences that show your potential for college success; you have one “brand” that you want to show off to every school.
It thus follows that you need to tailor your list of experiences to each school, fitting them in best via the required and optional elements they allow you.
You can access a list of every supplement for every college on your Prompt dashboard, including ones required or optional for specific majors, programs, and scholarships offered by a college.
You can also read our 5-part strategy for great supplemental essays. While schools do sometimes ask idiosyncratic, unique questions, more often they ask common ones, such as Why Us, Why Major, and Describe an Activity.
You know that you need to tell your colleges all about your experiences that say you’ve got potential for college success. A great place to do this is in the activities sections. So you should be feeling really excited about this opportunity.
However, ApplyTexas’ activities sections require some strategizing. They’ve divided non-academic activities into 3 sections:
Within those 3 pages, your space to describe what you’ve done varies, but it’s pretty limited. In fact, it’s complicated enough that we’ve made you a chart to help your sort things out:
The point of this chart is not to make you think you should have quantity — you don’t need to fill in every slot or have an activity in each category. (In fact, the “family obligations” category is only for if they “keep you from participating in extracurricular activities.” Most people should keep this one blank, and you’ll likely have other blank categories, as well.)
The point of this chart is to help you think through how you can use these slots to express your “brand,” and how what you’ve done aligns with 1+ of the 5 traits. In other words, quality.
We’ll talk about how to write strong descriptions below (spoiler: it’s all about showing impact). For now, let’s talk about how to make room to fit these descriptions in.
There are 2 main strategies here:
First, use the “Talents, Awards, Honors” slots (which allow you up to 8 “Award, Honor, Distinction”) from page 7 to describe achievements you had in your jobs, internships, and summer activities, as well as your extracurriculars/community service.
For example:
You can be creative with these ideas. Try to think of something that could qualify as an award, honor or distinction for every activity you list. Then get someone to look them over for an outside perspective on whether you’re shining light on your impact or stretching things a little too much.
Second, since space is so limited, accept ApplyTexas’s offer to supplement this section with a full (one-page max) resume.
Even if you have no traditional extracurriculars because of those family obligations (for example), you can describe what they entailed in more detail — making it more clear the time involved and which of the 5 traits you demonstrated in meeting them (perhaps grit aka drive).
By including a resume, you also give yourself space for unconventional, but potentially meaningful activities, such as learning on your own (trading stocks, taking a MOOC) or creative projects (blog, YouTube channel).
Resumes can be challenging to write — they have their own lay-out and stylistic conventions. We recommend asking a teacher or writing coach for support. But showing that you have interests and impact outside of the classroom is so critical to a strong college application that it’s worth the extra effort. (Plus, you’ll need a resume for internship and job searches very soon, so why not get a headstart?)
For more on what makes a great activity (and a great activity description) take a look at our complete guide to the Common App Activity List. Even though there are differences with ApplyTexas, the basics hold true.
We’ve written in depth on how to write up your descriptions. The most important thing is to understand what the admissions officer is reading them for — evidence that you’ll succeed in college and contribute to the campus.
If you just want the gist, our style advice boils down to:
More important than style is content. We recommend spending the time to brainstorm everything you’ve done in high school. Be creative about what you consider an activity. Write something up for each activity and come back to it a few times (you’ll keep thinking of new things to add). Ask for feedback from parents, teachers or coaches.
Then sort your list based on these 3 criteria:
This applies both for the ApplyTexas activity lists as well as for your resume.
Whether required or optional, recommendations can do a lot for your application.
As you were mapping out the experiences you wanted to highlight to the admission committee, it’s very possible that there was one piece you couldn’t quite fit anywhere. Asking a recommender to talk about that piece could be a great way to fit it in.
Similarly, you can think of recommenders as a chance to emphasize experiences that you really want highlighted in the admissions officers’ minds.
What we’re saying is that you should take charge of the recommendation process. Offer to write them an outline if they’d like one. (Obviously, if they say no, don’t force it.) More likely, they’ll be grateful.
Your recommender’s outline: Using your brainstormed list of experiences as a guide, provide 2-3 specific examples that the recommender can include. Categories to think about include:
After all the hard experience brainstorming and essay writing and activity describing you’ve done by now, writing up this outline should be relatively easy.
It will also keep your recommendations from being the bland things they usually are — they’re often vague, impersonal and filled with cliches.
Speaking of which, the other thing you can do to improve your recommendations is quite simple: choose a teacher, coach or guidance counselor (or even a supervisor) who has a strong personal relationship with you. The better they know you, the more likely they’ll write a vivid letter that makes you shine.
For more advice on college admissions, check out:
As essay coaches, we can say this: often, the Common App essay can just be used directly for the AT essay — provided it answers the prompt, which it usually does. And it works just as well the other way, too — you can reuse your AT essay for the CA personal statement.
If you do this, just promise us you’ll double check that you’re fully answering all elements of each prompt.
We brainstormed above on what makes a great college: students who thrive on campus, doing a wide variety of interesting, unusual, and exciting things — all while keeping up with classes, graduating, and going on to meaningful careers.
With that in mind, it won’t surprise you that the admissions officers have a directive to find that kind of student. Students who’ll succeed in college and beyond.
Your goal as you write your essays and activity descriptions is to show that you have that college potential.
At this point, your grades and test scores (if submitting) are mostly set, so let’s focus on making the rest as strong as it can be. (Essays can 10x your admission chances, so you won’t be wasting your energy.)
How can you show college potential in an essay? As we discussed, it’s not about flowery language or lovely turns of phrase — that didn’t come up when we thought about our dream campus.
Rather, we’ve found that the most effective way to think about showing your potential is to describe experiences in which you’ve shown one or more of 5 special traits that colleges love:
Which of the 5 traits resonates most with you? Find out by creating a free Prompt account to take our 5 traits test.
Knowing which 1-3 traits are most “you” is critical because your entire ApplyTexas application should be about showing off those traits through your experiences (armadillo-related or not) that show them off.
Most students tackle each piece of the application separately. But that’s not how admission readers grade them — and it’s not how you should approach them either.
While the details of the process vary from school to school, all schools give you one global score (usually, the “personal” score) for your essays, activity descriptions, recommendations and interviews (if you have any).
That means that you want to create a “brand” of you — you as a student with the potential to succeed in college and contribute to campus culture, as we saw above — that comes through in each piece of your application.
To pull this off, you’ll need to follow our 2-part plan:
This should take you about 1-2 hours.
The hardest part is probably brainstorming the experiences you’ve had that show off the 5 traits. You can use our free brainstorming tools (just create an account). We also recommend getting a second opinion about your most compelling experiences. This is part of our coaching and feedback process but you should get that second opinion whether or not you use our services.
Once you’ve got your 5 traits-demonstrating experiences all in a big heap on your kitchen table (metaphorically speaking), you want to carefully arrange them to fit into each of your school’s application processes. (Unfortunately, while 150+ schools may use ApplyTexas, they generally each have unique requirements.)
You want your very strongest experience(s) to go in your main essay, fitting other strong experiences into supplemental essays, your activity descriptions, and recommendations. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.
Alright. ApplyTexas has 3 main essay prompts, and the good news is that all of them are great for 5 trait-demonstrating essays. That’s good because you don’t always have the choice of which of these to write.
If you DO have a choice of which prompt to choose, don’t start by reading them. They don’t really matter. (They do matter in that you must read the prompt carefully and answer it fully. We’ll get to that below.) They don’t matter in that they shouldn’t be dictating what you’re going to write about — you should have already determined above when you:
In other words, your top concern here is clearly and in an easy-to-follow way showing the experience that best shows your potential for college success. (Your second concern is answering the prompt fully. Your third concern is grammar and spelling. In that order.)
Are you thinking: “Why are they harping on this? I already got it from the section above.” That’s great! It’s just that we see a ton of common mistakes. Here’s what talented, bright, smart students tend to write about that does them no favors.
These are mistakes not because your family isn’t interesting or because you don’t have a beautiful, creative soul. (It is! You do!) The mistake, though, is that these topics don’t paint that picture of you succeeding on campus that admission officers want to see. Remember your college? (Did you call it Armadillo College or did you go with something more reasonable?) Remember what kind of students and atmosphere you wanted on it?
If you write an essay that shows you as:
You will indeed be making your admissions reader leap up from their desk and yell “Admit this kid!” (Good thing they’re probably WFH as this will probably startle their colleagues.)
If you’re following along in our College Admissions Dashboard, it walks you through how to transform your best experiences into a powerful ApplyTexas essay for prompts A, B, and C.
If you want to just read about it, here are our 10 steps:
Each of the prompts can form the basis for a winning essay. But each also has hidden pitfalls. Here’s our best advice for each one.
The 2021-2022 cycle prompts are:
Some school requirements:
Essay A — What to do:
Essay A — What to avoid:
Essay B — What to do:
Note on choosing between an “identity,” “interest,” or “talent”:
Essay B — What to avoid:
Essay C — What to do:
Essay C — What to avoid:
Finally, the very best piece of advice we can give you for any of these prompts is: get feedback on your content. Don’t start writing before a trusted outside perspective has shared their thoughts on what you plan to say.
For this, you can choose a parent, a teacher, a friend or college essay experts (like us), or all of the above. If there’s one step not to skip it’s this one. If you have a really compelling experience to write up, it’s hard to go wrong — you’re going to impress that admissions reader. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up wasting a lot of time trying to get a strong essay out of weak material.
We mentioned this above. Each ApplyTexas school has its own unique requirements. Whereas you have brainstormed one list of great experiences that show your potential for college success; you have one “brand” that you want to show off to every school.
It thus follows that you need to tailor your list of experiences to each school, fitting them in best via the required and optional elements they allow you.
You can access a list of every supplement for every college on your Prompt dashboard, including ones required or optional for specific majors, programs, and scholarships offered by a college.
You can also read our 5-part strategy for great supplemental essays. While schools do sometimes ask idiosyncratic, unique questions, more often they ask common ones, such as Why Us, Why Major, and Describe an Activity.
You know that you need to tell your colleges all about your experiences that say you’ve got potential for college success. A great place to do this is in the activities sections. So you should be feeling really excited about this opportunity.
However, ApplyTexas’ activities sections require some strategizing. They’ve divided non-academic activities into 3 sections:
Within those 3 pages, your space to describe what you’ve done varies, but it’s pretty limited. In fact, it’s complicated enough that we’ve made you a chart to help your sort things out:
The point of this chart is not to make you think you should have quantity — you don’t need to fill in every slot or have an activity in each category. (In fact, the “family obligations” category is only for if they “keep you from participating in extracurricular activities.” Most people should keep this one blank, and you’ll likely have other blank categories, as well.)
The point of this chart is to help you think through how you can use these slots to express your “brand,” and how what you’ve done aligns with 1+ of the 5 traits. In other words, quality.
We’ll talk about how to write strong descriptions below (spoiler: it’s all about showing impact). For now, let’s talk about how to make room to fit these descriptions in.
There are 2 main strategies here:
First, use the “Talents, Awards, Honors” slots (which allow you up to 8 “Award, Honor, Distinction”) from page 7 to describe achievements you had in your jobs, internships, and summer activities, as well as your extracurriculars/community service.
For example:
You can be creative with these ideas. Try to think of something that could qualify as an award, honor or distinction for every activity you list. Then get someone to look them over for an outside perspective on whether you’re shining light on your impact or stretching things a little too much.
Second, since space is so limited, accept ApplyTexas’s offer to supplement this section with a full (one-page max) resume.
Even if you have no traditional extracurriculars because of those family obligations (for example), you can describe what they entailed in more detail — making it more clear the time involved and which of the 5 traits you demonstrated in meeting them (perhaps grit aka drive).
By including a resume, you also give yourself space for unconventional, but potentially meaningful activities, such as learning on your own (trading stocks, taking a MOOC) or creative projects (blog, YouTube channel).
Resumes can be challenging to write — they have their own lay-out and stylistic conventions. We recommend asking a teacher or writing coach for support. But showing that you have interests and impact outside of the classroom is so critical to a strong college application that it’s worth the extra effort. (Plus, you’ll need a resume for internship and job searches very soon, so why not get a headstart?)
For more on what makes a great activity (and a great activity description) take a look at our complete guide to the Common App Activity List. Even though there are differences with ApplyTexas, the basics hold true.
We’ve written in depth on how to write up your descriptions. The most important thing is to understand what the admissions officer is reading them for — evidence that you’ll succeed in college and contribute to the campus.
If you just want the gist, our style advice boils down to:
More important than style is content. We recommend spending the time to brainstorm everything you’ve done in high school. Be creative about what you consider an activity. Write something up for each activity and come back to it a few times (you’ll keep thinking of new things to add). Ask for feedback from parents, teachers or coaches.
Then sort your list based on these 3 criteria:
This applies both for the ApplyTexas activity lists as well as for your resume.
Whether required or optional, recommendations can do a lot for your application.
As you were mapping out the experiences you wanted to highlight to the admission committee, it’s very possible that there was one piece you couldn’t quite fit anywhere. Asking a recommender to talk about that piece could be a great way to fit it in.
Similarly, you can think of recommenders as a chance to emphasize experiences that you really want highlighted in the admissions officers’ minds.
What we’re saying is that you should take charge of the recommendation process. Offer to write them an outline if they’d like one. (Obviously, if they say no, don’t force it.) More likely, they’ll be grateful.
Your recommender’s outline: Using your brainstormed list of experiences as a guide, provide 2-3 specific examples that the recommender can include. Categories to think about include:
After all the hard experience brainstorming and essay writing and activity describing you’ve done by now, writing up this outline should be relatively easy.
It will also keep your recommendations from being the bland things they usually are — they’re often vague, impersonal and filled with cliches.
Speaking of which, the other thing you can do to improve your recommendations is quite simple: choose a teacher, coach or guidance counselor (or even a supervisor) who has a strong personal relationship with you. The better they know you, the more likely they’ll write a vivid letter that makes you shine.
For more advice on college admissions, check out:
I am the Founder and CEO of Prompt. Our mission is to make people better writers.
