S3E10: How to Ace the Columbia Supplements (2024)
Today's question of the week: "How do I approach the Columbia Supplements?”
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Today's question of the week: “How do I approach the Columbia supplement?"
Introduction: In this episode of the "Admittedly" podcast, host Thomas Caleel provides an in-depth guide to tackling the four main essays in the Columbia University supplement. He offers strategic advice on how to approach each essay, ensuring that applicants present their most authentic and compelling selves.
Summary of Key Points:
1. Selection of Texts and Resources: This essay asks for a list of texts, resources, and outlets that shape your intellectual interests. Thomas advises students to be creative and authentic, choosing items that reflect their true passions and relate to their intended field of study, while avoiding the temptation to overthink the format.
2. Diversity Essay: Applicants are encouraged to define what diversity means to them and how their unique perspective will contribute to the Columbia community. Thomas emphasizes the importance of specificity, urging students to tie their personal experiences to how they will actively engage with Columbia's campus life.
3. Challenges and Failures: This essay asks applicants to reflect on a significant challenge or failure and how they grew from it. Thomas advises students to focus on meaningful experiences, even small ones, and to be honest about the lessons learned, showing how they have matured and how these insights will shape their future contributions to Columbia.
4. Why Columbia?: Thomas cautions against generic praise and encourages applicants to focus on specific aspects of Columbia that align with their academic and personal goals. He stresses the importance of making each sentence unique to Columbia, showing genuine enthusiasm and a clear understanding of what the university offers.
Conclusion: The Columbia supplement provides a platform for applicants to showcase their intellectual curiosity, diversity of thought, and personal growth. By following Thomas Caleel’s advice, students can craft authentic and compelling essays, helping them stand out in the competitive admissions process.
Have your own question you want answered? Leave us a comment on social media @admittedlypodcast for a chance to be featured.
About Thomas Caleel:
Thomas is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School of Business in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at Wharton. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to curate the best possible MBA class. Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities LLC, he works as a high-level admissions advisor to help families and students achieve their education goals. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for all parents and applicants.
Related Links
Apply to be a guest: www.thomascaleel.com/apply-for-podcast
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Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
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Let's talk about the Columbia Supplement. There are four main essays, and we're going to address each of them in turn. The first one asks you to list a selection of texts, resources, outlets, and you have 100 words or fewer to answer this. And this question gives applicants fits. What do I include? What do I not include? What are they looking for? What's the format? The format is whatever works best for you. It can be a list. It can be a series. It can be broken out by type, by genre, whatever you'd like. Do not overthink this. There should be things that are relevant to what you want to study. So if you want to be a biologist, for example, and none of the things you read, see, or do, or attend relate in any way to biology, that's probably not the best.
But they don't want everything related to biology. They don't want your favorite book to be the Iliad because, quite frankly, they're not going to believe you. They want to see who you are as an intellectually creative and curious person. Do you like the arts? Do you like music? Are you a binge watcher of TV shows? What is it that makes you uniquely you? And that is what you want to bring to this question. So, again, do not overthink it, but be broad and creative and expansive in the things that you decide to include. The second essay is the famous diversity essay. And it asks you, you know, a viewpoint, perspective, or lived experience that has shaped the way you learned about the world around you and how you will use that to learn from and contribute to the community at Columbia.
This essay, you can take a lot of different ways. If you have any element of diversity in your background, whatever that may be, and however you choose to define it, this is the place to discuss it. You should, again, clearly define what you mean by diversity. What is it? Diversity of experience, diversity of background, diversity of ethnicity, of gender, of whatever it is. Define it. Talk about the influence in your life, and then talk about how you will live this experience at Columbia. Don't just make general statements. Really dig in. Are there affinity groups that speak to this element of diversity? Do they exist? If they don't exist, have you started one at your high school? If so, perhaps you can start one at Columbia.
We don't want a kind of high-level pie-in-the-sky discussion of diversity here. It needs to be specific to you, and this is important, your lived experience. So, let's bring that to bear, talk about this personally, and make it alive within the Columbia community as I see myself for the next four years going forward. The third Columbia essay, Columbia, the first of the four essays, talks about being challenged in ways that you might not anticipate. So this is a barrier, or an obstacle, or even a failure. I get asked a lot about this by students: what if I failed at something? What if I tried something and it didn't work out, or I tried to influence somebody and it didn't happen, or I wanted to get a job and I got fired from it?
I want to hide that, right, because schools don't want to see that I failed, and actually, schools don't mind if you fail if you have learnings, if you have personal insights from that experience. And this is really what they want to see. And I would challenge you here, don't just say, well, I disagreed with somebody in my class on a group project, but they finally went and saw my way, right? That is not an effective example. It is okay to say, I was convinced otherwise. I was actually the one who was wrong, and I learned from my classmate, coworker, teacher, parent, sibling, and this is how I came out of that a better person. So these are the kinds of experiences that can distinguish you. You don't need to have a big failure.
You don't need to have convinced the president of a country to change their economic policy, right? If you did, congratulations. But you don't need to overstretch here. These can be small, meaningful experiences, but again, meaningful to you, and you're showing, not telling how this affected you, and how you're going to bring this wisdom and insight into your life. You're going to bring this insight to Columbia and to the community. The fourth and final essay here asks, why are you interested in attending Columbia University, okay? It's 150 words. That is a very, very short essay. What you don't want to do here is butter them up. This is not a love letter. This is not your place to say, 'oh, Columbia is such an extraordinary place with such great faculty and wonderful student peers, right?' None of that means anything.
Ask yourself, with every sentence that you write here, and you write in any supplement, can this sentence, if I pull this sentence out of an essay, can it be applicable to any other school? And if it can be, then you need to drill down further and make it unique to that school. So what Columbia is saying is, what do you want to study here? Why? What does Columbia offer that is unique to what you want to accomplish? Columbia is in Manhattan, so that's going to give you a different experience than, say, Columbia. Cornell, or Penn, or Brown, or Princeton, or Harvard. So if you want access to what New York City has to offer, this could be very compelling to you, right? But also look at research opportunities, faculty, student groups, all of those things.
And remember, it's personal to you. So if Columbia, for example, has the best biotechnology research lab on the Eastern Seaboard, but you are interested in classical poetry, you don't need to mention that, because it's not relevant to your lived experience there. So, personalize it, do your research, and communicate very clearly why you're excited to be a part of the Columbia community. There's one additional piece, and that is a research supplement. And I can already see the comments on social media saying, but what if I haven't done research? Oh my gosh, I'm at a disadvantage. You are not at a disadvantage. Many students these days are doing research, especially students in the STEM fields, and so if you have done research, put your abstract in there. Talk about it. If it's meaningful to you, then it should be included. But if you haven't, you're not at a disadvantage. Don't worry about it. You're doing other things, and it's your job to communicate how you spent your time, that other students spent researching, you were doing other things. So find the place in the application to communicate that.
