S3E14: How to Answer the Yale Supplement (2024)
Today's question of the week: "How should I approach the Yale Supplement?”
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Today's question of the week: “How should I approach the Yale supplement?"
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Introduction: In this episode of the "Admittedly" podcast, host Thomas Caleel breaks down the Yale University supplement, guiding applicants through the nuances of both the short and longer essay questions. He emphasizes the importance of research, personal reflection, and thoughtful responses to create a cohesive narrative that resonates with the admissions committee.
Summary of Key Points:
1. "Why Yale" Essay: This standard "Why this school?" essay requires thorough research on what makes Yale a unique fit for your academic and personal goals. Thomas advises avoiding generic praise and instead connecting Yale’s offerings to your specific interests and future plans.
2. Yale Short Takes (200 characters each):
What inspires you?: Be genuine and concise—choose something that reflects who you are without overthinking it.
If you could teach any college course…: Show your intellectual curiosity and have fun. The course should reflect something unique to your interests.
Significant influence (non-family member): Focus on someone meaningful in your life—someone who has truly impacted you in a way you can express clearly and briefly.
What’s not included in your application?: This can be a lighthearted or fun fact about yourself, offering insight into a unique or quirky aspect of your personality.
3. Longer Yale Essay (400 words):
Disagreeing with someone: It's important to discuss how you handled the disagreement and what you learned, regardless of whether you "won." Yale values intellectual flexibility and growth.
Membership in a community: Clearly define your community and then focus on your role within it. Your definition of community can be broad, but your connection to it must be personal and meaningful.
Reflection on an unmentioned experience: This essay should dive deeper into an aspect of your lived experience or identity that hasn’t been addressed elsewhere in your application. Yale is looking for how this unique part of you will enrich the campus community.
Conclusion: The Yale supplement provides an opportunity for applicants to showcase both their intellectual curiosity and their personal identity. By following Thomas Caleel’s advice, students can craft focused, thoughtful essays that highlight what makes them a perfect fit for Yale’s community.
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 Yale supplement. There's one initial essay, why Yale this is your pretty standard, “Why this school?” Do your research. Figure out what it is that's unique about Yale that applies to you and what you want to do, what you want to study there. That answer should be different for everyone, and you don't need to say–please do not say that Yale is a world class university with great professors and a leading student body. It's straight out of the brochure and not meaningful to you do the work. Don't just list things that you want to do, really integrate it into a coherent thesis for how this school best gets you to where you want to go based on what you think you want to do.
Now next, we move on to the Yale short takes. These are brief. They're 200 characters, which doesn't give you a lot of room to talk, so you need to be very concise and to the point in your answers. The first one, what inspires you? People freeze on this one. They overthink it. It should be a very genuine response. There's no wrong answers here. So you don't want to pick something super aspirational out of the blue, but you want something that does tie into ways that you have lived your life, so that it makes sense.
The second one, if you could teach any college course. And we see this question in several universities, so you're going to see it again. They're looking here for intellectual curiosity. Now this course could be related to your intended field of study. It could be related to an extracurricular activity or something you do in your everyday life. But make it unique to you. You can take a clever approach to it, right? It doesn't need to be serious and heavy, and have some fun with that answer.
The third one is other than a family member–so as an aside, I'm not the only one telling you not to talk about your family members–who has had a significant influence on you. And this is somebody. This could be anybody. It could be some, an author that you read frequently. It could be a teacher. It could be a colleague. It could be a friend. Don't overthink this one. It should be somebody who is relevant in your life that you can really paint an articulate and accurate picture of in a very short amount of space. And then finally, what is something that's included about you that isn't anywhere else in the application. You can take this two different ways. This can be serious, but it could also be fun and lighthearted, a special skill that you have that you can count Eminem's just at a glance, or you can catch 35 pieces of popcorn in your mouth consecutively. So you can have fun with this if you want.
Now let's talk about the third Yale essay. This is 400 words. It's longer form, and you have three topics to choose from. The first one asks you to discuss a time you disagreed with somebody on a topic. It's very important to keep in mind that you didn't necessarily have to win the argument. A lot of students go into this and they think I need to show how smart I am and how I won this argument. But sometimes we learn when we're wrong. Sometimes somebody can open our eyes to truths that we were not aware of. And so that ability to evolve, that ability to grow, is very important when you think about a university, because you're going to be in classes, you're going to be challenged by new and different views. And what the school is saying is, are you mature enough to defend your position, but also intelligent enough to know when your views might need to evolve? And that's a sign of intelligence. It's a sign of maturity. So you can take it one way or the other. It may be that you did win the argument, but it's not necessary.
Second one: membership in a community. I've talked about the community essay. You can define community as however you want. You can define it as your ethnicity, as your gender, as any orientation you want, your family, community, your demographic community and online community, a team. There's so many different ways. It's just important that you clearly define what the community is and why it's meaningful to you. Don't get lost in the definition of the community. Make that short and sweet right in the beginning, and then get into you and your role in that community.
The final essay asks you to reflect on something that's not in your application that you think will be meaningful to your experience at Yale, and they ask you, how has it shaped you? So this is not something where you talk about a light, fun example, right? That's that short question, that short answer, this is something a little bit deeper. This is about maybe your lived experience, maybe something that you've been through, maybe something that you've done or tried or created, and what they want to know is kind of what makes you unique, what makes you you that maybe nobody else has, and how are you going to use that to benefit your classmates and teachers and the Yale community? So be thoughtful about this one, and you can take this in a lot of different directions, just make sure, again, that it lines up with the overall strategy of who you're trying to convey to the admissions committee.
