How to Write the UT Austin Supplemental Essays 2017-2018

Founded by the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1883, the University of Texas at Austin is home to 51,000 students and 3,100 faculty members. As the â€Å"Public Ivy† of the South, UT Austin annually ranks among the Top 20 public universities. As UT Austin’s reputation grows, its applicant pool becomes increasingly competitive as well, leaving its current acceptance rate in the low 40% range, one of the lowest among public schools. Noted departments at UT include petroleum engineering, history, and linguistics. Additionally, UT permits students to apply directly to programs that are occupation-specific, an aspect that differentiates UT from other institutions. UT Austin provides multiple essay prompt options for students to choose between. There is one mandatory essay prompt that all students must respond to, as well as secondary questions that you may answer depending on your intended major. Note: UT recommends that you keep your essays between 350 and 500 words, with no more than 650 words. 650 is also the word limit for the Common Application, so it’s easy for you to get an idea for how much room you have to get your point across. For more tips on how to write the Common Application Essay, feel free to check out ’s Common App 2017-2018 Guide . As the only essay prompt required by every applicant, this topic allows you to expand and describe your personal background or story. Where are you from? How did you get here? How has your community influenced you to become the person you are today? Because every applicant will write this prompt, the goal is to be as original as possible. Prompt A is the only mandatory question out of the topics in UT’s Essay requirement. For your second essay, you should choose just one from the following prompts. Answer this topic by explaining the origin and goals of your decision to pursue nursing; UT seeks to understand how your specific experiences will aid you along this path. Additionally, explain the future opportunities you want to participate in, and how these will help you reach your long-term goal in nursing. Submit your essay and we’ll get back to you with helpful edits. Along with your main essay, you must submit at least three additional short essays. According to the UT Austin application requirements , your answers should be limited to no more than 40 lines, or about 250–300 words. While not quite as elaborate as a traditional common app essay, you still have sufficient space to develop a compelling response. The following sections will discuss strategies to approach the UT Austin short answer prompts. If you could have any career, what would it be? Why? Describe any activities you are involved in, life experiences you’ve had, or even classes you’ve taken that have helped you identify this professional path. Some Tips to Consider: Even if you aren’t sure what you want to do for your career, you can still write an excellent response. First, notice that this prompt is hypothetical in that it asks, â€Å" if you could have any career, what would it be?† With that being said, you can feel free to explore and select between countless options for your topic, and they don’t necessarily need to be exactly what you want to do. The career path does not necessarily need to match every aspect of your skill set and personality; rather, it should incorporate your experiences and interests, and potentially complement other information you’ve provided. One strategy to write this essay is to match an aspect of your personality to a career. For example, if you are very meticulous and attentive to aesthetic details and love to travel, you may want to consider writing about being a photographer for National Geographic . You could discuss how viewing awe-inspiring photographs on Instagram has motivated you to travel and see different cultures. At the same time, you could take the response a step further by explaining how you would love to incorporate aspects of your cultural anthropology class to better document the lives of the people or communities you photograph. Instead of focusing too much on the career path itself, you can make the task of writing easier by expounding upon your relevant activities or experiences. For example, if you want to be a product manager for a high-tech company, you could discuss how your leadership role in the robotics club has taught you valuable lessons in failure. Now, whenever you design, you take a skeptical approach and assume things will never work the way you intend, which causes you to iterate quickly as a manager. Do you believe your academic record (transcript information and test scores) provide an accurate representation of you as a student? Why or why not? Here is a tip directly from the UT Austin Admissions Office: â€Å"Feel free to address anything you want the Office of Admissions to know about your academic record so that we can consider this information when we review your application. You can discuss your academic work, class rank, GPA, individual course grades, test scores, and/or the classes that you took or the classes that were available to you. You can also describe how special circumstances and/or your school, community, and family environments impacted your high school performance.† Essentially, you can discuss anything you want with respect to your high school academics. Some potential topics could include: You may feel compelled to â€Å"explain† a bad grade in a class or convince admissions that your GPA could have been higher, but that’s not really the point of the prompt or what admissions wants to hear. Instead of focusing on making excuses, focus on the lessons you’ve learned from mistakes . For example, if you struggled in calculus, explain why you may have found the subject challenging and how you worked hard to change your study habits by setting up weekly meetings with your professor to work on the concepts. A response like that could shed light on a lower grade on the transcript while revealing positive aspects about your character. Whatever you choose to write about, try to incorporate the positives of what you took from the experience and show why you are now a better applicant due to the experience. Keep in mind that admissions officers consider your potential as well as your past accomplishments. How do you show leadership in your life? How do you see yourself being a leader at UT Austin? Here is a tip directly from UT Austin: â€Å"Leadership can be demonstrated by positions you hold as an officer in a club or organization, but other types of leadership are important too. Leaders can emerge in various situations at any given time, including outside of the school experience. Please share a brief description of the type of leadership qualities you possess, from school and non-school related experiences, including demonstrations of leadership in your job, your community, or within your family responsibilities, and then share how you hope to demonstrate leadership as a member of our campus community.† The most effective way to respond to this prompt is to split it into two parts. Part 1 should concern your experience with leadership or cultivating a leadership skill. Part 2 should directly respond to Part 1 by analyzing how the identified skill will apply directly to a campus group or community at UT Austin. For example, you could begin by describing your experience volunteering or tutoring at a local elementary school. Instead of simply saying you were â€Å"a leader† to the younger kids, focus on describing the types of qualities you learned and how. If the kids often struggled with paying attention or staying on task, you could explain how you learned to temper expectations, be patient, and interact with a cool head. When the kids recognized how patient and composed you were, they adopted the same demeanor when solving problems and improved drastically. You could even go in-depth about particular moments or instances in which you learned a certain skill or developed a leadership quality. Further, you can also discuss what leadership means to you, potentially touching on the types of qualities you value in a leader. Following your anecdote, you can specifically show how your leadership qualities will be used at UT Austin. For example, if you are interested in leading outreach projects in local Austin communities or even other countries, you can explain how the quality of â€Å"patience† will come in handy when convincing organizations to let you work with them. If you do a mission trip in another country, patience is often crucial for forming relationships and overcoming social or linguistic barriers, as well. The point of this example is to show how clearly you must organize the response and how the specific quality you discuss in your personal anecdote must also motivate your application to UT Austin. Personal interaction with objects, images and spaces can be so powerful as to change the way one thinks about particular issues or topics. For your intended area of study (architecture, art history, design, studio art, visual art studies/art education), describe an experience where instruction in that area or your personal interaction with an object, image or space effected this type of change in your thinking. What did you do to act upon your new thinking and what have you done to prepare yourself for further study in this area? This topic confirms that UT Austin is searching for two things in applicants applying to a degree in architecture, art history, design, studio art, visual art studies/art education: 1) relevant past experiences and 2) how and why those experiences motivate you to pursue one of the above-mentioned fields. Discuss the reasons you chose social work as your first-choice major and how a social work degree from UT Austin will prepare you for the future. This topic essentially asks the same thing as Prompt N, for social work. Describe how your decision to pursue social work came about. Relate previous experiences in social work to how they will guide you in your pursuit down this career path. UT’s requirement of Prompt A and short answer essays is a chance for you to show off yet another aspect that readers have not been exposed to. Remember that an unforgettable essay can go a long way in convincing readers to grant you admission to the home of the Longhorns! Looking for additional guidance in essays or college apps in general? Check out our Essay Editing Program and College Apps Program . Want us to quickly edit your college essay? Submit it to our Rapid Review Program , and we’ll get it back to you quickly with comments from our expert team.