Why Lafayette? I understand the reason for the “Why (insert college)?” essays. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to make them original. When all students have seen the same website and attended the same tour, even a strong connection with a school may be hard to uniquely convey. I however, have a less common reason for wanting to attend Lafayette: before my visit to campus, I didn’t think I wanted to attend Lafayette because it was so close to home....

There’s a difference between being busy and being engaged. Lafayette comes alive each day with the energy of students who are deeply engaged in their academic, co-curricular and extracurricular explorations. In response to the second prompt, keep it simple – choose one activity and add depth to our understanding of your involvement. What do you do? Why do you do it? (20-200 words) The response to this question is optional. I run. Rain, snow, sleet, shine, 6 a.m., 6 p.m.,...

Please tell us what excites you about being a member of the GW community. From the beginning of my college search I had convinced myself that I wanted to be at a small liberal arts school where I could develop relationships with my professors, cheer on the football team, and easily get from place to place on campus. I was determined to fill my college list with these types of schools and did not even consider looking at, nonetheless, applying...

Gettysburg College students are engaged learners and “make a difference” both on and off campus through their academic and extracurricular activities. Describe a situation in which you have made a difference in your school or community and what you learned from that experience. When the vans pulled into the church parking lot a surge of excitement and nerves set in. I did not know what to expect from this one week trip I was taking into Newark with a group...

Common App Essay Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you? At 6:45 each morning for my first few summers at camp I woke up to the powerful sound of “Reveille” ringing out over the loudspeakers. This sound was met with a chorus of moaning and yawning as four hundred disheveled campers wandered like zombies through camp in their pajamas to meet for morning exercises....

For Bucknell: Please explain why you are interested in the first-choice major/undecided status chosen on the Common Application. (200 words maximum)- Computer Science and/or Engineering (Computer) My generation is the first generation to be born in an age of computers. They are natural to us, and they are definitely natural to me. However, I do not love math and science simply because of my inclination toward these subjects. I love math and science because they are objective. As...

For Bucknell: Write about a protagonist in a movie/book and if you agree with the choices they made. When Andy Dufresne is falsely accused of killing his wife and her lover he is sent to Shawshank State Prison for 19 years. Throughout the duration of his imprisonment, Andy makes repeated appeals for freedom to the warden. These appeals are continually denied and while Andy never loses sight of his ultimate goal, he makes the best of his time in jail....

A few of the most important things I realized while writing my essays is to not wait until the last minute, and to have many people read over it. The summer before my senior year I looked at the essay questions from the schools I was going to apply to and I wrote down ideas I had and things I wanted to include in my essays over the summer. That really helped when I went to sit down and started...