A brainstorming session is key to this essay 

As you may know, Prompt’s essay-writing method is all about determining what’s most important to say about your high school experiences before you start writing.

When it comes to William & Mary, you have a simple — but kind of overwhelming — task: write two essays (the personal statement and this supplement) that convince the admissions team they should pick you. (And, yes, essays can hugely boost your admissions chances, as we calculated using litigation data.)

Make this task less overwhelming by starting with a big brainstorm on your recent experiences, including:

• Academic interests
• Extracurricular activities and interests
• Self-learning and independent projects you’ve undertaken
• Work experiences and substantial domestic obligations
• Any other skills you’ve developed or meaningful experiences you’ve had

If you create a free Prompt account, you can develop these ideas through our brainstorming modules. 

Next, you’ll choose your “best” experiences (the ones you want to write about) based on which ones best show you will be able to succeed in college and beyond. Because, ultimately, that’s what college admission readers really care about. 

Which experiences show you’ll succeed in college? The ones that best exemplify one or more of the 5 Traits Colleges Look for in Applicants:

• Drive (grit)
• Initiative
• Contribution
• Intellectual Curiosity
• Diversity of Experiences

Your very best experiences should go into your personal statement. Then, for W&M, you can put your “next best” experiences into this supplement — though, of course, they can’t be directly based on your academic or extracurricular experiences.  

Impress W&M, but stay “colorful” and don’t shy away from a little “attitude”

Admittedly, we have a serious approach to this essay. You might think we’ve got that wrong, given how clearly William & Mary is trying to get applicants to loosen up.

Here’s the prompt again with “fun” emphasis added:  

Beyond your impressive academic credentials and extracurricular accomplishments, what else makes you unique and colorful? We know nobody fits neatly into 500 words or less, but you can provide us with some suggestion of the type of person you are. Anything goes! Inspire us, impress us, or just make us laugh. Think of this optional opportunity as show and tell by proxy and with an attitude.

Here’s the thing. W&M is still looking for students with college potential as they read this essay. In fact, they’re not the only college to suggest things are low-stakes when in reality your chances of admission do depend more than you might think on your essays. We wrote a whole article about that: The #1 college essay myth (and what college admissions officers really look for).

Here’s the prompt one last time, with emphasis added to the part students tend to miss:

Beyond your impressive academic credentials and extracurricular accomplishments, what else makes you unique and colorful? We know nobody fits neatly into 500 words or less, but you can provide us with some suggestion of the type of person you are. Anything goes! Inspire us, impress us, or just make us laugh. Think of this optional opportunity as show and tell by proxy and with an attitude.

Nevertheless, we do suggest that you marry the two so as to answer this prompt faithfully — talk about experiences that show off one or more of the 5 Traits while also bringing a more “colorful” style to it. 

A few good sources for experiences that would fit here are:

• A summer or afterschool job
• Domestic obligations, relationships, or traditions (you make tacos for your family every Tuesday or call your grandmother weekly)
• Self-learning or independent projects.

Generally, we suggest staying away from an essay whose aim is to “make [W&M] laugh.” If there’s some incidental humor, ok. But please don’t have that as your main intent. Humor is just too tricky. Save it for your sideline in stand-up — you’ll find that hard enough. 

What else makes you unique and colorful — example

Before we begin, please do not take our example too seriously. It’s made up. If your actual experience sounds less “impressive,” that’s probably because it’s easy to make up “impressive” experiences. Be authentic. You will be impressive if you discuss what you’ve actually done through the lens of demonstrating one or more of the 5 Traits. At Prompt, we do not believe in modeling your essays on what anyone else has done. 

With that out of the way, here’s one example of what we mean. 

Unique and colorful example:

If there’s one thing my peers don’t really get about me, it’s my love for French comic strips (called bandes désinées or BDs). This is a legacy of my childhood spent in Belgium, where some of the greatest French BDs are actually from, including Tintin and Les Schtroumphs which is the original, you might say “true,” name of the Smurfs.

Keeping up with BDs has been more than an obsessive pleasure for me; it’s also been my way of staying connected to my upbringing, my former friends, and the culture I grew up in. Every time I go back to France or Belgium (or sometimes Quebec, which I can do more frequently), I always stock up on more comics, spending months ahead of each visit researching what’s new, asking my old friends what they love, and even falling in love on the spot with something unexpected. 

I love the challenge of keeping up with this world, learning about new authors — for example Riad Sattouf best known for “The Arab of the Future” — and keeping up my French effortlessly while also having a way to stay in the zeitgeist. 

I also love that this perhaps nerdy obsession gives me a different perspective than my peers. When we discussed Maus in my class, a lot of students thought that the comic presentation was radical or even disrespectful, but I was able to reference many BDs that take on dark subject matter in the same format. I also had a lot of fun with an end of term essay comparing three different “comic book” adaptations of Classic Literature (Emma Bovary, The Stranger, and The Search for Lost Time) and how they differed in terms of remaining faithful to the source material and which themes they maintained or de-emphasized.

Notes:

• This essay is 293 words. 
• Your essay probably should be a bit longer to get more great stuff in; feel free to have 2 or even 3 main topics, if they show the 5 Traits off well.  
• This essay shows intellectual curiosity and drive (to stay connected to a culture) as well as most explicitly diversity of experiences. 
• The essay connects the interest back to academic work, which is a great idea if done naturally — so long as your main material isn’t academic or extracurricular. 

Helpful info on all the “other” stuff you’ll consider as you apply to William & Mary (and other schools)

A few helpful resources for the non-supplement parts of your application:

• Common App: Since you must use it for W&M, read our guide to acing everything to do with writing your Common App application. 
• Whether to submit test scores: W&M is test-optional. Our test-optional article will guide you through the tricky waters of making this decision. 
• Early options: W&M has an Early Decision program. Read our Early Admissions article so you know how to approach this decision. 

BTW, here’s our guidance for approaching any college supplement + here’s where you can find our guides for almost every college’s supplements. 

Feeling inspired? A great place to start is at our College Essay Help Center. 

More articles on Prompt.com’s admissions-boosting methods:

• Work with a college essay coach
• Strong essays increase your chance of admission by up to 10x
• Don’t let influencers influence your college essays
• Should I apply test-optional?
• Early admissions: Everything you need to know
• College Essay Help Center