The “Green” way to write: Recycle an Essay

When you’re applying to 10 schools, each with a supplementary essay, you might feel overwhelmed. Writing your original 500 words was hard enough, and another 200-500 per school might drive you to full-on insanity.

So how to you handle this herculean task? Work smarter, not harder.

Though each school has it’s own essay prompts, it doesn’t mean that each school has it’s own essay. There is a practice called recycling, and if it’s done properly, it’s going to save you a lot of time and effort.

Essay recycling is when you use one essay for more than one school. So here are the basic types of supplements and how to properly recycle them.

The “Why Us?”

This type seems like it’s impossible to recycle, but actually it’s pretty simple.
There are probably several schools that are very similar on your list. The things you love about schools, or look for, are probably found at nearly every school you’re applying to.  So if your why essay for one small LAC is about class sizes and the community of professors, you can probably re-use some of it for another small LAC. Or if a school is known to be LGBT friendly and you talk about that in your why essay, those bits can be recycled. You might need to change small details and names (like the name of the school, DON’T BE THAT KID), but you can definitely keep a lot of the meat of that essay the same.

The “Tell us About a Time When ___”

These are probably the easiest to recycle. These essays are often about certain themes (Failure, Diversity, Accomplishment, Community, etc.), and many times schools will overlap on the prompt. You may need to tweek a few details, but if you have one great story, you might be able to use it for multiple apps.

The “Let’s ask an obscure or hard question”

Bad news first, these types exist to be impossible to recycle. I’ve talked about these one’s before, and the whole point of these essays is a school wants to know you put time and effort into applying, not recycling.
So you may not be able to recycle an essay per se for these ones, you might get really lucky and have a story from another essay that works for these prompts. I suggest writing these ones last when your muscles are exercised and you have a better idea of how to write one of these essays.

The “Tell us anything about you”

These should be the easiest to recycle, but there are a few traps. These are the open ended prompts that many schools are favoring these days. When you write an essay for this you may just want to recycle another essay and get the job done. While that’s a good idea, you will want to make it a bit less obvious that you’re using another school’s prompt. Especially if you’re using the great essay you wrote for a “unique” prompt school, they’re going to be able to tell. So make sure it’s a compelling essay that shows a school your talent as a writer and something awesome about you, not just a copy and paste of another school’s essay.

So remember, supplements are there to hit on something a school wants from you. You should take time and put a lot of effort into each school’s supplement, but that doesn’t mean that you need to write a brand new essay for each school. Though the prompts don’t all come out at the same time, take a long hard look at them and see if there are overlaps. You might be able to save yourself a boatload of work.