Welcome to Private Prep’s College Essay Hub — your complete guide to writing knock-out essays that will have admissions officers dying to meet you.

In general, if you’re applying to schools in the US, there are two types of college essays you’ll submit — a personal statement and supplemental essays. Below, we’ve included an absolute bonanza of resources to help you navigate both of those writing tasks, no matter what stage of the writing process at which you find yourself.

If you’re at the beginning of the process, we recommend starting with the personal statement. Why? Well, supplemental essay prompts don’t get rolled out until August — but you can get started on your personal statement as early as June, right after the conclusion of your junior year! Also, it’s a good idea to get started on the personal statement early, because the open-ended nature of the prompt requires a lot of reflection. (And a lot of drafts!)

Ready to write your way to your next phase of life? Grab a notebook (or open a Google Doc), and let’s get started.

In other words, this essay is what helps the admissions officers understand the person behind the stats. Most admissions committees read the rest of the application first, so when they get to your essay(s), they’ll already know your grades, achievements, awards, and other qualifications. Here, they’re on the hunt for the more human stuff that can be tough to glean from a transcript. They want to know what makes you tick, what drives you, what makes you you (in, you know, 650 words or fewer).

Junior Year

Many high school English classes—especially in junior year—make use of in-class exercises or assignments to encourage kids to begin drafting their personal statements during the school year. We love this idea, but we also advise juniors to think about these assignments more as invaluable brainstorming opportunities and less as the Real Deal.

Summer Between Junior and Senior Year

This is prime college-essay-writing time. In general, prioritize your personal statement in June and July so that you can shift your focus to supplemental essays when they get rolled out in August.

Late Summer and Fall of Senior Year

Ideally, by the time fall rolls around, your personal statement should be complete. However, you might use this time to show your personal statement to one or two trusted teachers for their feedback, so that you can make final tweaks and adjustments.

Look, we’re big fans of the Common App; we love how it increases the ease and accessibility of college applications. However, schools who sign on to the Common App do give up a certain amount of control — for example, they don’t have a say in the personal statement parameters, how students’ activities lists are arranged, or what demographic questions are covered.

That’s why many colleges include a supplemental essay section — it’s one of the only places on the Common App where they have total freedom to ask any question they like of their applicants. As you can imagine, schools take great care in crafting their supplemental essay questions to suss out which students will be an awesome fit for their campus in terms of academic opportunities, extracurricular resources, and student culture. Basically, the personal statement is about showing who you are, and the supplemental essays are about showing why you’re a great fit for a specific school.

Supplemental essays, which are generally released on August 1st for each application cycle, tend to be shorter than the personal statement, but they can range a great deal in length, from a few sentences to 350 words or so. Technically, colleges can ask whatever off-the-wall questions they please (we’re looking at you, UChicago), but — lucky you — there are some prompts that show up again and again across a wide variety of schools, which means that you can re-use certain supplemental essays for multiple schools with minor tweaks. Here are some of the most common questions that colleges ask on their supplements!

• Why do you want to attend our school specifically?
• What are your primary areas of academic interest, and why?
• Tell us about your engagement with a community to which you belong.
• How will you contribute to the diversity of our campus community?
• Tell us about a time when your beliefs were challenged.

If you need more personalized support or guidance in crafting your college essays, our college admissions team is here to help.