Application forms are hard to write. Questions like: “Tell us about yourself” or “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” are tiring to address usefully in 200 words. Getting stuck on a bad application question rewriting paragraphs is fermenting your brain. You don’t become a better applicant with more work on those sections. You lose hours of productive time.
As I understand it, proof of skill and good referrals decide whether you get in, the rest is a perfunctory test of whether you can put up with ill-defined and boring tasks.
Common stock questions are used because the application writer felt uneasy without them, or because they copied someone else’s form. It’s not because they’re looking for certain information.
Given the choice, don’t apply to organizations who use stock questions – it’s a signal of dysfunction. It means no one can change the most important form, or worse, no one cares to write better questions.
Often we don’t have the choice of where to apply. This means our job is to make ourselves good applicants at the places we want to be. But part of that will include filling out the vague questions.1
The general method is to:
think about what type of answer the person seeing your application wants.
reframe the question to make it direct and easy to give that answer.
If a question is vague, you’ll have to cover more ground thinking in order to come up with answers. In the absence of something clear to fit your writing to, most of the write-then-select-all-delete process is focused on irrelevant things like sentence structure and flow. This happens when there’s no progression in what you’re saying. When sentences aren’t following each other, you draw each sentence out of the entire set of responses to the original question – over and over, like trying to solve a scrambled jigsaw puzzle with each piece mixed in from another set.
It’s two-hundred words. The wording doesn’t matter if your sentences are short and simple – but short and simple comes as a natural consequence of knowing what you want to say beforehand.
For questions like “tell us about yourself” - or anything involving your individual experience - they don’t want to know about you, they want to see if you can figure out what they’re looking for in an applicant. This depends on the type of organization you are applying to, which is why this question is a deceptive time-sink – and must be reframed to “what values, attributes, and experiences – relevant to our firm, and independent of your job – do we want in an applicant? Only list ones that you share.”
Questions like “Why do you want to go to our college?” expect you to browse their Wikipedia page and look up facts like student-to-teacher ratio, not to introspect. That gives weird answers. Reframe this to “Why might an admissions officer be enthusiastic or proud to work for this school?” Some colleges are proud of cultural artifacts like their traditions and clubs, others their reputable name, and a few pride themselves on prioritizing educational outcomes. Remember that each admissions officer reads up to hundreds of applications per day (depending on the college) so they don’t care about your actual motive. They want to see whether you can fabricate enthusiasm. When you hit on the enthusiasm they already have, it makes their job simple. If you do have a strong desire to go to a certain school, then disregard this for that school – you’ll know what to write already. Applying to more schools is generally a good idea, so if you’re enthusiastic about each school, you’re not applying to enough.
There isn’t a good format for reframing every question, but the trick is to try out a few reframes and choose whichever one is the easiest to write the entire answer to “in your head” so you don’t get stuck half-way. Then, scribble down your answer in the modified format, and translate it back to Application English.2
If they have a political bent, don’t address that. But this does matter – and can possibly overrule what your skill is worth to them in gross terms. Using vague political affiliation words is a cursory filter for people who can conform to more complex internal politics. What you can do is think of the wording people with different politics use to express the same ideas. “Traditional” is right-leaning, while “organized” is left-leaning. Anything that’s a synonym with “diversity” is politically left, while words close to “merit” are center-right. This applies to suffixes too: ”-archy” (e.g. patriarchy, anarchy) is used more often by liberals, and “-cracy” (meritocracy, theocracy) by conservatives. Split words like those are usually window dressing on an identical thing – which is marketing by affiliation. They’ll usually put some of the words you need to incorporate in the application form itself, but infopages will contain the bulk of them.
Again, skill and referrals matter more than anything you write. Don’t talk to people – or even pretend to be interested in something you’re not – on the basis someone will make a good referral. That’s lying. It’s okay to give fake answers to “Why do you want to go to our college?” because written language carries less information than in-person interaction, and it’s implicit that faking enthusiasm is what you’re supposed to do. People can tell your motive in-person instantly. In high school and college, the way to end up in a situation where referrals aren’t a problem is to spend more time asking questions to teachers or faculty that have genuine interest in their subject. I expect people want to talk with some teachers more, but are too nervous – so using the psychological grounds of an external reason is a great excuse to allow yourself to do what you want.
This article will be useful for scholarship applications. College is expensive and you shouldn’t pay, but stock scholarship questions can drain you to fill batches of them out. There are a lot of scholarships to apply to – each of which you can rejected from despite qualification, and most of them will only pay a tiny portion of your fees – so it’s a bad use of scarce resources.
At least it used to be. Now, it’s easy and fun. Skimming this post just netted you thousands of dollars.
Overtly weird questions are a bad signal too, because it means they’re doing something that’s not straight-forward. Serious people with strong convictions won’t deviate too far, no matter the circumstances – they want to see if you can get things done, so the questions will be at least somewhat convergent.
“Ask the question that produces the answer.” is a 42 character sentence.