This is all to say that your supplemental essays are not just about yourself, but rather yourself in relation to the school, and why you would be a great fit for said school. 

The supplemental essays are formatted slightly differently from the Common App essay.  While you’ll be given a lot of options for how to approach the Common App essay, with seven different questions you can choose to answer in your writing, the supplemental essays for each college typically only provide you with one or two questions to choose from.  Further, these questions generally lack the broadness of the Common App’s questions and can be expected to have a high level of specificity.  Additionally, like with the Common App, schools will change their questions every year, and there is no guarantee that different schools will ask similar questions.  However, many of these questions will still follow general archetypes, and occasionally, you might be able to reuse an essay you wrote for one school in order to answer another school that asked the same question.  

Due to the breadth of possible questions that different colleges might ask you, it would be impossible for me to cover every potential scenario, however, there are certain excessively common queries which I will address directly in this article. 

The first of these queries is the question of why you, the applicant, were drawn to this specific school.  You should answer this question in a way that highlights the unique features of the institution, the unique features of you as a person, and the ways in which these features complement one another.  One common mistake people make in responding to this kind of question is focusing on the location of the school rather than the features of the school itself.  If you’re applying to NYU, for example, you’ll likely want to mention the many boons of living in New York City, and while it’s not a bad idea to show that you’re interested in the in the area where the campus has been built, you can’t forget the fact that there are a large number of schools in New York City, and that location alone is not what differentiates one college from another. Instead, you should spend your limited time and wordcount focusing on specific programs and offerings provided by the school, and make sure to be specific, because saying that a school has a ‘good science program’ isn’t going to convince the people reading your essay. 

The second of these queries is the question of what you, the applicant, would contribute to the school if you are to be accepted.  This question has slightly more room for creativity than the past one. You should still make sure that your response is specific to the school in question, but you have a lot more opportunities to discuss your own interests.  Perhaps, you’ve noticed that the school you’re looking into has a large number of people involved in the English program, while the clubs offered by the current student body don’t reflect that quantity.  You could propose your vision of starting a book club with other students, a vision you could back with any experience you have in running similar groups in the past.  You have a lot of free range with this project, as it’s all about recognizing potential, both in yourself and the school you’re writing to.  Additionally, it’s important to mention that you’re not obligated to fulfill the ideas you threw out in your application letter if you are to be accepted.  The colleges are more interested in you displaying your drive for action than they are in seeing your drive for a specific cause.  

The final of these queries I’ll be addressing is the most nebulous, that of a college asking you a question unrelated to the college and entirely about yourself.  If this occurs, you should focus mostly on yourself in your writing, but you should still consider the interests of the specific college you’ll be attending.  A more STEM-focused school may not be swayed by you talking about your interest in transcendentalist poetry, for example.  Each college has different interests when it comes to choosing students, and you should ensure that you have a solid knowledge of those interests before writing for said college.  Also, keep in mind that the people reading your supplemental essay will have also read your Common App essay.  You should make sure not to repeat anything you already stated in your Common App essay, as it will end up as a waste of your very limited word count. 

Ultimately, you can utilize a lot of the strategies you used on writing the Common App essay when writing the supplemental essay, though you’ll still have to keep their differences in mind.