Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, a small town in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. Williams has approximately 2,000 students, and the most popular major is economics. The Williams admissions office emphasizes that they are not just looking for students with excellent grades and scores — quantitative measures that aren’t perfectly parallel with potential. They want creative, community-focused students. One of the more unique quirks at Williams is that students can borrow art from the College’s museum to hang on the walls of their dorm!
It is a very selective college. The acceptance rate is only 13%.
The 2019-2020 supplement is the same as the 2018-2019 supplement, and it is also still ‘optional.’ Before we dig into the supplement with fresh eyes, we need to make something overwhelmingly clear. ‘Optional’ supplements are not optional. If you do not submit a supplement, you will not get in. This is a simple fact that is only worked around by a tiny percentage of applicants who are fast-tracked towards acceptance — such as some athletes and legacies. Why would they make it optional if it isn’t really at all? Well, that’s a good question.
Colleges, including Williams, have only one ‘good’ reason for making supplements optional. Making a supplement optional makes it easier to apply. Making it easier to submit increases the likelihood that someone who wouldn’t apply to Williams otherwise will apply. More applications for the same number of seats results in a decreased rate of acceptance. The acceptance rate is a critical statistic for college rankings, even if a significant number of the applications were never seriously considered because they chose not to complete the supplement portion.
Logically, we understand why colleges choose to do this. Ethically, we feel that it is misleading to students, especially those who are paying an application fee and think they will be seriously considered regardless of whether they submit a supplement.
Which is all to say that you must do this supplement, and you must do all of the supplements for all of the colleges that you are applying to if you want to be considered for admission.
Please respond to one of the prompts below in a short essay of 300 words or fewer.
1. At Williams we believe that bringing together students and professors in small groups produces extraordinary academic outcomes. Our distinctive Oxford-style tutorial classes—in which two students are guided by a professor in deep exploration of a single topic—are a prime example. Each week the students take turns developing independent work—an essay, a problem set, a piece of art—and critiquing their partner’s work. Focused on close reading, writing and oral defense of ideas, more than 60 tutorials a year are offered across the curriculum, with titles like Aesthetic Outrage, Financial Crises: Causes and Cures, and Genome Sciences: At the Cutting Edge. Imagine yourself in a tutorial at Williams. Of anyone in the world, whom would you choose to be your partner in the class, and why?
This is a very long prompt that boils down to, “who would you want to learn with and have critique your work?” They are not asking for the type of person you would want to review your work — they want an actual living person. This gives you a lot of options. A good place to start brainstorming from is with your area of interest. What do you want to major in and, given that, what kind of tutorial would you be most likely to take?
For the purpose of this exercise, we’re going to run with one of the examples they give, which also aligns with their most popular major, economics: “Financial Crises: Causes and Cures.” If you were to be in that tutorial, who would you want critiquing your work? Perhaps a prominent economics professor or economist whose work you respect? Maybe you’d prefer someone who could bring an entirely different perspective, like an anthropologist, artist, or filmmaker.
If you have trouble thinking of someone, consider books or articles you’ve read recently, podcasts you listen to regularly, or documentary films that you’ve been captivated by. Then look into who wrote them, worked on them, or appeared in them.
Once you have a person, try writing an answer that isn’t solely explanatory. Play out what your dynamic with your partner would be like. What would they bring to the table, and how would you reciprocate?
2. Each Sunday night, in a tradition called Storytime, students, faculty and staff gather to hear a fellow community member relate a brief story from their life (and to munch on the storyteller’s favorite homemade cookies). What story would you share? What lessons have you drawn from that story, and how would those lessons inform your time at Williams?
We love this question because it offers an opportunity to tell a story that reveals another facet of who you are. Your grades and scores only say so much about you. Your activities list shows a little more. Your essay is a big opportunity, but there’s only one of them. Here you have another chance to tell your story — or, at least, a critical piece of it.
This prompt is an especially good option for students with more complicated backgrounds, and who feel that the intricacies of their lived experiences haven’t been adequately presented thus far. Something to avoid, however, is trauma. Traumatic pieces of your past are critical to who you are, but if you want to address them in your application, the additional information section is there primarily for that purpose.
Whatever story you choose to tell, answer this prompt as a story. Tell the tale of you telling the tale, if you will. And remember to include what kind of cookies the audience would be munching on while listening!
3. Every first-year student at Williams lives in an Entry—a thoughtfully constructed microcosm of the student community that’s a defining part of the Williams experience. From the moment they arrive, students find themselves in what’s likely the most diverse collection of backgrounds, perspectives and interests they’ve ever encountered. What might differentiate you from the other first-year students in an entry? What perspective(s) would you add to the conversation with your peers?
This is a weird Rorschach test to get students to other themselves, Williams. In general, questions that ask you to differentiate yourself from your peers aren’t recipes for thoughtful and considerate answers. Responses tend to fall into clichés and stereotypes, even when students truly do feel that they are sharing a piece of themselves that is unique and different. This is particularly true because they are asking you to differentiate yourself from a group of students you have never met nor spoken to. You don’t know their backgrounds or what their passions are, so you’re left scrambling to find difference without any knowledge of what you are supposed to be different from. Also, you are different from people you’ve never met in literally every conceivable way.
If they simply asked what you could add to a conversation, we wouldn’t have as big of a bone to pick with this question. It would be about you, your contributions, and not about drawing lines between you and others. If the point is to bring people together, it doesn’t seem to make sense to have the first things you experience regarding Entry be a differentiator.
Because of this, we suggest selecting the first or second prompt, and perhaps Williams can take this prompt off their application or rewrite it for next year. If you do insist on picking this prompt, the best advice we can give is to maintain a high level of self-awareness and to be self-critical throughout the writing and editing process. Focus on yourself, not on others. Find connections, not differences.
Overwhelmed by supplements that seem like quicksand? Send us an email. We help students navigate tough questions.