Macalester is a small liberal arts school that has around 2,000 undergrads and is located in St. Paul, Minnesota. It’s incredibly picturesque and, yes, St. Paul is a real city. It’s bustling! The school itself has gotten increasingly popular because of its academic rigor combined with school spirit and strong community. It has everything and is on a lovely campus placed in a larger city with lots of cool internships, cultural landmarks, and work opportunities. It’s also the perfect size if you want to be able to recognize and run into people you know all of the time while you walk across campus. It’s the ideal “cozy liberal arts” moment.
Onto the supplement! Macalester has a relatively straightforward supplement. We’ll review how to tackle it below. They just have one question, and it’s a 500 word limit.
Macalester is one of few highly selective liberal arts colleges located in the middle of a metropolitan area. Students benefit from the strong sense of community on campus and opportunities to engage in academic, social, and civic engagement options in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Have you thought about how Macalester's location might impact your experience? If so, in what ways?
So, it’s clear that Macalester fancies their community to be strong, and their location desirable. But they want to hear that from you. It’s clear that they want to filter out students who are phoning in their applications, might be considering Macalester a low target or safety, and who did not do enough research. This is crucial. It’s important to do quite a bit of research for this one because if you don’t indicate a certain number of specifics to *show* that you did your research, you’re going to be nixed.
Macalester knows that they’re not Yale or Harvard, but they still want students who really do want to be there. And if you copy and paste an ordinary “Why X College?” essay from a different college, they’re going to know, because there won’t be a sufficient number of Macalester-specific details.
Our advice -- if you don’t want to do the research and aren’t excited about Macalester, apply elsewhere, because they’ll be able to tell.
If you *do* really want to go to Macalester and feel excited to apply and to have it as a legitimate option, then get on Google! Pay attention to the keywords in the prompt: “engage,” “civic engagement,” “Macalester’s location,” “strong...community.” Those are the words and phrases that stand out to us. Your essay should connect something you’ve done in your past that combines your academic interest(s) and passion for space and place to what you want out of a Macalester college experience. Rephrased, the question is, “Why can you only do what you want to do at Macalester, in St. Paul, and as a member of these communities?”
It’s important to highlight how and why you want to contribute to the Macalester and St. Paul communities, and how you’ll be able to draw from them in return. And be specific, which means researching student organizations, local community opportunities, and ways for you to get involved and to expand your academic horizons both in and outside of the classroom. We’d structure it as follows:
Paragraph 1: Origin story about your interests
Paragraph 2: What you want to study and why AT MACALESTER (research! specifics!)
Paragraph 3: Talk about St. Paul and why you absolutely love it and why you want to be there.
Paragraph 4: How you see yourself engaging with an additional community that you plan to pursue, and how it will contribute to your academic and personal growth.
You have a lot of space (500 words) to show off your research. Use it.
Let us know if you have questions on this one -- we’re all ears.