The University of Virginia is comprised of 12 schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one additional college in Southwest Virginia. As a whole, the university is widely considered one of the best in the country, and has been routinely ranked as one of the top five public universities in the US for decades. Nearly 17,000 undergraduate students call the 13 colleges home, and UVA is especially respected for students interested in pursuing law, medicine, politics, policy, and economics. As a public state university, the majority of students at UVA are from Virginia, with 32% of students from out of state. This drastically impacts the acceptance rate. While the overall acceptance rate is 18.6%, the rate of acceptance for students from out of state is much lower and it is extremely competitive only amplifying the reputation of the university at a national level.
If UVA is one of your top picks for college, they advise you to take the most advanced classes available to you in the core subjects — English, math, foreign language, social studies, and sciences — and those related to what you want to major in.
For years, the Associate Dean of Admissions at UVA has operated a blog where she writes about special informational events, changes to the admissions process, and what she and the other UVA application readers look for. For a long time, she wrote the blog anonymously, but she’s maintained a high level of candor even since revealing her identity. For example, UVA puts a lot of emphasis on the activities section of the application because they do not accept resumes. They receive 51,000 applications, and the uniformity of the layout of the activities section is a much more streamlined way for them to learn about your activities than slogging through tens of thousands of uniquely formatted resumes. On the blog, the Dean emphasizes that they don’t expect you to fill all 10 spots unless you have 10 meaningful things to include, and that they aren’t fixated at all on your activities expressing a singular narrative. Variation is good!
Somewhere else that they allow for variation is with testing. UVA is currently test optional (although that may change in the coming years), and they say that you “won’t be disadvantaged because of the choice you’ve made.” If you do decide to submit scores, they accept SAT, ACT, AP, and IB testing.
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UVA has one supplemental question, and it’s not a long one. This doesn’t mean it’ll be quick, though. Writing less often takes longer than writing more, so you’ll need to allocate time for plenty of brainstorming and drafting.
What about your individual background, perspective, or experience will serve as a source of strength for you or those around you at UVA? Feel free to write about any past experience or part of your background that has shaped your perspective and will be a source of strength, including but not limited to those related to your community, upbringing, educational environment, race, gender, or other aspects of your background that are important to you. (300 words)
Interestingly, this is not a “why us” essay. They aren’t asking what you want to study, or what you want to take from the university in the form of classes, a major, or extracurricular experiences. Instead, the admissions office wants to know what you are offering. What are you bringing to the table that will benefit their community?
After the first sentence of the prompt, they give a bit more insight into what they are looking for. UVA is asking you to share a piece of who you are and where you come from that has shaped you and that has helped you develop skills or traits that will support you and those around you during your collegiate experience. But this isn’t a hardship competition. A lot of students read the prompt and immediately start wracking their brain for the most difficult thing they’ve ever faced. Sometimes writing about a tough situation is the right call, but most of the time starting with hardship is the wrong approach.
What they are looking for is who you are, not what you’ve been through. Sometimes you have to go through something particularly tough to get to where you are, but that isn’t actually the point of the essay. So, look to your community at home, your neighborhood, at school, through an extracurricular, or a place of employment for a single experience that you can write about that is representative of something bigger and that will help them understand who you are and how you support those around you.
For example, you could write about getting your wilderness first aid certification, or a lifeguard certification, before working as a camp counselor. No, the point of this hypothetical essay isn’t that you can put someone on a backboard if they get injured at the university gym. Rather, a story like this (keyword: story) may spotlight that you are a strong communicator, you can deal with stressful situations with a level head, and you measure your success by the health and wellness of the community around you.
Again, whatever you write about for this prompt should be more about relationships and community than, say, lost swimmer drills, but the story of getting a certification is, for this example, a useful frame that gives your response a narrative arc. And narrative is, in many ways, everything. When someone is reviewing thousands of applications, simple but compelling stories will catch their attention and hold it far longer than a sob story without a beginning, middle, and end.
Finally, remember to include a really clear mention of how you see whatever you learned in the process, or whatever emotional skills you gained, helping you and those around you at UVA.
The University of Virginia has just this one, fairly short supplement. Remember, though, it’s not going to be a fast one. You need to take your time to do it right.
If you’re applying to UVA as an out-of-state applicant, send us an email. Getting into UVA from out of state requires strategy and clarity, and it helps to have an expert on your side.