Colby is more than a delicious cheese. It’s also a premiere liberal arts school located in Waterville, Maine, where students have been “daring northward” since its founding in 1813. Known for its access to the great outdoors, its prestigious teaching museum, and its innovative 4-1-4 program which sandwiches an intensive academic exploration called “Jan Plan” between the fall and spring semesters, Colby is a small college of the highest caliber…

…and it has no required supplements. What?? Are you serious? As a heart attack, unfortunately. If you are rubbing your hands together feeling like you robbed a cosmic bank, we hate to twirl our handlebar mustache and grumble “not so fast,” so we won’t. But we’ll put it another way: don’t get ahead of yourself just yet. Colby isn’t an Ivy, but it might as well be — it’s incredibly competitive to get in, and the incoming Class of 2027 had a historically low acceptance rate of only 6%.

The absence of an official supplement actually creates a bit of a dilemma as Colby becomes increasingly selective, because you still need to set yourself apart. Maybe there’s no place for supplementary writing through the Common App, but you are still going to write something — an email to admissions@colby.edu to demonstrate interest. An email? Yes, an email! Revolutionary, we know. We’ll give you the low-down, and then it’s all up to you to craft your email. The Email to End All Emails. Your talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show-stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not-ever-been-done-before ~email~.

Reaching Out to Colby

You want to send a personal message that conveys your sincere interest in Colby and demonstrates why you’d be a great addition to their student population. Your note does need to sound like an email — not a piece of unsolicited, formal writing — but it also needs to hit all the same points as a “why this college” essay. Basically, you need to balance these two general guidelines:

Sound polite, but be conversational, folding your pitch naturally into the body of your email (rather than presenting an unnatural, word-vomited wall of text).
Make sure you touch on all the components you’d include in a “why Colby” essay if you had the chance to write one. You’ll need to be briefer, and you can include information in any order that goes with the flow of your message, but you can follow the format below to ensure you’ve covered all your bases.

The “Why I Want to Go Here” Outline

Introduce yourself. You know how this goes! You don’t need Chat GPT to hold a human conversation! Say hello, give your name, and explain that you are emailing because there was no space on the formal application to express why you want to go to Colby.
Give your intended major and “origin story.” Next, detail what you’d like to study in college, and tell a story about how you discovered your passion or developed your interest in the field you’ve highlighted. If you’re applying to study microbiology, you could explain that, during quarantine, you became obsessed with learning how the rapid at-home antigen tests work, and preliminary research into how immunoassays operate eventually led you to take AP Bio and assist your teacher with her virology labs outside of class.
Research Colby, and reference specific classes and professors there. You’ll build on your backstory by pointing to detailed examples of your future plans. This shows not only that you’ve spent time getting to know Colby but also that you’d be a productive member of the Colby community. Essentially, you want to demonstrate that you’ll be the kind of scholar who will benefit their student body (and later alumni network), and that you need the opportunities provided at Colby, and not anywhere else, to achieve your goals. In order to do that, we recommend that you reference 1-2 upper-level courses unique to Colby that excite you, as well as identity a professor you’d like to work with as a research assistant, teaching aide, or mentee. Our hopeful microbiologist, for example, might say that they can’t wait to take “Applied and Environmental Microbiology” (BI351), which would allow them to investigate how microbes and their environment affect each other in the wilderness of Maine. This independent study would prepare them well to work with Professor Susan Childers, whose “studies on the interactions of human gut bacteria and selenium” are of particular interest to our applicant.
Conclude with a student group you’d like to join. Admissions officers want to make sure they’re admitting people — not scholastic robots. They want to find out how you’d contribute to your communities and ensure that you play well with others. Make sure you reference an activity outside the classroom that you’d like to get involved with, preferably something you have past experience with. This not only demonstrates engagement with your network but shows that you leverage potential — past experiences become stepping stones in a long-term journey that culminates, ideally, at Colby.

Badabing, badaboom — we’re in business! You’ve got everything you need to write a successful email to Colby that showcases what an ideal student you are. Weave these elements together, and, tough as it may be, kill your darlings. You don’t want to go over 350 or so words, or your message might land like a sermon in their inbox.

Giving Your “Elevator Pitch”

While this isn’t noted on the Common App, cyber-stalkers among us may have noticed that Colby’s admission page says that students have the option of submitting an InitialView “Elevator Pitch.” Unfamiliar? Don’t worry, you’re not out of the loop. This is a relatively new platform where you can record a short video (between 1-2 minutes) to share your story with your top colleges.

The premise here is the same as the one behind an email — you want to give new information to admissions officers that they couldn’t find elsewhere on your application, and you want to show why you’d be a great fit for any college.

Here’s the thing — the “Elevator Pitch” is not tailored to individual colleges. If you sign up for this service, you provide a writing sample and undergo a recorded Q&A with one of InitialView’s employees, who then edits your interview into a finalized video that you can send to as many colleges as you’d like. It might show your personality, but it will have to be generic enough to send identical copies to every school on your list.

While going the extra mile never hurts, you don’t need to enroll in InitialView’s program. As far as we know, these “elevator pitches” have not become a norm or unspoken requirement, and they don’t give you the space to personalize your video for each application. In other words, even if you have a video to send to the colleges you’re applying to, we still recommend that you send an email to Colby to outline why they’re the right school for you.

Ultimately, whether you want to try InitialView is up to you, but as of now there’s no publicly available hard data — their FAQs page just states that “feedback from admissions officers” indicates that “students who submit an InitialView interview tend to do markedly better in the application process.” Okay, Miss Vague with a capital “V!” Our take? The jury’s still out, so don’t stress out about it and just do you.

Want college counseling that gets to know you as well as you know your dream school? Reach out to us here today for one-on-one help.